Requested feature overview description.
This feature would return users the ability to upload Flash content.

Why would it be useful?
Even to this day, there are lots of old furry Flash content that is not on e621. Besides, thanks to projects like Ruffle, Flash is experiencing a slow but sure revival, which means we will likely see many more furry Flash works in the near future.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?
Flash content uploads would no longer be rejected.

electricitywolf said:
Requested feature overview description.
This feature would return users the ability to upload Flash content.

Why would it be useful?
Even to this day, there are lots of old furry Flash content that is not on e621. Besides, thanks to projects like Ruffle, Flash is experiencing a slow but sure revival, which means we will likely see many more furry Flash works in the near future.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?
Flash content uploads would no longer be rejected.

as someone who worked with flash in the distant past.
please stop trying to make flash happen in 2025.

valthar said:
as someone who worked with flash in the distant past.
please stop trying to make flash happen in 2025.

it's not about "making flash happen" it's about archiving furry art so it doesn't get lost to time.

I'd much rather we leave flash in the past, e6 stopped accepting flash uploads for a reason
a ruffle integration has been denied multiple times so flash posts are useless to most people

donovan_dmc said:
a ruffle integration has been denied multiple times so flash posts are useless to most people

There is the Ruffle browser extension. This site does not need a change in that regard.

electricitywolf said:
There is the Ruffle browser extension. This site does not need a change in that regard.

An extension that less than 0.5% of users will bother installing still results in the posts being useless for >99% of users

electricitywolf said:
There is the Ruffle browser extension. This site does not need a change in that regard.

Not everyone is using a pc, not even a majority of users

snpthecat said:
Not everyone is using a pc, not even a majority of users

And before anyone tries to mention mobile browsers with extensions (like I would), the browser used on almost 3/4 of mobile devices is chrome and does not support extensions

Make your own Booru, with Blackjack and 20072024 UI? :P

Actually, it would not be a bad idea to have a Flash focused Booru, if it's strictly things uploaded by the OP. There's sites that do SWF archives but e621ng has a far nicer experience.

I do still constantly bump into content that was interactive flash but no longer possible to be uploaded as original file and I also do not like this.

The main reason for flash uploads to be disabled wasn't because people weren't able to view them, it was security. Software is EoL, so if there's any vulnerability that's found and utilized, there would be no updates to patch that.
However we do have whitelist and we do have websites which do have a lot of content and have also disabled new flash uploads, including Furaffinity.
Also I'm not entirely sure how huge this risk is considering websites like Newgrounds still actively allow SWF files to be uploaded.

donovan_dmc said:
I'd much rather we leave flash in the past, e6 stopped accepting flash uploads for a reason
a ruffle integration has been denied multiple times so flash posts are useless to most people

The discussion around this has been around time when half of the staff was differend and it was just around the time where people still had flash player in their browsers and it was just getting cut off forcibly to some.
Also the stage of Ruffle was that it wasn't that great and implementation would've required at least some amount of work hours from someone, at the same time when there was much bigger project on table and nothing was really advancing.

Ruffle seems to be at the stage where it does actually support Actionscript 3, that was one of the biggest drawbacks because it felt like a toy that could only really do some extremely old flash stuff or videos looping, where now it should actually do majority of things that native flash player did.

Also we are still going to keep the old SWF flash files in here, available directly on search and even the thumbnails have been broken for some time now, so even I'm now moving on board to actually maybe do something about this as the situation has changed and we have moved past the "FLASH IS DYING, EVERYONE PANIC!1!" phase.

I think it would be a great feature! Flash is fortunately dead (My Pentium 4 probably still wants to kill Adobe programmers) and with Ruffle having become way better I think there is no better time to add Flash uploading than now since a lot of content is now useable again.
Even just FA has a lot of fully unarchived stuff that is just rotting there (and FA does support Ruffle so they can use it if people stumble upon it)

Not only are there logistically sound reasons not to include Flash anymore (Barely any users interact with such content, a majority of users use browsers that don't support it, etc.) but there are also potential security reasons why we shouldn't allow it, either. Given the year at which Flash was discontinued, and the fact that it's been 5 years - a lifetime when you consider tech and cyber security - allowing people to upload potentially harmful Flash files to the site is just not a good idea.

And, before you ask, no. There's no real safe way to check a flash file for such things unless you decompile the file, which itself can be risky.

bird-tm said:
Not only are there logistically sound reasons not to include Flash anymore (Barely any users interact with such content, a majority of users use browsers that don't support it, etc.) but there are also potential security reasons why we shouldn't allow it, either. Given the year at which Flash was discontinued, and the fact that it's been 5 years - a lifetime when you consider tech and cyber security - allowing people to upload potentially harmful Flash files to the site is just not a good idea.

And, before you ask, no. There's no real safe way to check a flash file for such things unless you decompile the file, which itself can be risky.

This is clearly coming from the standpoint of "artists don't do new content with flash and we only get new content" when in reality, we do not have even fraction of acceptable content from past here and like already said, I have bumped into many instances where I would've needed to upload SWF flash file here, but now nothing is uploaded because conversionjob would've taken way too much time and effort.
Also realistically, if going by the idea that only whitelisted URLs are able to upload content, we would not have malicious files from sites that also disallowed new SWF uploads along e621, this includes major furry websites with thousands of files with legacy content not here yet.

Also considering many sites have not disabled SWF flash uploads, including Newgrounds, SoFurry and Inkbunny as quick examples, security issues could be more of fear mongering than anything else.
This is because Ruffle is not flash, so even if there is Adobe flash exploits in there, they could not be utilized and if they can, Ruffle is in active development, meaning the only way to actually get this malicious act to manifest is to run the file locally on EoL Adobe Flash Player or Projector.

Some points of note about Ruffle is that, as Mairo said, it's different from Flash and in active development, so it could moderate security issues, and being written in Rust and WASM makes it dramatically more secure already.
If it gets installed on a website, it even autoupdates so if they ship a security fix it'll just download itself, and it means compatibility will always be improving instead of being frozen in time (and, being open source, you CAN report bugs to the team and they will fix it).

Also I've seen the "most people use phones, so it's useless!"
But Ruffle works on phones! I wasn't sure, so I tried playing back some stuff from FA on my phone, and after a loading time it just worked perfectly. If anything, adding it would allow MORE people to interact with Flash content after all those years, without the need for being on a desktop and (at least for e621) getting an extension or finding it in a place la FA that integrates Ruffle already

This is better than the original Adobe Flash, which was famously stonewalled by Steve Jobs due to "horrific performance and security issues", which proved to be right because when they ported it to Android it performed HORRIBLY and was deprecated quickly, which is part of why HTML5 became a thing

I would enjoy being able to play goofy furry smut games again without downloading the file. And I'd enjoy seeing stuff that hadn't previously been uploaded.

If e6 continues to host flash files, all the security arguments are nonsense. If you aren't verifying those files, you do not know that they were ever harmless.
I don't even know if e6 goes through the trouble of blocking external links in flash like swfchan did.
Newgrounds doesn't.

Until a valid Flash replacement comes along that .swf files can be converted to that would then be supported, Flash content should be archived. If e6 still takes the stance that it is an archive, it should take that load. Current conversion options are lossy, even if you use a lossless video output as vector graphics have no resolution limit.

"no one uses it"
Okay then delete all the content on the site that hasn't been accessed in 10 years or has been accessed by less than 0.1% of the users. I don't know why you keep all this crap on here no one uses O.o

cormy1 said:
If e6 continues to host flash files, all the security arguments are nonsense. If you aren't verifying those files, you do not know that they were ever harmless.

Considering you can't run the flash files without extensive effort, there is no problem with existing files
New uploads are not allowed both due to new zero days which are not being fixed (most of which are likely not exploited in old flash files), and the fact that you cannot run them under normal circumstances

alphamule said:
Make your own Booru, with Blackjack and 20072024 UI? :P

Actually, it would not be a bad idea to have a Flash focused Booru, if it's strictly things uploaded by the OP. There's sites that do SWF archives but e621ng has a far nicer experience.

I was gonna say, I swear that SWFchan or whatever it's called is exactly that