That is true. But the rules on that should be enforced or at least easy to access. The rules on FA are split apart in a very weird way. :T
It would be so easy to have a small text next to the rating box that tells you what belongs into what.
The rules
are enforced when users report the submissions. I know plenty of people break the rules, trust me. But staff can only address that problem if users take responsibility on their end and report the violations. When creating an account users agree to follow the rules.
It's literally the first item in the Terms of Service. The Ratings section of
the AUP is the first item in
that document and almost a screenful in itself on my monitor - inserting that on the upload page would necessitate either condensing the rules further (probably not what you'd want - brevity and specificity are kind of diametrically opposed) or making the upload process inconvenient for everyone, including people who do read the rules, by introducing blocks of text and extra scrolling.
And absolutely, ignorance does not excuse breaking the rules (except in rare edge cases where, yeah, you could do the wrong thing in good faith and shouldn't necessarily be penalized for trying and getting it wrong); that's kind of my point. You argued that FA wasn't clear enough about the boundaries between ratings, and that's where "I didn't know" comes in - if people don't read the rules it doesn't matter how clear FA is about what goes where, because it's still a toss-up whether those people would put things where they belong or somewhere else entirely.
Show me a billboard ad or a pg-13 movie that features a literal mountain of fat with a super small head on top, sweating and farting, while tentacles/slime pump food into the mouthhole.
You know just as well as I do that there's a huge difference between "these things occur separately" and "these things occur all at once." Asking for the latter when the problem is the former (unless you
really only want to change the rating of submissions that involve extreme fat, sweat, flatulence, tentacles/slime,
and forcefeeding, all together) is disingenuous. If memory serves you've got some serious inflation including proportionally tiny head and hands in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Jabba the Hutt fits the "mountain of fat" description pretty well (FAIK Star Wars is not higher than PG-13). I've seen billboard ads with dudes in sweaty tanktops. Flatulence is a staple of kid humor. Tentacles show up in any number of children's "monster" movies, and I relatively recently saw a children's movie on Netflix that involved the villain force feeding the king cookies that would make him love her (I can't recall the title because my memory is shite; it involved a magical version of Scotland Yard and two siblings turned from adults into kids).
Billboard ads was more addressing things like bikini/lingerie shots, in general, though. They tend towards the provocative and are definitely sexualized. It's an awkward line to draw and "open to interpretation" is not something to strive for in rules, hence the clear "no visible nipples/nipple bumps" in the rules.
Not if that hard-line rule is against anatomical exaggeration with a fetish background. The intention here is key, obviously.
And my argument all along is that rules based on "intent" by their nature would create a situation where enforcement gets less uniform, and people are more likely to get dinged for something they posted in good faith because someone else took exception to their fatty fatty bunny or whatever.
I know that I didn't draw a ludicrously fat bunny riding a carrot to tickle anyones jimmies, but
how do the mods know that? Putting staff in a situation where they have to guess at intent is not fair to them nor to the users who would be impacted by their decisions when they shouldn't be (ie when the intent wasn't in fact sexual).
I remember that too. And I remember that Tom didn't wet or shit himself during that short scene. And that it still left a weird feeling behind.
(Sorry about this being out of order, my brain is all over the place and the new interface isn't being very cooperative with me trying to move quotes around.)
I want to say the little girl who dressed him up changed him
as though he'd wet himself, but that's neither here nor there. I mentioned that scene specifically because you were arguing that any situation involving an adult wearing a diaper for anything other than medical reasons, is fetish content:
And the moment an adult is wearing diapers (without a medical need to do so, and lets be honest; that is never the case on FA..) it's a fetish. Period.
I can't speak for the AUP staff, because I only addressed AUP tickets rarely and only for blatant offenses for most of my time on staff, but it appears as though AUP actually prohibits depictions of faeces in General (emphasis mine):
Upload Policy Section 1.1 - Ratings said:
General Content Guidelines
[...]
Free of sexual fluids, bodily waste, or forced involuntary drug use. Minimal blood presented in a comedic manner or mild, non-violent injury is permitted.
To me that suggests that visibly soiled diapers, or at the very least diapers soiled with solid waste (I don't recall whether "bodily waste" was intended to include urine or not when the policy was discussed), would probably violate the ratings rules. But that's just my reading; you'd have to ask current staff for clarification on that point.
I do want to stress that I agree with you in part - there is some content that technically falls into the General category that doesn't feel like it truly fits there. Maybe the rules could be adjusted to move some of that content to Mature without much collateral damage - if so, great! What I strongly disagree with, and am pushing back against, is the scope of the changes you're proposing. Sweeping changes moving a lot of frankly pretty harmless content to Mature would create a very hostile environment for artists who create this content, and particularly those who create it with no sexual intent.