Written by steet :

It's been a long while since I've been working on that, but it's finally here!

Lately, there have been many issues surrounding the moderation of fan creations, and in particular the fan characters : too many characters to validate, long waits for validations,... But the biggest source of problems, is that each person has different opinions on what SHOULD or SHOULDN'T be accepted in this section. And this leads to conflicts between the members and the mods, and none would really know what rules to follow.

Well here is my solution. No more characters deactivated! Instead, each character has categories, that you must fill when you send one.

For example, one of them : "Is the character a 'Sparkledog'?" (on Balto Source)

What's the point? Well, now, you can add your own filters on what YOU don't want to see in that section. If you don't like Sparkledogs : at the bottom of the characters page, add a filter to remove them from appearing on ALL the site!
Also, categories make searches a lot of more fun. At the top of the characters page, you'll find the available categories that you can search, and you can combine. For example, it's now possible to find "Blue Female" characters, or "Detailed characters who appear in at least one fan creation"!
By the way, if you think there is a category missing, you can send me suggestions : it's now very easy for me to add new categories! (almost everything is automatized)

Because there are a LOT of characters already sent, and it would be too hard for the mods to do it alone, anyone can "fill the blanks" on any character page - so that, progressively, all characters will be fully "categorized". The help of everyone is welcome! Of course, the mods and the owner of the characters will always be able to make changes.

This comes with another big change. Now that the site has grown a lot bigger, this was becoming the best solution : characters will now be immediately validated! Which means : no more waiting days until it appears, and no more headaches from the mods to validate and study hundred of characters.

Of course I had to make a few changes to counter-balance this. When reporting a character, you will now be able to choose "wrong category" as the reason. Now, the mods job will be more based on reports, and instead of deciding if a character should be accepted or not, they just have to check if the chosen categories are correct or not.
To reflect that, the characters rules are now MUCH more lighter : only real offending characters should be deactivated (violence/blood or sexual), which is how it should have been from the start.

Of course, all this is just a part of a bigger plan...this system will be eventually extended to ALL the fan sections!

I'm hoping you like it!