Hey Tom; don't mean to potentially throw more on the servers than you've already heard, but I read your post and I figured I'd put my two cents' worth in.

I don't think this whole "Flash portal war," if I can call it that, is about which site is the best and which one deserves to "dominate" (though I'd personally vote Newgrounds.com anyway :-P). It's about who came up with the original ideas. You and Wade and all the people at the office implemented the idea of a compact, automated file submission, rating, and management system at a time when DSL Internet service was either unheard of or revered as some kind of ... well ... you remember how much dial-up sucks and that's what's important. Newgrounds was the first.

The notion can't be avoided that someday someone might come up with a better or simpler or more cost-effective way of doing things and put Newgrounds, in one sense or another, out of business. This site is a business, and Pennsylvania's part of one of the world's largest capitalist nations. But Newgrounds will always have been the first. I firmly believe that this site will go down in history books as part of the history of the Internet as one of the pioneering forces in free, sometimes politically incorrect online entertainment (if that hasn't already taken place).

And the important part is that you all keep pushing at it, trying to find ways to make it better, and all after it made its debut on the WWW thirteen years ago. How many Flash sites have been pushing the boundaries, either with technology or with their contributors - programmers and artists alike - for thirteen years? How many websites have even lasted thirteen years?

I've a bone to pick with sites that only post the "hottest" viral video content for extra clicks (like eBaumsworld, last I saw) or that post simply everything (like YouTube, which devolved long ago into a clusterfuck). They're not trying to be the next investigator of the problems of the future today, today (no typo), but they and those made in their likenesses are contributing to all this garbage piling up on the Net that people are going to see once or twice and show their friends and never view again. I'm not saying Newgrounds doesn't have a part in that as well, but the HTML and/or Javascript that make up the Flash Portal was designed, if I'm correct, to minimize spam and blatant copyright violations. There's that, and there's the fact that it keeps getting updated; bugs get fixed; cheating gets harder; making comprehensive and meaningful collections gets encouraged.

I may only say this because I've never written anything in HTML beyond the tags for various typefaces, but the Flash Portal is a work of genius, especially considering the foresight one might require to implement it just before the turn of the millenium, just before making content became part of a worldwide popularity contest (at least to some). And I'm not sucking up 2 teh innertente mazterzes. I may work hard at politeness but I'm not sucking up to anyone here. And on that note I should stop this rambling. I didn't know my post would exceed more than three sentences, but you get on a train of thought and you know how it goes...

Anyway, thanks for going at it with this site for two-thirds as long as I've lived. I hope I haven't bored you, and I apologize if I have.

Maybe I am a suck-up :-P.