Especially since sometimes stuff that should be mature/adult rated sometimes ends up on the front page due to accidentally or intentionally not posting as such.
It's definitely an 18+ website, yeah.

Very true. Shouldn't be something that can even happen accidentally if it's a website where kids are allowed.

I've been saying this for years. I don't understand why they keep making policy changes that are increasingly dumb and say they're to protect the kids on their site inside of just doing the logical thing and banning the kids from their very obviously adult oriented site.

Honestly, I stopped paying attention to the 5 quintillion policy changes after the Yoshi scare. Maybe this is a bad outlook, but I figure if I post something that gets me banned I'll just go somewhere else. All of it seems like a whole lot of jumping through hoops for something that could be pretty easily fixed if the website was designated as an adult space (as it very clearly is, in my opinion).

Mind clarifying a bit about the Yoshi scare? I possibly missed that. (Considering I do not pay attention to every corner of Furaffinity.)

I'd be curious to find out how many artists with large followings got started before they turned 18, and how FA and similar sites being 18+ Only would have diminished that.
No way to find out how alternate histories would have played out, of course.

That said: How would an 18+ restriction be enforced? How many of us, when we were under 18, lied about our ages on the internet? Takes almost no effort to select a different year on a dropdown menu. Why would FA throw money into a pit of trying to restrict access when it can be circumvented by any child with a modicum of determination?

One fix might be to alter the front page when a user is not logged in. By default any artwork marked as NSFW is hidden until the user changes their account settings (section 4.2 of the Terms of Service), but that relies on the uploader properly marking their uploads (pfft, good luck with that, tons of people don't even bother to tag their creations) or community reports to a limited moderation team with limited assets. Altering the front page to be only a login form with no thumbnails or links to creations could mitigate unregistered users (who may or may not be under the age of majority) would prevent them from seeing NSFW art without logging in, but again we're back to the problem of "it's easy to lie about your age."

There's a few tools in Global Site Settings that can help prevent minors from seeing specifically your account's content: Disable Guest Access and the newly-released Disable Access to Minors.

All that to say: Good intent to keep kids safe, but it's very difficult (and thus expensive) to keep kids safe when they're acting in an unsafe manner on the other end of a computer.

I think that unfortunately like you said there's no real way to keep an adult oriented website completely free of people who are underage. I've seen others suggest asking for IDs, but I know that those are very easily faked even with 3rd party services involved. Plus I don't think it's a good idea for anyone to hand over their personal info to any website.

If everyone tagged their work as they were meant to, kids and teens didn't interact with 18+ stuff, people weren't creepy, there wasn't such a huge gray area with what's considered NSFW, etc, I think a website like this could run alright. Sort of like a back room in a novelty shop or an adult section in a rental store (if they were still around haha), easily monitored by whoever's keeping shop.

Being online blurs the lines too much for me. I appreciate the tools that administration has put into place, but I think FA is a little too much Brunettes Gone Wild and not enough Lilo & Sitch DVDs for me to feel entirely comfortable sharing the space with people who are underaged. I know that I'd be anyways even if they did flip the 18+ switch, but it's more about sending a general "Hey, this isn't intended for you, please don't endanger yourself and the people here." message. It's frustrating that money always seems to be at the root of these issues, but that's the way she goes

I say the same thing about Deviantart, the amount of lude things in General is insane

Inflation for example is definitely a fetish, you go to the front page with NSFW turned off and there usually is fetish content.

Yeah I'm really not too sure what Deviantart's deal is anymore. I don't frequent the website super often but when I do, like you've said, I see loads of unfiltered actual porn so I'm not sure if the policies have changed or moderation just isn't being enforced. I grew up using the website with very few incidents and would have been fine with letting someone younger make an account on it back then, but I can't say I'd be comfortable with that these days.

tbh inflation is safe for network tv so its not like kids arent seein it

like how many inflation episodes of kids tv shows are there ya know

I get what you're saying and I feel like those weren't intended to be fetish material

If it's on deviantart or furaffinity, it's probably fetish related

at the end of the day, its not a NSFW website

its a website with a nsfw section, like how discord allows age-gated nsfw

Yeah, the internet nowadays has such a big problem with unregulated access for children to access literal fucking porn. There needs to be laws based around preventing children outright from accessing certain sides of the web outright, as this is actually harmful. COPPA (from the Americas) isn't enough anymore.

Furaffinity is just one example of how badly the internet suffers from this.