I've been updating the NG History page and thought this would be a good time to share the 2019 recap!

Update: On January 31st, we released the new project system!

2019 Recap

In January we overhauled the Art upload form, making it mobile friendly with a new thumbnailer and better support for thumbnails from animated gifs. We added our new text editor, so artists can include WIPs and alt images in their commentary space. Tag entry got modernized with auto-suggestions.

We celebrated our fourth Pixel Day, with a lot of great entries and a beautiful site skin by @moawling!

Long-time fans were treated to new episodes of Salad Fingers, Starbarians and Madness all in one month. #blessed

In February we updated blogs with the new text editor and tagging, allowing users to blog via mobile for the first time ever and browse blog posts via tag.

Tag search was overhauled, allowing you to search for multiple tags with a more intuitive front-end. We replaced tiny thumbnails with full art pieces directly in the feed and updated the art hub to use our new, larger thumbnails.

We also hosted a Devil May Cry Art Contest and TheEnkian hosted a Tale of Enki Art Contest.

In March Peregrinus organized Voice Acting Contest 12!

April marked the launch of Newgrounds Player, a streamlined desktop player for Flash content that works when browsers don't. NG Player supports our API for medals, high scores and shared creations, ensuring that NG's existing Flash content will remain playable until in-browser emulation arrives!

Random-storykeeper organized the Art Inspired Music Contest this year, a great event that builds a bridge between art and music here on NG.

In May we celebrated Pico Day, complete with a party at PhilaMOCA in downtown Philly organized by @IvanAlmighty.

We introduced content filters for art browsing, so you can block specific users and tags while browsing the Art Portal. We also added "Custom" to the date range selector, so you can browse by specific date ranges.

@CoachFro kicked off the NG Original Character Writing Contest, which continued throughout the year with an art phase, voice phase, theme song phase and animation phase going into 2020! Shout to to CoachFro for also organizing monthly writing contests this year.

Between April and August we hosted a Wick Editor game jam, a Gato Roboto art contest, a My Friend Pedro art contest, an Epic Battle Fantasy Contest, a Knightin+ Art Contest, a Sprite Draw Art Contest.

In June @TaintedLogic organized the Underdog Audio Contest.

In July we added the ability to specify what tools you used to create your animation, game or audio and started to build a database of tools and hardware based on the results. This feature will be used for art as well when the art portal is integrated into our new project system and we have future plans for the database we're building.

@LoboF organized the Music Inspired Art contest this month as well and we migrated everything over to a new, larger storage system!

In August we introduced everyone to Ruffle, Mike's open-source project to emulate Flash in-browser. We also added support for receiving BAT tips in the Brave web browser, nice alternative to Chrome if you are looking to de-Google.

@FelixZophar and @8oltSh0cX organized the NG Remix Contest this year, @MindChamber organized another Robot Day and the Clock Crew once again celebrated Clock Day.

NEAR DEADline was also released and the team behind it (@BrandyBuizel, @NickConter and @Carmet) organized an art contest utilizing the drawing tool on the games' loading screen.

September brought us another great Madness Day and an update to the Classic Portal, making it mobile friendly and introducing ratings filters.

We updated the forums and blog posts so you wouldn't lose your work if you accidentally left the page or closed your window and made some overhauls to the Art Portal scouting system, so large groups of people wouldn't get de-scouted if someone deleted their account. We also updated search to exclude user you've blocked.

October was a Spooktacular month, with many brilliant entries.

We added a dedicated front page spot for Podcasts, thanks in particular to two wonderful community Podcasts: GroundsPatrol and ACoupleOfCrickets.

In December we unveiled an update to the Collabinator, introducing a mobile-friendly layout, new categories for paid work and expanded search and filtering options.

The 2019 Newgrounds Audio Deathmatch was a huge success, culminating in a finale on the Grounds Patrol podcast!

The holidays were extra cheerful, thanks to the community-driven Christmas ADVENTure game / art gallery, the Art Forum Secret Santa organized by @LegolaSS and several improvements to gifting for Supporters.

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That's what I have so far! What were your favorite things that happened on Newgrounds this year? Any events you would like to see added to the history? I think @ninjamuffin99 and @PhantomArcade need some love in there still, among others.

Saturday update: I've added the Music Inspired Art contest, Secret Santa, Classic Portal Overhaul and Voice Acting Contest to the history, in addition to a shout out to @CoachFro for organizing monthly writing contests, which maybe should get individual links?

The history page itself will be getting a mobile-friendly overhaul in early 2020, when the Wiki gets updated. The same will be happening with PMs and the remaining pages that have not yet made the leap.

We have a lot planned for 2020 and that includes starting the year with a lot less ads! This may only last for a month depending on how many new supporters we bring on board. If you like what Newgrounds is doing and appreciate that it's been doing this for over 20 years now, please consider becoming a Supporter!

cool. also first post.

Can you make it possible to go back to the old Newgrounds designs?

For me, 500 followers and finishing the Potatoman trilogy made this a fun year overall.

Not possible. If you really wanna go back, Wayback Machine is your closest friend.

Always love reading these

It's great to see the site adapting to the times, especially now since there some migrations of artists. This place will always be a staple of the internet to me, and I hope for other as well.

Would be a cool pet project to make responsive versions of the old designs and be able to switch to em like how some websites have night mode.

god bless these two

On to another decade of Newgrounds!

I can't wait for the project manager redesign. Finally gonna catch up with the rest of the site.

RIP 2013 design.

remember kids love ninjamuffin99 and phantomarcade like tom says or he will kill you

Been a great year for NG, can't wait to see what next year brings 👍

I mostly missed everything, I'm relatively new to this plataform since I joined on September

But so far, I like how this place and comunity grows and develops

I had the pleasure to work on Christmas ADVENTure this year, I discovered some amazing people in there

I hope I can participate on more events on 2020 since they are super fun and wonderful! <3 <3 <3

This site rules <3

Great year, can't wait to submit constant bug reports to you in the new PM system :p

Mobile layouts for PMS got me hyped though ngl.

What an amazing year for Newgrounds. Like so much of the site has changed for the past year or two. It almost feels like a brand new site again. Thank you Tom and the entire team for running this site for 20 years now, it's been something

What a good ass year. Always nice to see the NG history page get updated heheh

and if u want NG history from me, me and the boys released Monster Mashing commercially on PC, Mac, Linux, and Android, and all versions use the Newgrounds.io API. So I'm takin credit for having the first NG API game on desktop outside of Newgrounds and first mobile NG API game on mobile outside of Newgrounds. If there was someone else who nabbed it before me eehhh at least I probably nabbed the first Linux game that uses the NG API lmao

NG API is very cool and easy to deal with god bless ya. And shoutout to my boy @Geokureli for doin all the hustlin on the shit that was too hard for my dummy brain. I hope all my games that I release commercially can have the NG API and be on NG as well

It sure has been a crazy year.

Love the new design.

I hosted a Music Inspired Art Contest in July,

and @Legolass just hosted a Secret Santa on the art forum

This has been the busiest year of the decade. Really feels like things are coming together!

Niice! Always glad to read/re-read the History section, with more perspective it looks like it was a though start of the decade, but by now it's awesome to see how NG keeps on evolving!

Also, wow the first mention of Nightmare Cops comes from 2012! I'm reeealIy looking forward to not only playing it but also hearing the stories behind it while NG keeps going through the decade :)

It kinda surprise me that I went to Newgrounds ever since I was an kid back then. There were lot of flash game I play (Noticeably :the game: and other computer-related flash game since I was an computer freak at the time) as well as some animation which introduce me to Flash in general. See you have improved ever since with no bad update or sort, it surprise me a lot, even though I joined back in 2018, marking my first year here.

Honestly, deviantART is kinda struggling and with many people protesting or even leaving the site, I decide to check Newgrounds after so long of visiting the site. I still remember the "Vote Fairly, no ass-kisser or hater approve" and the adult rating was bit different as you can still view them as unregistered user and related more violent (Mario Mortal Combat is what I can remember)

Also, I think ninjamuffin99 still need some love with his artwork.

Keep it up Tom!

Looks like it's been a great year for Newgrounds!

The pixel art site skin by moawling is my all time favorite. It's always awesome when it reappears!

NG's definitely had a great year! I'm looking forward to the upcoming site improvements in 2020! It'll be interesting to see what next year brings

Oh man, I love the recaps. These are so great in case ya missed anything. (which i often do)

I really wish there was an NG app. I've interacted with a number of people who are so averse

to using mobile web browsers for this purpose. If there was an app, maybe it could also have

a more boring, modern-styled design that wouldn't turn off all the poor-taste masses...

I just want NG to get the love it deserves, even if it has to make some changes. lol

not if i get to him first

Tons of stuff went down in 2019. Some bad and some good. On to 2020.

I would like to thank @PhantomArcade for sharing my sirpelo cartoon on the ng Twitter. That was the funniest thing and a amazing Christmas day for me to see lol. Thank you for the laughs lol.

Another favorite was The sketch collab 2019. came out great this year, some really nice artist joined it. @camuri did a nice job as well.

This year for NG was really fun and I'm really excited to see what's to come in 2020.

I wish you Tom a great 2020

The WayBack Machine is certainly a good option, but there is only saved and I need to be able to have the old design now..

Next year, Newgrounds is getting some serious blast, I can fee lit. I like the Brave-BAT path! Seeing how many publishers jump on board, this could really become a competitive option in the whole market.

Aside from that, thanks to everyone contributing to everything this year! Still spending much time here everyday, even after 20 years.

You'll have to get past me!

So, what'll it be?