What gets into the gallery, what gets kept out, and why. Read this once and you will never have to guess.
Everything you make here starts private. Nobody sees it but you until you decide otherwise, and you can stop sharing at any time.
Works the moment you turn sharing on. Nobody reviews it. Send it to a friend, your family, or your teacher, and it opens for them. This is how you hand work in.
The public feed everyone browses. A real person looks at every project before it goes up, so not everything makes it. That is on purpose.
The gallery is picky because a gallery that shows everything is worth nothing. When it is worth scrolling, being in it means something.
Not making the gallery takes nothing away from you. Your project stays in your account, you keep building on it, and your share link keeps working. It just is not on the public feed.
Most projects that do not make the gallery are one of these:
asdf, test 2, the one where you were finding the buttonsNone of that means you did anything wrong, and none of it goes on any kind of record. Everyone has a pile of these. They are what making things looks like. Keep going.
Bringing in a picture, a sprite sheet, or a music file from outside the app is allowed. Plenty of good projects start that way. The only thing we ask is that you say where it came from, and the app asks you when you share, so you do not have to remember to.
There are four situations here and only the last one is a problem:
The app tells us when a file comes in from outside, and it always has. That is not us watching you, and it is not a trap. It is a note attached to the project, it is why you get asked the question, and it is why saying "I drew this" about a file you imported does not work. Importing art is fine. Saying you drew something you did not is the part that costs you, and it is a completely different thing.
You will scroll the gallery and find something you are sure is worse than the project of yours that did not make it. Everyone does, and it is an honest thing to be annoyed about. Here is the actual answer.
"But that one is imported too, and it got featured." Sometimes it is, and this is the part worth slowing down on: two projects can both involve an import and be completely different things. Plenty of students here were building on the older version of this site for years, and carrying that work across is a kid moving their own pixel art, made pixel by pixel, from one place to another. Nothing was taken from anyone. Somebody else's picture opened and shared straight back out is not the same act and does not get the same result.
Which is the real answer to the whole comparison: you cannot see what is behind somebody else's project. You do not know what they made, where it came from, what they were asked, what they answered, or how long they spent. We do. That is the job. Deciding you were cheated on the strength of a thumbnail is guessing, and it is usually guessing wrong about a kid who did nothing to you.
Whatever you do, leave the other kid out of it. They did not decide anything about your project and they did not take a spot from you. Going at their work in the comments, or telling people it is bad, is aiming something at a person, which is covered under "the lines that are not about the gallery" below, and the one thing here that actually gets you in trouble. Being annoyed is allowed. Making somebody else wear it is not.
If you genuinely think something in the gallery breaks one of these rules, use the report button. That is exactly what it is for and nobody minds a report that turns out to be nothing. And if you think a real mistake was made about your own project, ask an admin or your teacher. Just know that the thing that gets a project of yours into the gallery is finishing it, never pointing at somebody else's.
The people here come from families who disagree with each other about big things, and they disagree strongly. The gallery is the one place all of them share. So it stays out of those arguments:
Your own world showing up in your work is not the problem, and never was. A church or a mosque in a 3D build. A menorah or a Christmas scene in pixel art. A flag on a map. A history project about an election. Build what you know. The question is not whether a project has a belief anywhere near it. The question is whether the project is showing you something or arguing with you. Showing is welcome. Arguing goes somewhere else.
This is a rule about one public feed, not about you. Nobody here is telling you what to think, and nothing is ever taken off your account over this.
These are about people getting hurt, so they apply everywhere on the site: your projects, your comments, your files, your messages. Not just the gallery.
Content crossing these lines gets taken down, and doing it can cost you your account. If you run into any of it, report it. That is not tattling, it is the whole reason the report button exists, and reporting something that turns out to be nothing is a completely fine outcome.
A file you put in ~/shared is a different audience: only your own
classroom opens it, never the whole site. It is looked at first, the same way a gallery
project is, so there is a gap between sharing it and your class seeing it. It is not
held to gallery standards though. The question is only whether it helps your class or at
least does not bother them, so a half-finished sprite sheet your group needs is fine.
The people lines above still apply, because those are about people and not about polish.
Look at the list further up first. It is nearly always one of those, and nearly always fixable by opening the project and finishing the thought.
Please do not ask a moderator about it. Some moderators are students like you, they are not allowed to discuss what they decided, and putting them on the spot puts them in a bad position. If you think a real mistake was made, ask an admin or your teacher and they will look. Every decision here is recorded and every one of them can be undone.
People, not a filter. Some of them are students who hold a moderator role, and they work from a written code that says what they may and may not do, including that they judge the work and never the person, and that they never touch anything of their own or a friend's. Every action they take has their name on it and can be reversed.