Difference between revisions of "Fur Affinity"

Revision as of 03:55, 8 December 2013

Fur Affinity
Fur Affinity front page
Author(s)	Owner/Lead admin: Dragoneer (via Ferrox Art LLC) Founder: Alkora Admins: Asia Neko, Bazeel, Carmen, Cerberusnl, Fox Amoore, Glaide, Helperdog, Jasu Fox, Keio, Kryphosdrgn (photography lead), Nero Silent, Oddy, Odin Canis, QMelon, quoting_mungo, Sheepdust, Shivadramon (team lead), SSJ3Mewtwo, Surgat, Trpdwarf Tech staff: Carenath, Net-cat, Tsawolf, yak
Website	http://www.furaffinity.net/ SFW link: http://sfw.furaffinity.net/ Forum: http://forums.furaffinity.net/ Wiki: http://wiki.furaffinity.net/
Launch date	16 January–1 August 2005 (staff dispute & server issues) 10 December 2005–present
Genre	Social media community
Rating(s)

Fur Affinity, also known as FA, is the furry fandom's largest online community, focusing on the promotion of art, music and stories.

The site was created in 2005 by Alkora as an alternative to various art community sites such as SheezyArt and deviantART, distinguished by allowing artistic freedom of expression regardless of content rating. It is led by Dragoneer and Daemonshyai.

WikiFur News has a related story:

Fur Affinity access disrupted amid ownership dispute

WikiFur News has a related story:

'Krystal sandwich' meme strikes Fur Affinity

History

Main article: History of Fur Affinity

Fur Affinity was launched on 16 January 2005 as an alternative to SheezyArt, with the forum going live on that date and the main site being transferred a few days later from FurPawz. Since then, it has suffered a few outages, most notably a month-long downtime over July 2008, but always managed to recover. In 2011, Fur Affinity announced a major revamp in connection to FA: United 4.^[1]

Fur Affinity: United!

Main article: FA: United

In August 2007, Fur Affinity held its own furry convention, Fur Affinity: United! (or FA:U) in Newark, New Jersey. The convention was a success, drawing 310 attendees and 25 fursuiters in the parade, and was followed by another in 2008, drawing 381 attendees. In February 2009, Dragoneer announced FA: United 3 "Games United" for 28-30 May 2010.^[2] No event was scheduled for 2009 due to the economic downturn.

Features and rules

Fur Affinity's features for users include the ability to allow users to track new updates from particular artists; highlight favorites; and upload a wide variety of art (images, music and stories). The site attempts to promote community through its comments system and individual journals.

While works of all ratings are accepted (other than photographic nudes, images whose intent are to slander or discredit others, and minors in sexual situations^[3]), art rated as mature or adult is not shown to visitors, or to users who have not specified it as a preference (which requires giving a date of birth indicating an age over 18). Keywords and tags can be added to works, though a feature that allowed blocking based on tags was disabled due to performance issues.

Fur Affinity's search engine was "temporarily disabled" in mid-2006 due to it taking up too many resources.^[4] A faux search feature was implemented for April Fool's Day 2007, much to the chagrin of some users.^[5] Search was reimplemented on 5 February 2009; it was initially labelled "That Thing You Want" and randomly included rickrolls.^[6]

Privacy features were added in May 2012 with users being able to block guests from seeing their content with messages such as "[username] has elected to make their content available to registered users only" and being able to hide their adult, mature+adult or all favorites from public view.^[7]

Project Ferrox

Main article: Ferrox (software)

The FA development team was working on a new backend system called Ferrox which was to be used for the next major revision of Fur Affinity, and was to be made available as FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for other sites to use. By late 2009, development of Ferrox had stalled, with the last change to the code being made on September 7, 2009. Days earlier, net-cat, who was acting as the lead Ferrox developer after Eevee had left, announced that the code was to be frozen, citing that "Nobody knows Python."^[8]

Mascots

Fender, drawn by Mutley James

Fender is the Fur Affinity mascot. He was primarily created by artist K-9, based upon a character concept by Preyfar. He is half fox and half ferret, commonly referring to himself as a 'ferrox'. On April Fool's Day 2007, Fender was depicted in the site's banner as a busty female dragon, still wearing the trademark blue tie. This dragon was made a separate character from Fender and an official mascot of the site in May 2007, and named Rednef, or "Fender" spelled backwards.

Fender was displayed as a three-toed sloth for April Fools' Day 2008. So far this sloth form has yet to become an official character.

Controversies

Main article: History of Fur Affinity#Controversies

Organization

Fur Affinity is officially owned and run by Ferrox Art LLC, a limited liability company founded 25 February 2008, registered in Lenhartsville, Pennsylvania.^[9]

Statistics

• In late 2010, the monthly hosting bill for FurAffinity was just under $1,700 ^[10]. This includes a full equipment rack, bandwidth, and IP addresses. The monthly cost likely increased with the addition of extra bandwidth (Increasing the total to 350Mbit) in early 2012.^[11]
• In less than a year since the site's re-launch, Fur Affinity gained over 45,000 users and over 300,000 submissions. ^{[citation needed]}
• Alexa has previously ranked Fur Affinity in the top 4,000 sites on the web in 1 November 2007, showing greater traffic than the VCL for most of the previous year. The trend continued through 2008 and 2009. Fur Affinity has ranked as high as 3,475 on individual days, and close to 2,000 in the USA. In October 2010, Fur Affinity's rank fell to 7681.
• Fur Affinity reached its 1,000,000th submission on 11 January 2008. It later reached its 2,000,000th submission on 15 February 2009, and its 3,000,000th submission in November 2009.

Hardware

Fur Affinity's servers Bahamut, Tiamat, Novastorm and Trogdor (unlabeled).

As of September 2010, Fur Affinity runs on the following servers:

• Tiamat is a twin dual-core 2.0Ghz Opteron 2212 with 32GB DDR2-533 RAM. The server was used as the search server until August 31st, 2010 when it was discovered it had suffered a equipment failure^[12] It is unclear if Tiamat was ever brought back online or if Search was moved to another server. Storage consists of 4x 74GB 10K RPM hard drives in RAID10.
• Neo Bahamut, FA's backup server, is a dual-core 2.0GHz Opteron with 2GB DDR2-667 RAM. Storage consists of 4x 1TB hard drives in RAID5. Nightly backups for both data and DB.
• Novastorm, FA's database server, is a Sun Fire X4150 manufactured by Wikipedia:Sun Microsystems with twin quad-core 2.5Ghz Xeon 5420 processors and 64GB of RAM (as of March 2010).^[13] Storage consists of 2x 74GB 15K RPM hard drives in RAID1 and 6x146GB 15K RPM hard drives in RAID10.
• Figment, an application server, is dual quad-core 2.33Ghz Xeon 5345 with 32GB of RAM and 4x 1TB of storage. Figment was purchased with the intent of offering hosting^[14] on it "sometime in April... or May, or maybe August" of 2010^[15] and is currently serving advertisments^[16]. Server was named by Sciggles.^[17]
• Shivan is a twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. This server is currently unused. The server was named by FA donator TlaiLaxu.
• Sparkz is a twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. This server is currently running traffic data graphing software. The server was named by FA donator Dax.
• Tonberry is a twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. This server is currently unused. The server was named by FA donator YiffyHusky.
• Lapse is a twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. This server is currently unused. Server is awaiting an official designation.

Fur Affinity also runs a Cisco 7301 router dubbed "Routezilla" as well as a 48-port Cisco Catalyst 3560 switch known as "Switchthulu". This is the second Switchthulu, the original having been a 24-port Cisco 3750.

Retired

• Gecko, the original FA server, is a dual 3.0Ghz Nocona Xeon system with 4GB of RAM. Storage consists of 2x 250GB hard drives. The server is still used to host Team Fortress 2 servers for the Furry Pound and Left 4 Dead servers for the Fur Affinity Steam Gamers group.
• Trogdor, FA's data server, was a Dell Poweredge 2970 2U Server with 32GB RAM. Storage consists of 6x 1TB hard drives - 4x in a RAID10 array, 1x RAID hotspare and 1x local backups. Trogdor was retired in October 2011^[18] and replaced with an unspecified model which is only known to have 12 Terrabytes worth of hard drives in it.

Confirmed future features

References

1. ↑ Fur Affinity Turns 6! - Dragoneer, Fur Affinity forum post (16 January 2011)
2. ↑ FAU3 Announcement - Dragoneer, Fur Affinity journal (9 February 2009)
3. ↑ Acceptable Upload Policy - Fur Affinity
4. ↑ Admin mode on june 5th 2006 - Alkora, Fur Affinity forums (5 June 2006)
5. ↑ Search is up! - Fur Affinity Forums (1 April 2007)
6. ↑ SEARCH - Dragoneer, Fur Affinity journal (5 February 2009)
7. ↑ Update Notices, Changelog & Banner journal posted to Fender's blog on May 24th, 2012. Retrieved 2012 November 25.
8. ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/49368-Code-freeze-on-current-Ferrox-codebase?p=1174129&viewfull=1#post1174129
9. ↑ Ferrox Art LLC (entity number 3791597) - Pennsylvania Corporations, PA Department of State. Accessed 20 November 2013.
10. ↑ http://twitpic.com/2g8t5x - TwitPic Posted on August 19, 2010 by Dragoneer
11. ↑ https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3484539/
12. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/22617961790 - FA Twitter
13. ↑ Novastorm upgrade tweet - Dragoneer's twitter (23 March 2010)
14. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10203450025 - FA Twitter - March 8, 2010
15. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10942579229 - FA Twitter - March 23 2010
16. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10936829317 - FA Twitter
17. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10585322442 - FA Twitter
18. ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/108936-10-17-2011-File-read-only-mode
19. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3325316#cid:25505803

See also

• FA Rank
• Category:Fur Affinity administrators

External links

• Furaffinity Status' Journal. Fur Affinity on LiveJournal
• Fur Affinity on Tumblr
• Fur Affinity on Twitter
• Fur Affinity on Facebook
• #furaffinity on FurNet IRC
• Fur Affinity Gamers on Steam
• #furaffinity statistics on irc.netsplit.de