Difference between revisions of "Fur Affinity"

From WikiFur, the furry encyclopedia.
Jump to: navigation, search
(→‎Hardware: Tweak headers (H→h, etc) Help:Furry Book of Style "Header titles on WikiFur are normally not capitalized after the first letter, unless there is a proper name involved.")
(→‎Administrators: Staff got smaller. A "System Account" is also listed as an administrator and is used for anonymous notices. Hendikins, Photographurer, Luftwoofe, Writerwren, Grammatist, Silver R. Wolfe, Summercat as past staff, Xaerun as admin.)
Line 61: Line 61:
 
==Administrators==
 
==Administrators==
  
−
Fur Affinity "Administration and Support Staff" include [[Asia Neko]], [[Bazeel]], [[Carmen]], [[Cerberusnl]], "Site Owner/Admin" [[Dragoneer]], [[Fox Amoore]], [[Helperdog]], [[Jasu Fox]], [[Keio]], [[Kryphosdrgn]] (Photography Team Lead), [[Nero Silent]], [[Oddy]], [[Odin36519]], [[QMelon]], [[quoting_mungo]], [[Sheepdust]], [[Shivadramon]] (Team Lead), [[SSJ3Mewtwo]], [[Surgat]], and [[Trpdwarf]].<ref name="staff">http://www.furaffinity.net/staff/ Retrieved January 5, 2014.</ref>
+
Fur Affinity's listed "Administration and Support Staff" include [[Asia Neko]], [[Carmen]], [[Dragoneer]] ("Site Owner/Admin"), [[Fox Amoore]], [[Jasu Fox]], [[Kryphosdrgn]] ("Photography Team Lead"), [[Nero Silent]], [[quoting_mungo]], [[SSJ3Mewtwo]], and [[Surgat]].<ref name="staff">[http://www.furaffinity.net/staff/ "Staff"] - Fur Affinity. Retrieved June 20, 2014.</ref><ref>[[Cerberusnl]], [[Helperdog]], and [[Shivadramon]] were listed as of June 20, 2014, but are no longer administrators per their user pages.</ref> [[Xaerun]] also has administrator status,<ref>[http://www.furaffinity.net/user/xaerun "Xaerun"] - Fur Affinity. Accessed 20 June 2014.</ref> as does a "System Account" which is used to send anonymous notices.<ref>[http://www.furaffinity.net/user/systemaccount/ "Fur Affinity System Account"] - Fur Affinity]</ref>
  
−
[[Carenath]], [[Net-cat]], [[Tsawolf]], and [[yak]] are listed as Technical Staff.<ref name="staff"/>
+
[[Carenath]], [[Net-cat]], and [[yak]] are listed as Technical Staff.<ref name="staff"/>
  
−
Past staff include [[Glaide]].{{cn}}
+
Past staff include [[Bazeel]], [[Glaide]], [[Grammatist]], [[Hendikins]], [[Keio]], [[Luftwoofe]], [[Oddy]], [[Odin36519]], [[Photographurer]], [[QMelon]], [[Sheepdust]], [[Silver R. Wolfe]], [[Summercat]], [[Trpdwarf]], [[Tsawolf]] and [[Writerwren]].<ref>''[http://www.flayrah.com/3720/five-fur-affinity-staff-resign-some-citing-leadership-failures Five Fur Affinity staff resign, some citing leadership failures]'' - [[Rakuen Growlithe]], [[Flayrah]] (29 October 2011)</ref>{{cn}}
  
 
== Statistics ==
 
== Statistics ==

Revision as of 12:20, 20 June 2014

Clock.png This article may be out of date and in need of updating to include more recent information.
For specifics, check the edit history and talk page. Consult the Furry Book of Style for editing help.
Fur Affinity
FAFront Page.pngFur Affinity front page
Author(s) Owner/Lead admin: Dragoneer (via Ferrox Art LLC)
Website
http://www.furaffinity.net/
Launch date 16 January–1 August 2005 (staff dispute & server issues)
10 December 2005–present
Genre Social media community
Rating(s)
Web PG
Web NC-17

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.

Wiki.png
Wiki.png
Flayrah has news and features on 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, created by artist K-9 based on a character concept by Preyfar. He is half fox and half ferret, a "ferrox". On April Fool's Day 2007, Fender was depicted in the site's banner as a female dragon. This dragon was made a separate character and an official mascot of the site in May 2007, and named Rednef, or "Fender" spelled backwards.

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]

Administrators

Fur Affinity's listed "Administration and Support Staff" include Asia Neko, Carmen, Dragoneer ("Site Owner/Admin"), Fox Amoore, Jasu Fox, Kryphosdrgn ("Photography Team Lead"), Nero Silent, quoting_mungo, SSJ3Mewtwo, and Surgat.[10][11] Xaerun also has administrator status,[12] as does a "System Account" which is used to send anonymous notices.[13]

Carenath, Net-cat, and yak are listed as Technical Staff.[10]

Past staff include Bazeel, Glaide, Grammatist, Hendikins, Keio, Luftwoofe, Oddy, Odin36519, Photographurer, QMelon, Sheepdust, Silver R. Wolfe, Summercat, Trpdwarf, Tsawolf and Writerwren.[14][citation needed]

Statistics

  • In late 2010, the monthly hosting bill for FurAffinity was just under $1,700 [15]. 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.[16]
  • 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).

Current hardware

Name Purpose Hardware Notes First Used Status
Routezilla Router Cisco 7301 router  ? Presumed in use
Switchthulu Network Switch 48-port Cisco Catalyst 3560. Replaced an older 24-port Cisco 3750, also called "Switchthulu"  ? Presumed in use
Neo Bahamut Database Backup Dual-core 2.0GHz Opteron with 2GB DDR2-667 RAM. Storage consists of 4x 1TB hard drives in RAID5  ? Presumed in use
Figment Virtualization Server
Ad server, Email server 		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[17] on it "sometime in April... or May, or maybe August" of 2010[18] and is currently serving advertisments[19]. Server was named by Sciggles.[20] 2010 In use
Sparkz Network Monitoring Twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. The server was named by FA donator Dax. This server is the only server in a group of four donated servers (The others being Shivan, Tonberry, and Lapse) that is known to have been put into service. November 30, 2010[21] In use
File Server File/App Server An unnamed, unspecified model which is only known to have 12 Terrabytes worth of hard drives in it. This server replaced Trogdor. October 2011 In use
Finn* Database Server A custom-built server in a Supermicro SuperServer SYS-6027R-WRF chassis with at least one Intel Xeon 6C E5 2620 processor, 64GB of RAM, and 6 15k HDD's in an unknown RAID. This server was built by donations received in February 2013[22]. Due to a MySQL misconfiguration leading to a database crash, Finn was swapped with Jake in December 2013. September 16, 2013 Unknown
Jake* Database Server A custom-built server in a Supermicro SuperServer SYS-6027R-WRF chassis with at least one Intel Xeon 6C E5 2620 processor, 64GB of RAM, and 6 15k HDD's in an unknown RAID. This server was built by donations received in February 2013[23]. December 16, 2013 In use
  • Finn and Jake are identical and were bought with the purpose of building a redundant database cluster. For unknown reasons, Finn was brought online first, with Jake supposedly following behind[24] later that week. In December 2013, an issue came up that put the site into "Read Only" for a week. FA then moved the database to Jake, which was apparently not put into service yet.

Retired / unused hardware

Name Purpose Hardware Notes First Used Retired
Gecko Web Server 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.  ?  ?
Tiamat Search Twin dual-core 2.0Ghz Opteron 2212 with 32GB DDR2-533 RAM  ? August 31, 2010[25]
(Hardware Failure)
Novastorm Database 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).[26] Storage consists of 2x 74GB 15K RPM hard drives in RAID1 and 6x146GB 15K RPM hard drives in RAID10. The server was initially purposed as the "Application server" but eventually converted to run the Database. This server was bought with donations following the July 2009 outage. August 2009 September 2013
(Replaced by Finn)
Shivan Unused/Unknown Twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. The server was named by FA donator TlaiLaxu.  ?  ?
Tonberry Unused/Unknown Twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. The server was named by FA donator YiffyHusky.  ?  ?
Lapse Unused/Unknown Twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM  ?  ?
Trogdor File/App Server 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. This server was bought with donations following the July 2009 outage. August 2009 October 2011[27]
(Replaced by File Server)

Confirmed future features

Feature Official Mentions Status Notes
On-demand printing December 2005
November 2009
 		Not Implemented
Content filtering November 2006 Not Implemented Proposed for Ferrox.
Gallery folders November 2006
August 2010
January 2011 		Not Implemented Proposed for Ferrox.
New UI April 2007
May 2010
January 2011 		Canceled?[28] Was in development at the same time as Ferrox.
New "dark" theme May 2012
October 2012		 In Progress This project incorporates a new "dark" theme using some of the elements of the "New UI" that was canceled.
"Character Information" October 2012 In Progress A placeholder for a "Character Information" widget is present in the new dark theme.
Opossums (pss.ms) URL shortener August 2010 Not Implemented pss.ms is currently down.
Web hosting November 2009
March 2010 [1]
 		Not Implemented
Supporter ribbons November 2010 Not Implemented
Note/inbox search September 2010 Not Implemented
Artist list and reviews
"Commission Ratings" 		June 2006
January 2011 		Not Implemented
Improved commenting January 2011 Not Implemented

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. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "Staff" - Fur Affinity. Retrieved June 20, 2014.
  11. ↑ Cerberusnl, Helperdog, and Shivadramon were listed as of June 20, 2014, but are no longer administrators per their user pages.
  12. ↑ "Xaerun" - Fur Affinity. Accessed 20 June 2014.
  13. ↑ "Fur Affinity System Account" - Fur Affinity]
  14. ↑ Five Fur Affinity staff resign, some citing leadership failures - Rakuen Growlithe, Flayrah (29 October 2011)
  15. ↑ http://twitpic.com/2g8t5x - TwitPic Posted on August 19, 2010 by Dragoneer
  16. ↑ https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3484539/
  17. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10203450025 - FA Twitter - March 8, 2010
  18. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10942579229 - FA Twitter - March 23 2010
  19. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10936829317 - FA Twitter
  20. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10585322442 - FA Twitter
  21. ↑ @Furaffinity tweet
  22. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4389184
  23. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4389184
  24. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5058966/
  25. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/22617961790 - FA Twitter
  26. ↑ Novastorm upgrade tweet - Dragoneer's twitter (23 March 2010)
  27. ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/108936-10-17-2011-File-read-only-mode
  28. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3325316#cid:25505803

See also

External links


view · talk · edit
Fur Affinity
Founder
Owner
Administrators
Topics
Mascots
See also


view · talk · edit
Web-based community archives for fiction, video and images
Clean/PG-rated
Mature content
Defunct(?) or not recently updated
Defunct
ArtPiles  · ArtRise  · Epilogue  · Furiffic  · Furry Art Pile  · InflatableFurs.com  · The InflatioNation  · PlayMouse  · Pregfur.org  · PureYiff  · Rubberfurs.org  · SheezyArt · Storm-Artists.net (2019: data retrieval available)  · TFCentral  · Vor-Com  · Xenographia  · YiffCo  · Yiffstar  · yiff.party  · Yiffy.net (2019: redirect to furry.ink)  · Yiffy.Tk · Yiffy Flash  · Yiffy International (2019: redirect to furry.ink)  · YNA

Retrieved from "https://en.wikifur.com/w/index.php?title=Fur_Affinity&oldid=431499"