Difference between revisions of "Fur Affinity"

Revision as of 00:43, 9 July 2008

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

The site was created by Alkora as an alternative to various art community sites such as SheezyArt and deviantART, promoting itself by allowing artistic freedom of expression regardless of content rating.

• Addresses:
  • Website: http://www.furaffinity.net/
  • Forums: http://forums.furaffinity.net/
  • Wiki: http://www.wikiffinity.net/
  • LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/furaffinity/
  • IRC: #furaffinity on FurNet
  • Frapper: http://www.frappr.com/furaffinity
  • Second Life: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Critter_Valley/158/130/28
• Administrators:
  • Owners: The Dragoneer
  • Site Founder: Alkora
  • Lead Admins: Damaratus, The Dragoneer
  • Admins: Ahkahna, Bijoux, Dave Hyena, Fox Amoore, Glaide, Kyoujin, Silverwolfe and Wicht
  • Coders: Eevee, Net-cat, Tsawolf, yak
  • Server Administrator: Gushi
• Ran from/to:
  • January 2005 - 1 August 2005 (coding/server problems)
  • 10 December 2005 - 1 July 2008 ("server hardware fault")^[1]

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

Launch

Fur Affinity was launched on January 16, 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.^[2][3] During that time period, Sheezy abruptly changed policies to both remove adult art and take a stronger stance against users and their uploads. Warnings were supposedly issued from the site's service provider, advising Sheezy Art that they were not permitted to host adult content on their site.

Much of Sheezy's community was abandoned after the rules change took effect. This migration left many with few alternatives. Many of those burned by SheezyArt went on to sites such as Fur Affinity and y!Gallery; when the latter decided to ban anthro art in May 2006, Fur Affinity gained further traffic.

Server problems of 2005

Fur Affinity had suffered from major security holes and a hacking in during Summer of 2005. The site was shut down on 1 August 2005 due to a disagreement between lead coder Jheryn and host provider Arcturus, the primary administrators of the site. At that time Fur Affinity had 12,174 user accounts and nearly 100,000 submissions. Arcturus and supporters went on to found ArtPlz.

Thanks to the community, Fur Affinity was able to build a stronger, faster server than the site originally used for operation. Over the course of 2005, Fur Affinity was able to raise $1,500 in donations towards the purchase of new hardware for its primary server; a server which would, unfortunately, not realize itself until the middle of 2006.

Fur Affinity returned to operation in December 2005 with a solid backbone and more efficient coding, although full operational status would not be reached until December 10 due to a defect in the ASUS motherboard which powered the server. During Fur Affinity's official re-opening on December 10th, over 10,000 submissions for music, art and writing were submitted to the site during its initial 12 hours. These submissions included imported art from returning users and pieces not previously posted.

Fur Affinity: United!

In August 2007, FA held its own furry convention titled Fur Affinity: United!. The convention was such a success another one is planned for August 2008 (see the main article FA: United! for more information.)

2007 breach

On August 11 2007, The Dragoneer's admin account was compromised at FA: United‎ when he used the hotel's unencrypted Wi-Fi connection to access it.^[4][5]The first sign of trouble was a note left on the front page that announced the following:

Administrator notice: We're sorry, our vaginas are currently full of sand. We're makin' pearls here, folks! :D! FA:U rocks. We all got handjobs from Glaide and Damaratus. -- hacked by jheryn

Assurances were made that the password database had not been compromised, and the main site came back online 48 hours later. The FA forums were not affected by this breach.

2008 hardware fault

On July 1, 2008, Fur Affinity went completely offline again. Staff member Dragoneer explained on the site's forum that a "server hardware fault" was to blame.^[1] All of FA's pages, as of this announcement, show an angry Fender stomping his computer in sheer anger, followed by a notice about the failure and a link to the forum thread.

As of July 7th 2008, Fur Affinity's members had donated about $16,000-$18,000 within 5 days (since July 2nd) to solve the issue^[6][7], and donations are still coming in.

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 and images whose intent are to slander or discredit others^[8]), 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). In addition, a tagging system is in use, but in the current version of the website software it doesn't have any effect on the site functionality, being used only as a visual addition to the submission page. Previously, users could browse and block the display of art based on these tags, but much like the search feature it was disabled due to performance issues, and haven't been brought back since.

Fur Affinity used to have a search feature that allowed users to search for specific art on the site, but this feature became disabled in mid-2006, listed as 'temporarily disabled', and a faux search feature was temporarily implemented on April Fool's Day, much to the chagrin of some users. No news regrading to when (and if) the search feature will come back has been posted.

Pornographic cub art

August 2006 saw the restart of an internal administrative debate over the presence of pornographic underage furry artwork (or "cub art").^[9] Such art was forbidden by the site's Terms of Service, which specified that "depictions of sexually immature characters in any sexual situation are not permitted on Fur Affinity", but bans for this rule were not uniformly enforced. As with previous discussions, administrators could not come to an agreement on whether or not to modify site policy.^[10] Over the following months the issue developed into a public debate, with forum polls and discussion suggesting that the site's members were divided on the topic.

On November 5, it was announced that such work would be allowed, with the requirement of mandatory tagging. The main reasons given for this decision were that no actual minors were harmed during the artwork's creation, and that depictions of many other illegal activities, such as rape, murder, and drug use, were permitted. Conversely, work that depicted human children, including anime characters, in sexual situations was forbidden.^[11] Some artists had threatened to leave the site if it was not forbidden, and some of these did so.

Ferrox code update

As of June 21, 2006 the site announced an impending upgrade to the site. FA opted to shed their previous naming convention (v1, v2 and v3) and go by codename for the major upgrade, known as "Ferrox". The code reached an estimated 60% completion before being pushed back to an early Winter/Spring 2007 release in effort to follow new quality and coding standards.

The effective release date is "when it's ready". Ferrox is not going to be released until the coding team feels it has undergone sufficient testing and bug hunting.

Features announced as introduced or improved upon are:

• A new user interface supporting better web programming standards, user-requested features and more streamlined navigation for ease-of-use
• Revised submission interfaces for art, music and stories to allow for faster, more accurate uploads and provide unique features for each artistic area
• Re-written server back-end to better support scalability and future upgrades
• Time-limited editable user comments
• Flood detection to prevent spam and abuse
• Enhanced site security focusing on account creation and content delivery
• A flexible keyword-based search system
• Communities, allowing users to post art directly to themed submission groups
• Community-sponsored error messages inspired by VCL
• Monthly themes and mini-contests where users can obtain ranks and profile enhancements
• Better integrated help and site information.

Mascots

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.

A second mascot, Rednef, a female dragon, was announced in May 2007. She has been shown in the Fur Affinity header on April 1, 2007.

Fender was displayed as a three-toed sloth for April Fools' Day 2008.

Facts

Statistics

• In less than a year since the site's re-launch, Fur Affinity gained over 45,000 users and over 300,000 submissions.
• The site transfers a daily average of nearly 80 GB of data and well over 10,000,000 individual files. The site's peak bandwidth record stands at 33.2Mbit.
• Alexa ranked Fur Affinity in the top 4,000 sites on the web as of 1 November 2007, showing greater traffic than the VCL for most of previous year. Fur Affinity has ranked as high as 3,475 on individual days.
• Account import strings began and ended with !pie!
• Fur Affinity gets approximately 2.5 million page hits per day (estimated on 01/11/2007).
• Fur Affinity reached its 1,000,000th submission on January 11th, 2008.

The hardware

There are currently six servers held by Fur Affinity:

• Gecko, the original FA server, is a dual 3.0Ghz Nocona Xeon system with 4GB of RAM and 2X 250GB drives configured in RAID 1. This server is not use and is currently being re-purposed.
• Tiamat, the DB backend server, is a twin dual core 2.0Ghz Opteron 2212 with 8GB DDR2-533 RAM. Storage consists of 4x 74GB 10k SATA WD740ADFD hard drives on a 3ware 9650SE-4LPML hardware raid card, running in RAID10 configuration.
• Bahamut, a data storage server, is a dual core 2.0GHz Opteron 1212 with 2GB DDR2-667 RAM. Storage consists of 4x 500GB Seagate Barracuda ES drives on a 3ware 9650SE-4LPML RAID controller, configured in RAID5+1. Bahamut is currently offline due to an unknown hardware problem.
• Ghostlight, the wiki and forums server, is a virtual server held at a separate data center to ensure up-time even when primary site may be down.
• Trogdor, the primary data storage server, is an HP ProLiant DL 185GS with a single quad-core 1.8Ghz Opteron 2346HE with 16GB DDR2-667 RAM with a massive 12x 1TB RAID array in RAID 10 configuration.
• "Sun Fire", the web front end server, is a Sun X4150 with dual quad-core 2.5Ghz Xeon 5420 processors, 4GB of RAM and 2x 146GB 15K RPM drives in RAID 1. This server does not yet have an official designation.

References

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} "Server Hardware Fault" (2008, July 1). Fur Affinity Forum.
2. ↑ Furaffinity.org information - launch of forum on Furaffinity.net. Posted on SheezyArt, 16 January 2005.
3. ↑ Furaffinity - note re. transfer of mainsite and 400+ users. Posted on SheezyArt, 21 January 2005.
4. ↑ http://www.furaffinityforums.net/showthread.php?tid=11488 Thread by Preyfar on the FA forums about the August 2007 breach
5. ↑ http://www.furaffinityforums.net/showthread.php?tid=11484&pid=195037#pid195037 Post by Preyfar on the FA forums with a more elaborate account of the 2007 breach
6. ↑ FA Forums: Server Hardware Fault, page 120, post #1786 by Artie reads "$10,477.15 via Amazon, plus over $6,000 via PayPal. So, over $16,477.15 total so far." on July 6th 2008, 5:35PM EST
7. ↑ FA Forums: Public Donation and Expenditures Log, Please., page 1, post #15 by Seppel (based on an official file published by Dragoneer here) reads "I checked the budget Dragoneer posted. $18,000 is more than twice FA has ever had. [...] $18,000 will go far. Very far." on July 7th 2008, 9:03AM EST
8. ↑ Fur Affinity FAQ
9. ↑ "DA account reactivated -- FA Truths revealed". Posted by Myr on November 6, 2006 and deleted several days after.
10. ↑ Comment by The Dragoneer on previous attempts to solve the cub debate. Posted on November 6, 2006.
11. ↑ "FA Policy Notice - "Cub" Art". Posted by The Dragoneer on November 5, 2006.

External links

• statistics of #furaffinity on FurNet IRC network on irc.netsplit.de