Fur Affinity

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Fur Affinity (commonly FurAffinity) is one of the furry fandom's largest communities, and the second largest furry-specific art gallery after the VCL. It was created as an alternative to art community sites such as SheezyArt and deviantART, promoting itself as allowing people from the furry/anthro fandom to upload art, music and stories regardless of rating.

• Addresses:
  • Website: http://www.furaffinity.net/
  • Forums: http://www.furaffinityforums.net/
  • Wiki: http://www.wikiffinity.net/
  • LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/furaffinity/
  • IRC: #furaffinity on FurNet
• Ran from/to:
  • February 2005 - 1 August 2005 (coding/server problems)
  • 10 December 2005 - present

Features

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, "cub" related pornography and images whose intent are to slander or discredit others), 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, and users can browse or block the display of art based on these tags.

Administrators

• Admin Team Lead: The Dragoneer
• Admins: Bijoux, Damaratus, Glaide, Pinkuh, Silver R. Wolfe and Wicht
• Coder Team Lead: Jheryn Lightfoot (Alkora)
• Coders: Ice-Wolf, Crypto and yak
• Server Administrator: Gushi

See also: Fur Affinity staff page

History

Fur Affinity was launched at the beginning of January 2005 as an alternative to SheezyArt. 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.

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.

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. Thanks to the community, Fur Affinity was able to build a stronger, faster server than the site originally used for operation.

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.

There are currently two servers in use by Fur Affinity. The primary server, Gecko, is a dual processor Intel Xeon 3.0Ghz system with 4GB of RAM, currently housed in a Weehawken, New Jersey Level 3 collocation facility. The second server, Phoenix Down, is an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ with 1GB of RAM and is used to store an identical 1:1 copy of the website in the event of hardware failure. Phoenix Down is located at an office at the foothills of Hawk Mountain, near Allentown, PA.

Fur Affinity is assisting in the planning of a convention known as United!, tentatively scheduled for August 2007.

Pornographic cub art

August 2006 saw the restart of an internal administrative debate over the presence of pornographic underage furry artwork (or "cub art"). 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. 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. 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.

Fender

Fender, drawn by Mutley James

Fender is the Fur Affinity mascot. He was primarily created by artist K-9 (one of the people behind the comic Circles,) based upon a character concept by Preyfar. The site currently displays a version of Fender (which can be found on the page header) as drawn by various guest artists to reflect the monthly theme of the site.

Half fox and half ferret, Fender was born in an attempt to give the site a unique figurehead to whom people could turn for questions and answers regarding the site. This was done in an attempt to dissuade grandstanding by admins using the site as a pedestal for their own popularity.

Fender is most often mistaken as being a raccoon.

On April 1st, 2007, the FA header showed an anthro Dragon that bore a resemblance to fender in terms of coloration, markings, and attire. It is widely believed that this is an April Fool's joke.

Facts

• 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 20.1Mbit.
• Alexa ranked Fur Affinity in the top 25,000 sites on the web as of 20 August 2006, showing equal or greater traffic than the VCL for the prior month. Fur Affinity ranked as high as 15,000 on individual days, but the total ranking has suffered due to intermittent downtime.
• Account import strings began and ended with !pie!
• Fur Affinity gets approximately 800,000 page hits per day (estimated on 10/01/2006).

External links

• Fur Affinity user Frappr map