Fur Affinity

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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://wiki.furaffinity.net/
  • LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/furaffinity/
  • IRC: #furaffinity on FurNet
  • Steam: Fur Affinity Gamers on the Steam Network
• Administrators:
  • Owners: The Dragoneer
  • Site Founder: Alkora
  • Lead Admins: Damaratus, The Dragoneer
  • Admins: Ahkahna, Bijoux, Fox Amoore, Glaide, Kyoujin and Wicht
  • Coders: Eevee, Net-cat, Tsawolf, yak
  • Server Administrator: Gushi
• Ran from/to:
  • 16 January 2005 - 1 August 2005 (staff dispute & coding/server problems)
  • 10 December 2005 - Present

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

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. 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!

Main article: FA: United

In August 2007, Fur Affinity held its own furry convention titled Fur Affinity: United! (commonly abbreviated as FA:U) at the Ramada Newark Airport International in Newark, New Jersey. The convention drew 310 attendees, with 25 fursuiters participating in the fursuit parade. The convention was a success and a hit among con goers, so much that another one followed that next year on August 1-3 2008, meeting with an equal amount of success. Although no offical announcements have been made regarding of a future FA:U, Dragoneer (among others) has confirmed that a FA:U 2009 is presently in the works.

It should be noted that the convention did not come without a flaw:

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.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, the Fur Affinity mainsite was taken offline again due to a "server hardware fault", as explained by Dragoneer on the FA Site Discussion forum, to be replaced by an image of Fender angrily stomping his computer followed by a notice about the failure and a link to that forum thread.

By July 7th, Fur Affinity's members had donated about $16,000-$18,000 within 5 days (since July 2nd) to solve the issue.

Also on July 7th, Dragoneer posted on the FA forums that a new server, an HP ProLiant quad-core Opteron code-named Trogdor had been ordered. On July 14th, the order for Trogdor was canceled due to confirmed issues with the vendor. The replacement for Trogdor was a Dell PowerEdge 2970.

The hardware ordered since July 7th:

• Data Server - Dell Poweredge 2970 2U Server, 32GB RAM
• Storage Array - 14 1TB hard drives
• DB Server Upgrades - 24GB additional RAM
• Web Server - Sun Fire x4150 1U Server, 4GB RAM

Fur Affinity resumed operation at 11:30pm EST on August 5th, 2008 in read-only mode, and by 9:20am EST on August 6th the site was fully stable again with all options and features prior to the outage. Submissions, comments, and journals posted to the site before the outage were not lost.

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), 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.

Project Ferrox

The current software for Fur Affinity's servers is based upon the free and open source Ferrox content management system.

See also: Ferrox (software)

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.

Controversies

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.

2008 Thanksgiving banner

Rednef and Fender's Thanksgiving banner

The November 2008 Thanksgiving banner featured food stuffed pictures of Rednef and Fender after a turkey meal. Some FA users complained about the nature of the image as being "tastless", "disgusting", a "fucking fetish", "shit", etc...

Counter arguments against this initial argument, such as "there are fat people in real life", "fat isnt neccessarily a fetish", "eating lots is kinda connected with this time of year", "it's just up for a day anyway," had no effect in dissuading the initial users, so after almost a dozen threads with neither the "for" nor "against" sides of the disagreement demonstrating any ability to come to an acceptable decision over the image, FA administrators replaced the image with the initial November Fall themed banner to stem the bad blood running though the archives and forum.

By late Thanksgiving day, The banner was replaced with plain text reading "FurAffinity.net"; however new threads appeared complaining about the removal of the banner and, a few hours afterwards, it was reinstated and went on to serve its term the rest of the day. After which the November banner was put back in use.

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 failure of its onboard Ethernet chip and will be re-purposed once its new motherboard is installed.
• 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 new data server, is a Dell Poweredge 2970 2U Server with 32GB RAM.
• Novastorm, the web front end server, is a Sun Fire X4150 with dual quad-core 2.5Ghz Xeon 5420 processors, 4GB of RAM and 2x 146GB 15K RPM drives in RAID 1.

External links

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