History of Fur Affinity

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.

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.