Fur Affinity
{{LinkingSupporter}} is to be used on authorized pages only
|
The use of time in this article lacks definition. Dates should be used instead of words like "today" and "currently". For specifics, check the edit history and talk page. Consult the Furry Book of Style for editing help. |
| Fur Affinity | |
|---|---|
 Fender, drawn by Mutley James | |
| Author(s) | Owners: The Dragoneer |
| Website | http://www.furaffinity.net/
|
| Launch date | 16 January 2005 - 1 August 2005 (staff dispute & coding/server problems)
|
| End date | Ongoing |
| Genre | Multimedia archive |
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.[citation needed]
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.
Contents
History
- Main article: 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.
Since then, it has suffered a few outages, but always managed to recover.
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 (now Wyndham Garden Hotel Newark Airport) 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.[1]
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[2]), 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. It has since been reimplemented on February 2009.
Fur Affinity's search engine was "temporarily disabled" in mid-2006 due to it taking up too many resources.[3] A faux search feature was implemented for April Fool's Day 2007, much to the chagrin of some users.[4] Search was reimplemented on February 5, 2009; it was initially labelled as "That Thing You Want" and randomly included rickrolls.[5]
Project Ferrox
- Main article: Ferrox (software)
The FA development team are working on a new backend system called Ferrox which, in addition to being used for the next major revision of Fur Affinity, will be made available as FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for other sites to use.
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, or "Fender" spelled backwards, 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
- Main article: History of Fur Affinity#Controversies
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. It later reached its 2,000,000th submission on February 15th, 2009.
- On average, Fur Affinity receives approximately 2,500 submissions a day. Thats about 104.2 submissions every hour, and 1.6 submissions every minute.
Hardware
There are currently four servers held by Fur Affinity:
- 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 RPM hard drives.
- Neo Bahamut, a data storage server, is a dual core 2.0GHz Opteron 1212 with 2GB DDR2-667 RAM. Storage consists of 4x 1TB hard drives.
- Trogdor, the new data server, is a Dell Poweredge 2970 2U Server with 32GB RAM. Storage consists of 6x 1TB hard drives.
- Novastorm, the web front end server, is a Sun Fire X4150 with dual quad-core 2.5Ghz Xeon 5420 processors and 4GB of RAM. Storage consists of 2x 146GB 15K RPM hard drives.
Retired Hardware
- Gecko, 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 currently retired from Fur Affinity, though it 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.
References
- ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/showthread.php?t=26880 Thread by D'hll'k on the FA forums with a response from Dragoneer himself
- ↑ Fur Affinity FAQ
- ↑ Alkora. Admin mode on june 5th 2006, Fur Affinity Forums, June 5, 2006, accessed March 18, 2009.
- ↑ Search is up!, Fur Affinity Forums, April 1, 2007, accessed March 18, 2009.
- ↑ Dragoneer. SEARCH, Fur Affinity journal, February 5, 2009
External links
- statistics of #furaffinity on FurNet IRC network on irc.netsplit.de
