History of Fur Affinity

The following is a history of Fur Affinity and its properties.

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 SheezyArt 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 to refocus on its core topic, Fur Affinity gained further traffic.

Server problems of 2005

Fur Affinity suffered from major security holes and hacking during Summer 2005. The site was shut down on 1 August 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 his 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 raised $1,500 in donations towards the purchase of a new primary server, though it did not go online until the middle of 2006.

Fur Affinity returned to operation in December 2005 with a solid backbone and more efficient coding, though full operational status was not reached until December 10 due to a defect in the motherboard which powered the server. Over 10,000 submissions were made in the first 12 hours subsequent to Fur Affinity's official re-opening, including both 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 (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.

The convention did not come without a flaw:

2007 breach

On 11 August 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.

2008 hardware fault

On 1 July 2008, the main site of Fur Affinity was taken offline again due to a "server hardware fault", 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 7 July, Fur Affinity's members had donated $16,000-$18,000 to solve the issue, and Dragoneer posted on the FA forums that a new server, an HP ProLiant quad-core Opteron code-named Trogdor had been ordered.

On July 14, the order for Trogdor was canceled due to confirmed issues with the vendor. The final hardware order was:

• 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 on 5 August 2008 at 11:30pm EST in read-only mode. The site was stable again with all options and features prior to the outage by 9:20am EST the next day. Since the prolonged outage, admins have gone out of their way to assure users that subsequent outages wouldn't be as bad or as lengthy as "the August incident", or "Augustgate".

July 2009 outage and IRC bans

On 29 July 2009, Fur Affinity suffered a temporary service outage (later found to be due to a power failure caused by lightning). During the confusion, FA forum moderator Carenath accused members of the FurNet IRC channel #hackfurs of causing the outage, resulting in multiple people residing in both #furaffinity and #hackfurs being banned. FA admin Pinkuh is believed to have performed the bans, due to the request notice on Meredith's kick message. Despite an admission that the accusation was mere speculation, Pinkuh did not revoke the bans until the following day. Carenath reported apologized for his remarks later.

Some who questioned the decision were temporarily banned from FurNet by network administrator Snowpony, who cited "trolling and previous conduct." These bans were initially made without a reason, a violation of the FurNet code of conduct; those questioning them also received threats of being banned.

November/December 2009 outage

Fur Affinity experienced an outage starting on 30 November 2009, when the site's ISP experienced technical difficulties due to broken fiber optic cables. By 2 December, the ISP still hadn't responded to FA staff email. The site's Twitter channel noted that staff were to visit the co-location facility later that day to investigate the issue. They also announced tentative plans to switch to a new facility, maybe even in Canada, but eventually settled on a new host offering 25% more bandwidth that is still in Virginia. Fur Affinity has since came back online with the forums first on Tuesday, December 8 and the rest of the site returned to full use at around 12:30 AM EST, Wednesday, December 9.

2010 features

In March 2010, DeviantART-like profile ID images, in which one could post an image as a persistent identification badge (often containing basic information such as a name, date of birth, and likes/dislikes), were enabled for Fur Affinity user profile pages.

On April 17, the embedding of YouTube and other external Adobe Flash-based videos within journal posts was enabled. Embeds of videos are visible within post pages but are rendered as their respective URL text links when one sees the most recent journal post in the profile page.

2010 December Hack

On the 16th gawker.com was hacked and passwords leaked. FA administrators who had used the same user and password between FA and Gawker then had their accounts compromised on the 17th. When this was discovered administrators closed off FA to prevent damage. After resuming operations the site, more accounts were compromised. Shortly thereafter all the admins and staff had their abilities pulled because they wanted to prevent any further damage. Multiple accounts were vandalized and their galleries deleted, and notes zipped and distributed. When this news was discovered users were asked to permanently delete all sensitive information on their FA account and change their password. The hacker was the brother of a victim of rape at a furcon, the reason for the hack was that dragoneer unintentionally helped the rapist get away with it. Currently fa is getting DDOS by lulz.net and plan on continuing the attack so long as dragoneer is the site owner.

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. Non-photorealistic art depicting minors is no longer forbidden (current policy on this point is merely that submissions "shall not violate the law of the United States of America, be it State or Federal.") Some artists had threatened to leave the site if it was not forbidden, and some of these did so.

On November 24th 2010, Dragoneer officially changed site policy to: "FA does not permit content containing minors involved in sexual situations. This applies to humans (Loli, Shota) or otherwise human-like characters (i.e. Cub) who are, without question, under the general legal age (18). ", due to AlertPay (their funding) dropping them, citing mature cub art as the reason. Artists were given 21 days to clean their galleries, and cub artists were given protection from harassment. This caused an uproar within the cub community, with several artists nuking their galleries, and migrating to Sofurry or Inkbunny (although several users and artists alike see the cub porn removal as a positive aspect for FA, some of whom even praised Dragoneer for the decision). It even escalated to the point where Dragoneer and other admins received death threats from disgruntled artists.

2008 Thanksgiving banner

Rednef and Fender's Thanksgiving banner

The November 2008 Thanksgiving banner featured pictures of community mascots Rednef and Fender depicted as immensely obese after a turkey meal, to the point of resembling inflation art. Some FA users complained about the nature of the image as being "tasteless", "disgusting", a "fucking fetish", "shit", etc..., often referencing the fact that the artist's gallery was full of fat fetish pictures.

Counter-arguments against this initial argument, such as "there are fat people in real life", "fat isn't necessarily 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.

In contrast, the Thanksgiving 2009 banner was a relatively harmless image of a turkey made to look like Fender being placed into an oven. This banner was still complained about, with users going so far as to claim it depicted the cooking or vore fetishes, though it is unclear how many of them were genuine complaints and how many were simply jokingly referring to the massive amount of complaints resulting from the 2008 banner.

Chewfox's appearance on Tyra Banks

Main article: The Tyra Banks Show and Chew Fox

April Fools Day

On April Fools Day 2007, the FA banner depicted site mascot Fender as a busty female dragon, with similar colourations to the original ferrox form and wearing his signature blue tie. The Fender account's avatar displayed the dragoness as well. Fender's appearance returned to normal after about a week, but in May 2007, it was announced that the female dragon form would become a separate character from Fender, and a second mascot for Fur Affinity, named Rednef, "Fender" backwards. Since then, Rednef has appeared on many of the monthly and holiday-based banners, either alone or with Fender.

For April Fools Day 2009, the homepage of Fur Affinity was snowing llamas. In addition to this, two spoof additions joined the randomly displayed mini-advertisements, which featured Rick Astley and Barack Obama. They linked to a Rickroll and the Barack Roll respectively. The banners were made by Hiro Judgement and Alexander Grey, although they were not credited for the work.

References

view · talk · edit Fur Affinity
Founder	Alkora
Owner	Dragoneer
Administrators	Category:Fur Affinity administrators
Topics	History · FA: United · Ferrox
Mascots	Fender · Rednef
See also	FA Rank · List of banners