Fur Affinity
| 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 |
| Rating(s) |  |
Fur Affinity, also known as FA, is the furry fandom's largest online community, focusing on the promotion of art, music and stories.
The site was created in 2005 by Alkora as an alternative to various art community sites such as SheezyArt and deviantART, distinguished by allowing artistic freedom of expression regardless of content rating. It is led by The Dragoneer.
Contents
History
- Main article: History of Fur Affinity
Fur Affinity was launched on 16 January 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, most notably a month-long downtime over July 2008, but always managed to recover. In 2011, Fur Affinity annouced it would be coming out with a new major version in connection to FA: United 4.[1]
Fur Affinity: United!
- Main article: FA: United
In August 2007, Fur Affinity held its own furry convention, Fur Affinity: United! (or FA:U) in Newark, New Jersey. The convention was a success, drawing 310 attendees and 25 fursuiters in the parade, and was followed by another in 2008, drawing 381 attendees. In February 2009, Dragoneer announced FA: United 3 "Games United" for 28-30 May 2010.[2] No event was scheduled for 2009 due to the economic downturn.
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[3]), 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). Keywords and tags can be added to works, though a feature that allowed blocking based on tags was disabled due to performance issues.
Fur Affinity's search engine was "temporarily disabled" in mid-2006 due to it taking up too many resources.[4] A faux search feature was implemented for April Fool's Day 2007, much to the chagrin of some users.[5] Search was reimplemented on 5 February 2009; it was initially labelled "That Thing You Want" and randomly included rickrolls.[6]
Project Ferrox
- Main article: Ferrox (software)
The FA development team was working on a new backend system called Ferrox which was to be used for the next major revision of Fur Affinity, and was to be made available as FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for other sites to use. As of late 2009, development of Ferrox has stalled, with the last change to the code being made on September 7, 2009. FurAffinity has since then decided to upgrade the UI of the existing code instead.
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, commonly referring to himself as a 'ferrox'.
On April Fool's Day 2007, Fender was depicted in the site's banner as a busty female dragon, still wearing the trademark blue tie. This dragon was made a separate character from Fender and an official mascot of the site in May 2007, and named Rednef, or "Fender" spelled backwards.
Fender was displayed as a three-toed sloth for April Fools' Day 2008. So far this sloth form has yet to become an official character.
Controversies
- Main article: History of Fur Affinity#Controversies
Facts
Statistics
- The monthly hosting bill for FurAffinity is just under $1,700 [7]. This includes a full equipment rack, bandwidth, and IP addresses.
- In less than a year since the site's re-launch, Fur Affinity gained over 45,000 users and over 300,000 submissions. [citation needed]
- 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.[citation needed]
- Alexa has previously ranked Fur Affinity in the top 4,000 sites on the web in 1 November 2007, showing greater traffic than the VCL for most of the previous year. The trend continued through 2008 and 2009. Fur Affinity has ranked as high as 3,475 on individual days, and close to 2,000 in the USA. In October 2010, Fur Affinity's rank fell to 7681.
- Fur Affinity got approximately 2.5 million page hits per day as of mid-January 2007.[citation needed]
- Fur Affinity reached its 1,000,000th submission on 11 January 2008. It later reached its 2,000,000th submission on 15 February 2009, and its 3,000,000th submission in November 2009.
- On average, Fur Affinity receives approximately 4,600 submissions a day. [citation needed]
- As estimated by a week's worth of statistical data gathered in mid-November 2009, FA is serving an average of 50 page requests/second, from registered and guest users alike. [citation needed]
- Fur Affinity receives several million pageviews every day, apparently peaking on September 28th, 2010, at 5.2 million pageviews.
Hardware
As of September 2010, Fur Affinity runs on the following servers:
- Tiamat is a twin dual-core 2.0Ghz Opteron 2212 with 32GB DDR2-533 RAM. The server was used as the search server until August 31st, 2010 when it was discovered it had suffered a equipment failure[8] It is unclear if Tiamat was ever brought back online or if Search was moved to another server. Storage consists of 4x 74GB 10K RPM hard drives in RAID10.
- Neo Bahamut, FA's backup server, is a dual-core 2.0GHz Opteron with 2GB DDR2-667 RAM. Storage consists of 4x 1TB hard drives in RAID5. Nightly backups for both data and DB.
- Trogdor, FA's data server, is a Dell Poweredge 2970 2U Server manufactured by Wikipedia:Dell, Inc. with 32GB RAM. Storage consists of 6x 1TB hard drives - 4x in a RAID10 array, 1x RAID hotspare and 1x local backups.
- Novastorm, FA's database server, is a Sun Fire X4150 manufactured by Wikipedia:Sun Microsystems with twin quad-core 2.5Ghz Xeon 5420 processors and 64GB of RAM (as of March 2010).[9] Storage consists of 2x 74GB 15K RPM hard drives in RAID1 and 6x146GB 15K RPM hard drives in RAID10.
- Figment, an application server, is dual quad-core 2.33Ghz Xeon 5345 with 32GB of RAM and 4x 1TB of storage. Figment was purchased with the intent of offering hosting[10] on it "sometime in April... or May, or maybe August" of 2010[11] and is currently serving advertisments[12]. Server was named by Sciggles.[13]
- Shivan is a twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. This server is currently unused. The server was named by FA donator TlaiLaxu.
- Sparkz is a twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. This server is currently running traffic data graphing software. The server was named by FA donator Dax.
- Tonberry is a twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. This server is currently unused. The server was named by FA donator YiffyHusky.
- Lapse is a twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. This server is currently unused. Server is awaiting an official designation.
Fur Affinity also runs a Cisco 7301 router dubbed "Routezilla" as well as a 48-port Cisco Catalyst 3560 switch known as "Switchthulu". This is the second Switchthulu, the original having been a 24-port Cisco 3750.
Retired
- 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 still used to host Team Fortress 2 servers for the Furry Pound and Left 4 Dead servers for the Fur Affinity Steam Gamers group.
Confirmed Future Features
| Feature | Official Mentions | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-Demand Printing | December 2005 November 2009 |
Not Implemented | |
| Content Filtering | November 2006 | Not Implemented | Proposed for Ferrox. |
| Gallery Folders | November 2006 August 2010 January 2011 |
Not Implemented | Proposed for Ferrox. |
| New UI | April 2007 May 2010 January 2011 |
In Development | Was in development at the same time as Ferrox. |
| Opossums (pss.ms) URL Shortener | August 2010 | Not Implemented | |
| Web Hosting | November 2009 March 2010 [1] |
Not Implemented | |
| Supporter Ribbons | November 2010 | Not Implemented | |
| Note/Inbox Search | September 2010 | Not Implemented | |
| Artist List and Reviews "Commission Ratings" |
June 2006 January 2011 |
Not Implemented | |
| Improved Commenting | January 2011 | In Development |
References
- ↑ Fur Affinity Turns 6! - Dragoneer, Fur Affinity forum post (16 January 2011)
- ↑ FAU3 Announcement - Dragoneer, Fur Affinity journal (9 February 2009)
- ↑ Fur Affinity FAQ
- ↑ Admin mode on june 5th 2006 - Alkora, Fur Affinity forums (5 June 2006)
- ↑ Search is up! - Fur Affinity Forums (1 April 2007)
- ↑ SEARCH - Dragoneer, Fur Affinity journal (5 February 2009)
- ↑ http://twitpic.com/2g8t5x - TwitPic Posted on August 19, 2010 by Dragoneer
- ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/22617961790 - FA Twitter
- ↑ Novastorm upgrade tweet - Dragoneer's twitter (23 March 2010)
- ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10203450025 - FA Twitter - March 8, 2010
- ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10942579229 - FA Twitter - March 23 2010
- ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10936829317 - FA Twitter
- ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10585322442 - FA Twitter
See also
External links
- #furaffinity statistics on irc.netsplit.de
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