History of Fur Affinity

From WikiFur, the furry encyclopedia.
Revision as of 17:52, 19 February 2013 by Spirou (Talk | contribs)

Jump to: navigation, search
Broom icon.png This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to WikiFur style and standards.
For specifics, check the edit history and talk page. Consult the Furry Book of Style for editing help.
Broom icon.png This article needs to be wikified (formatted according to the Furry Book of Style).
For specifics, check the edit history and talk page. Consult the Furry Book of Style for editing help.
Question book.png This article does not cite its references or sources. You can help WikiFur by adding references.
For specifics, check the edit history and talk page. Consult the Furry Book of Style for editing help.

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.[1][2] 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 (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.

April Fools Day (2007)

On April Fools' Day 2007, the FA banner depicted site mascot Fender as a busty female dragon, with similar coloration's 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.

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:

Server hack (2007)

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.[citation needed]

The first sign of trouble was a note left on the front page that announced the following:

   
History of Fur Affinity
 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
   
History of Fur Affinity

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.

Server problems (2008)

On 1 July 2008, the main site of Fur Affinity was taken offline again due to a "server hardware fault",[3] 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,[4][5] and Dragoneer posted on the FA forums that a new server, a 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". [6]

Server problems (July 2009)/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[7]). 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.[8] 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,[9] 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.[10]

Server problems (November/December 2009)

Fur Affinity experienced an outage starting on 30 November 2009, when the site's ISP experienced technical difficulties due to broken fiber optic cables.[11] 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,[12] but eventually settled on a new host offering 25% more bandwidth that is still in Virginia.[13] Fur Affinity came back online with the forums first on Tuesday, December 8 [14] and the rest of the site returned to full use at around 12:30 AM EST, Wednesday, December 9. [15][16]

Server enhancements (2010)

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.

In October 2010, a feature was introduced, which allows the owner of a submission or journal to hide a comment given in that submission, which is also possible for the owner of the comment. In addition, administrators can hide and unhide every comment posted to any submission sitewide.

Server hack (2010)

On December 17th a hacker was able to use a cross-site scripting (XSS) exploit[17] that existed in the trouble ticket system to take control of an administrator account. The site was taken offline while this was fixed, and resumed normal operations a few hours later. The next day, an administrator's personal email account was compromised, allowing the hacker to request a password reset on FurAffinity. This time, the site was not taken offline, instead the administrators all had their admin permissions pulled, but not before the hacker was able to wipe a number of user's galleries and download the private notes of several high-profile users. The forums were also accessed during this time and had the private Admin boards exposed to the public. FurAffinity has reported a total of 41 accounts were accessed. Dragoneer has since then apologized to those who's accounts were accessed and has offered them a free sponsorship-level membership to FA: United.

It should be noted that former FA developer Eevee had mentioned the possibility that a XSS exploit existed in the trouble ticket system a few months earlier, after Eevee had demonstrated that the hide comment feature was insecure and would allow anyone to hide any comment. Critics say that FurAffinity was well aware that the site code was vulnerable to attacks like the initial XSS exploits for years but have been slow to fix it.

Furocity merger

In July 2011 Dragoneer announced that Furocity and FurAffinity would be "Joining forces"[18], with many members of Furocity's staff joining FurAffinity. Over a month later, 7 members of Furocity's staff were officially brought on board[19] without warning the existing staff[20], some of whom were removed from their administrator positions. New "departments" were created to better serve the users.

Controversy

Pornographic cub art

  • August 2006 saw the restart of an internal administrative debate over the presence of pornographic underage furry artwork (or "cub art").[21] 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.[22] 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.[23] 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.[citation needed]
  • On November 24th 2010, Dragoneer officially changed site policy to:
   
History of Fur Affinity
 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)
   
History of Fur Affinity

This was 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.[citation needed] The ban also led furry musical comedy act Drama Armada to record the song "Where Has All The Cub Porn Gone?", a parody of "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?" by Paula Cole.

Thanksgiving banner (2008)

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...[24], 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.[25]

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[citation needed] and, a few hours afterwards, it was reinstated and went on to serve its term the rest of the day.[citation needed] 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 The Tyra Banks Show

Main article: The Tyra Banks Show and Chew Fox

Former Furocity staff departure

In late October 2011, four of the Furocity administrators abruptly resigned[26], citing poor communication, "hostile admins", and a lack of leadership. Within a few weeks, Gavin Daemonshyai was the only Furocity staff member left on FA, and the "department" system was abandoned. It wasn't until four months later that Gavin was removed from the Fur Affinity staff page as site owner, although his user page indicates that he still retains his admin access.

"Aged up" guideline (2012)

Sonic "age up" guideline diagram

On February 8, 2012, it was announced by Sciggles that a new "age up" guideline was now in effect regarding Sonic characters' "cub art".[27] Sexual artwork of the characters canon image would not be allowed, as they were considered, by FA staff, as cub characters.

No restrictions would be imposed on Sonic sexual material as long as the characters were "aged up" (with a diagram provided).

It was later clarified that My Little Pony would not be covered by this rule, except for Baby Spike and the Cutie Mark Crusaders, while Tiny Toons would. No other animated shows were mentioned further on the post.

Pinkuh reiterated on FAF that this announcement was a reconfirmation of a "Sonic age up" policy posted on 2010 on the FA's forum.[28]

On September 7, 2012, administrators began banning artists of "aged-up" Sonic adult art.[citation needed]

"Exodus"

On February 16, 2013, user Qarrezel posted an opinion piece ("Exodus"),[29] on her Fur affinity account, where she expressed her frustration towards the apparent non-response of the Fur Affinity staff to deal with user Fredriksam inferred stalking behavior towards her friend and client, Tarangryph.

On it, Qarrezel presented the case that not only had Fredriksam posted Tarangryph's personal information online, contacted her to try to gain more of it, and wrote disturbing sexual material involving her persona,[citation needed] but that the FA staff actually went out of the way to "punish" her by not banning the user, but by also removing all information Tarangryph had posted about her apparent stalker.[30]

The FA staff responded to the issue in several ways:

  • Admin Qoph replied on the thread[31] that immediate action was not taken regarding Fredriksam because the original ticket was issue by a third party person (user Svedge) with no evidence, but did exchange information about it with Tarangryph, but wanted to discuss the situation with Dragoneer because of the serious nature of the possible offense. On the removal of Tarangryph's journal containing all the "evidence" against Fredriksam, Qoph responded that that was a "normal action", in compliance by FA TOS' rules.
  • Admin Cerberusnl inquired Tarangryph further about the subject on her "Leaving FA." journal, and reaffirming that her journal, classified as a "callout journal", was proper subject for deletion because of the TOS rules.[32]
  • Dragoneer responded initially to the issue via ticket response saying that:
   
History of Fur Affinity
 The admin took the right course of action in this case. I don't feel it's something to leave FA over, as if it happened on FA, it will happen on /any/ site. It's unfortunate, but a choice they have made. I'll respect that.
   
History of Fur Affinity

And that there was not enough solid evidence to ban the user "at that time."[33]

The post generated more than 1900+ responses, most of them critical to the FA staff's response (or lack of it) to the issue. A number of FA users, including Qarrezel and Tarangryph, announced that they would be leaving Fur affinity because of it. Fredriksam was eventually suspended and had his IP address blocked when some evidence of stalking behavior (creating a sock puppet account, Garageman, to continue harassing Tarangryph) was posted on FA.[34]

References

  1. ↑ Furaffinity.org information — launch of forum on Furaffinity.net. Posted on SheezyArt, 16 January 2005.
  2. ↑ FurAffinity - note re. Transfer of mainsite and 400+ users. Posted on SheezyArt, 21 January 2005.
  3. ↑ "Server Hardware Fault" (2008, July 1). Dragoneer, Fur Affinity Forum.
  4. ↑ FA Forums: Server Hardware Fault, page 120, post #1786 by Artie reads "$10,477.15 via Amazon, plus over $6,000 via PayPal. So, over $16,477.15 total so far." on July 6, 2008, 5:35PM EST
  5. ↑ FA Forums: Public Donation and Expenditures Log, Please., page 1, post #15 by Seppel (based on an official file published by Dragoneer here) reads "I checked the budget Dragoneer posted. $18,000 is more than twice FA has ever had. [...] $18,000 will go far. Very far. "(7 July 2008, 9:03AM EST)
  6. ↑ [1]
  7. ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/showpost.php?p=1105765&postcount=3
  8. ↑ 
    (Chat logs truncated to remove noise. More bans than shown were handed out, but not all shown to maintain readability.)
00:40:24   <Carenath> *points a finger at #hackfurs*
00:41:14   <Carenath> Well, put two and two together... people in that channel,
			have axes to grind against FA and if it was an outside cause..
			I'd blame them first.
00:41:39   <Carenath> Meredith: they did it before.
00:42:37   * Pi (~pi@fur-9F1E9EA1.tcct.nmt.edu) has joined #furaffinity
00:42:38   * ChanServ sets ban on *!*pi@fur-9F1E9EA1.tcct.nmt.edu
00:42:38   * ChanServ has kicked Pi from #furaffinity (User has been banned from the channel)
00:44:26   <Carenath> Meredith: Im not an FA Admin.
00:44:58   <Carenath> FAF forum mod.
00:46:00   * ChanServ has kicked Meredith from #furaffinity (Requested (Pinkatron))
00:46:02   * Meredith (~arcturus@fur-71797932.hsd1.pa.comcast.net) has joined #furaffinity
00:46:02   * ChanServ sets ban on *!*arcturus@fur-71797932.hsd1.pa.comcast.net
00:46:02   * ChanServ has kicked Meredith from #furaffinity (User has been banned from the channel)
  9. ↑ 
    23:52 -!- Snowpony [admin@alicorn.furnet.org] has joined #furaffinity
23:54 -!- Pi_ [~pi@u15354709.onlinehome-server.com] has quit [User has been banned from FurNet (Ban Evasion)]
23:56 -!- GHDA [~GHDA@pool-173-79-208-221.washdc.fios.verizon.net] has quit [User has been banned from FurNet (Trolling is bad m'kay?)]
  10. ↑ 
    01:38 < Snowpony> omiiko: for trolling and previous conduct.  That enough for you?
01:39 <+AFKobura> Snowpony apparently someone tried private message with the
      specific admin and they were turned away with a threat of being klined themselves
01:39 < Snowpony> AFKobura: and?
01:39 <+omiiko> Snowpony: I'd prefer if the Admins followed their own CoC and
      placed the ban reason in the actual *line
01:40 < Snowpony> omiiko: Sure - I'll go update the ban then.
01:44 < Snowpony> Bobbluejay: I've answered your questions - they can log back in 24 hours.
  11. ↑ Oh, and you thought your cable outages were annoying? - Net-Cat,   furaffinity (30 November 2009)
  12. ↑ 02/Dec - The Dragoneer,   furaffinity (2 December 2009)
  13. ↑ It looks like we're planning to bring the site up Monday night - The Dragoneer,   furaffinity (4 December 2009)
  14. ↑ 08/Dec - thevirtualcat,   furaffinity (8 December 2009)
  15. ↑ 09/Dec - The Dragoneer,   furaffinity (9 December 2009)
  16. ↑ Furaffinity Tweet Announcing the Site is Back - The Dragoneer - Furaffinity Twitter Page (9 December 2009)
  17. ↑ http://community.livejournal.com/furaffinity/213163.html FA Livejournal
  18. ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/103573-Fur-Affinity-Furocity-Merger-Announcement?p=2618095#post2618095
  19. ↑ https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,545.0.html
  20. ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/105754-New-Staff-Structure-and-Admins?p=2656512&viewfull=1#post2656512
  21. ↑ "DA account reactivated -- FA Truths revealed". Posted by Myr on November 6, 2006 and deleted several days after.
  22. ↑ Comment by The Dragoneer on previous attempts to solve the cub debate. Posted on November 6, 2006.
  23. ↑ "FA Policy Notice - "Cub" Art". Posted by The Dragoneer on November 5, 2006.
  24. ↑ "New Banner is tastless and disgusting," original 2008 Thanksgiving banner discussion
  25. ↑ Thread discussing the banner removal
  26. ↑ https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,560.0.html
  27. ↑ Guidelines for Mature/Adult Sonic Images (retrieved February 8, 2012)
  28. ↑ A clarification on sonic/underage (retrieved February 13, 2012)
  29. ↑ Exodus post on Qarrezel's FA account (Retrieved February 15, 2013)
  30. ↑ Leaving FA. post by Tarangryph on her FA account (Retrieved February 16, 2013)
  31. ↑ Qoph response on the Exodus journal entry on Fur Affinity (Retrieved February 16, 2013)
  32. ↑ Cerberusnl response on the Leaving FA. journal entry on Fur Affinity (Retrieved February 16, 2013)
  33. ↑ Dragoneer response on the VERY Important! This could Affect ALL FA Users journal entry on Fur Affinity (Retrieved February 16, 2013)
  34. ↑ Synwolf response on the Leaving FA. journal entry on Fur Affinity (Retrieved February 16, 2013)
Wiki.png Some of this page is derived or split from another article on WikiFur. The original article was at Fur Affinity. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. Unless otherwise stated, the text of WikiFur is available under both the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license (CC-BY-SA).


view · talk · edit
Fur Affinity
Founder
Owner
Administrators
Topics
History · FA: United · Ferrox
Mascots
See also
Retrieved from "https://en.wikifur.com/w/index.php?title=History_of_Fur_Affinity&oldid=393075"