Popufur.com

Popufur.com, previously as the Fur Affinity Ranking or FA Rank, is a ranking website created by Taren Nauxen. It ranks the users on Fur Affinity in terms of relative popularity, which is determined by a complex algorithm. FA Rank was originally hosted on Taren's personal website, superwailingbonus.com, but after that was hosted on Popufur.com.

History

On July 1st, 2010, Taren announced that FA Rank had been moved to its own website, separate from his personal website. The address, Popufur.com, was chosen and appropriated by Varka.

The new website also came with the long awaited update system, coined the FARankFuRTer v1.0, which stands for the FA Rank Future Release Terminal version 1.0. This page was a Java applet that used the CPU cycles and bandwidth of visitors to the page to draw information from the Fur Affinity server. In this manner, the more people on the update page at once, the quicker the information was accessed and the sooner a new update occurred.

However, in order to lessen strain on the FA servers, the applet only accessed the information of one person per minute, for each user running the updater.

After being offline between early 2011 and late 2012, the rankings in file when the site became active again on December 2012, it only displayed data from as way back as June 11, 2011. The reason given was posted in the site's main page, noting that:

The script responsible for gathering the data displayed here has been IP-banned by FurAffinity's server. If you want to see fun statistics-related projects continue, go to FurAffinity's Forums and make your voice heard.

Ranking algorithm

The ranking score algorithm was based similarly to the algorithm used by Google on its PageRank system. Like that system, which worked on probabilities of a person surfing the internet finding a site randomly, the FA Rank system worked on the chance of randomly following watch links and the probability of finding specific users in that fashion.

Thus, the more watchers a user has, then the more likely it is that a random surfer will click onto their userpage from one of their watchers' pages. Furthermore, having a person with a large number of watchers watching a second user will boost that second user much higher than having a user watch them that has little watchers of their own. However, the more users that a "famous" user is watching, the less of a boost each of them gets from that user.

Format

FA Rank was composed of seven different columns that listed users and various types of information about them.

• The first column was a numerical counting of ranks, starting at 1 and continuing from there. If this rank number for a specific user was clicked, it provided a breakdown for that user and all of the updates that FA Rank has made and how that user's position has fluctuated over time. This breakdown page also had an extra column that contained a percentage, which indicated the percentage of users on FA that the user in question is higher than.
• The second column, illustrated by an upper-case delta symbol to indicate change, showed the amount in terms of position that a user has changed since the last time the site updated. An equals sign indicated that there has been no change in position. A blue arrow to the side indicated that the user was not on the list prior to the latest update.
• The third column was the list of user names, all of which act as links to the user's FA page.
• The fourth column listed the number of watchers that a specific user had when the site updated.
• The fifth column listed the number of users that the user in question is watching.
• The sixth column listed the number of page views for their user page that the user has.
• The seventh column listed the number of times that the user's submissions have been favorited by other users.

Trivia

On the main page of FA Rank, there was a counter at the bottom that read, "So far, (number) people have left the fandom because of this site." Ironically, this number had nothing to do with what it states, but was instead a page view counter for FA Rank, calculating the number of visitors to the site.

See also

• FurArtist Ranking

External links

• Popufur.com official webpage
• Popufur.com on Twitter
• FA Rank source code

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