The Furtean Times closes; content brought to Flayrah
British furry news site FurteanTimes.com has closed after almost four years online.
Former editor-in-chief Alexander Grey (stories) explained:
With falling readership and contributions since the middle of the year, followed on by an exploit in early September bringing the site offline, I have decided to close the website for good.
It was my initial intention to rebuild the website from scratch to make it easier for users to contribute multimedia content [...], however this process was difficult and time consuming to complete while working alone. Having started university in September, I now have little time on my hands for such an in-depth and involved project.
Like WikiFur News, the site's previously published content is being preserved at Flayrah.
Around 150 pieces were published from FT's January 2007 origin as a fanzine-style website, ranging from reviews and features to hard news. The site was influential in its native land, with lead writer Ian Wolf (stories) interviewed by the BBC in their 2009 article Who are the furries?
The Furtean Times' closure leaves Flayrah as the main source for originally-written furry news in English, supplemented by entertainment blogs Weasel Wordsmith and InFurNation, while furryne.ws, Furries In The Media and Furry Reddit provide social news, links and commentary.
Non-English readers are served by Fauna Urbana (Brazilian Portuguese) – which recently celebrated its first anniversary – Red Furros (Spanish) and Russian news portal WeFurries plus fanzine HUGS (occupying the space previously covered by Furry News).
About the author
GreenReaper (Laurence Parry) — read stories — contact (login required)a developer, editor and Kai Norn from London, United Kingdom, interested in wikis and computers
Small fuzzy creature who likes cheese & carrots. Founder of WikiFur, lead admin of Inkbunny, and Editor-in-Chief of Flayrah.
Comments
Your mention of Weasel Wordsmith and Infurnation are the first I have heard of these sites, and I'm not exactly born yesterday. Maybe somehow, somewhere there needs to be more exposure for these, and other, Fur community related sites. It might be most beneficial to new Furs. Yes, Wikifur is a good start toward providing a general billboard of sites, but I think even Wikifur could use some more exposure, e.g. when Wikifur moved to it's current site from the old one, about one and half years ago (?) I didn't know it until almost a month after the fact. (I posted on Live Journal's Greymuzzles about that.)
That's one reason I mentioned them. We've have had them posted in our front-page footer for quite a while now, but not everyone gets down there to check. Google helps a lot with exposure, but you have to know what you're looking for.
Of course, Flayrah itself is not entirely well-known in the community. If you like our coverage, I encourage you to get the word out. Let people know about us on your LJ or relevant communities, mention us at conventions, repost/retweet our stories (most new stories are CC-BY-SA), etc. More visitors means more comments and more contributors.
Another place to point people is the Open Directory's Furry category, which I maintain. Suggestions are welcome! Flayrah also has links.
Speaking of the footer, the news aggregators don't seem to be properly aggregating for some reason or another.
Hmmmm. Looks like cron wasn't being properly processed - our page cache was giving back a cached result due to a recent problem. I've purged it, should be better now. :-)
Yay!
Nice to hear Furtean Times content is being preserved here on your blog.
I do try, Xy. ;-)
GreenReaper has clearly done an excellent job with the site, as Flayrah was in this same situation a while ago.
Post new comment