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Fur Affinity

Fur Affinity, launched in 2005, quickly grew to become furry fandom's largest art website, and has struggled to deal with the impact. Updates are regularly announced, but rarely arrive, and it has trouble retaining staff. Given its position, downtime and security issues are a major event; the latter were once so frequent as to be parodied. Nevertheless, it remains popular – in part, because everyone's there, but also because it has outlasted competitors. Similar sites: Inkbunny, SoFurry, Weasyl, the VCL.

Tagging and filtering as an alternative to content bans

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A meme picture about tagging shielding people from annoying interests.It was one of those strange coincidences that makes one think that, if there were a god, he must have a strange sense of humour. Salman Rushdie, who was the target of a 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini that called for his death due to his novel The Satanic Verses and who lost sight in one of his eyes after being stabbed on stage in the US last year, warned that never in his lifetime had freedom of expression been under such a threat in the West. Less than a week later, Fur Affinity announced a new rule banning adult artwork of characters with childlike proportions, later calling out specific pokémon and digimon. I have already written about the importance of free speech for the furry fandom, so here I would like to discuss how increasing authoritarianism is restricting free expression and a simple way to help safeguard it.

Fur Affinity expands rules against "youthful appearing" characters in adult works to Pokemon and Digimon characters

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On May 19th Fur Affinity had announced that it will expand the rules toward banning portrayals of youthful appearing characters, even if the character is addressed as being older in universe, engaging in sexual situations to include digimon and pokemon characters. While situations that portrayed actual young anthro characters in sex (known colloquially as cub porn) had been banned 13 years ago, there were elements of gray area on characters that are determined as mature in age, but younger in appearance that were later expanded upon. This update is a furthering of that expansion.

In the announcement Fur Affinity had noted that there is a method for artists who have posted works that may be in this gray area to discover how they would be handled by submitting trouble tickets against it.

If you have questions as to whether this may apply to your content, please feel free to open a ticket under “NSFW Underage Content” with links to the content in question, and we can verify if the content is in violation or not.

Artists have been informed that the amendment will start to be enforced on July 1st.

Fur Affinity informed they are barred from advertising on Twitter following premiere of blue-paw Furrified status

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On November 28th, Dragoneer posted a message that Fur Affinity's account received on Twitter. It was from the social media site's advertisement team. In the message they indicated that the adult website would not be able to advertise on Twitter.

A user associated with your account is ineligible to participate in the Twitter Ads program at this time.

This determination is based on the following Twitter Ads Policy:
@furaffinity: Adult sexual products and services.

[...]

We appreciate your interest in Twitter Ads

Fur Affinity bans artworks generated by artificial intelligence programs

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On September 5th, Fur Affinity announced it will not be accepting art works that are generated by artificial intelligence programs. Recently computer algorithm generated artwork has come under much discussion as machine learning applications such as DALL-E have shown the ability to take obscure prompts and create art pieces based on them.

Content created by artificial intelligence is not allowed on Fur Affinity.

AI and machine learning applications (DALL-E, Craiyon) sample other artists' work to create content. That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.

Our goal is to support artists and their content. We don’t believe it’s in our community’s best interests to allow AI generated content on the site.

Dragoneer indicated in a Twitter statement on how blatant these programs are in assimilating the pieces of other artists as their own. He pointed to an example of a signature placed on a piece giving evidence of those that the program sampled from.

We made the decision to ban AI generated content on FA. I know a lot of people are asking, "but what about..."

Look, the AI-generated "art" is openly copying the signatures of the artists and teams it's sampling from. Maybe even from somebody you know. It's too much. - Dragoneer

Dragoneer buys back Fur Affinity from IMVU

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FA Logo Fur Affinity is now independent once again after five years under the management of social gaming company IMVU. This comes as IMVU is looking to restructure their company to be called Together Labs, and take on major investment from Chinese company NetEase. Dragoneer repurchased Fur Affinity, for more than he originally sold it for, and now owns it under his own company (Frost Dragon Art LLC) once again.

They also made a new logo for the occasion.

Gone in a Flash

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As the world still deals with the Coronavirus pandemic, political turmoil, and the uncertainty of the future, we did come into the year knowing that a major change was coming to the fandom, which has since been overshadowed by these other events. Flash is going the way of the dodo, due to Adobe dropping support for their Flash Player plugin and browsers withdrawing support in turn; and with it a substantial piece of furry history will no longer function in most browsers as of 2021.

Luckily, some of the most famous, or infamous, pieces of Flash history are preserved as videos. Remember Foxy Fluffs are Everything? Someone did “port” it to YouTube (adult language/situations warning in case you haven’t seen it). But despite the animation being saved in video format, foxy fluffs being motion tweens may not amount for much in a post-Flash world.

Time is running out for those animations that are only playable with Flash on their original sites. They can however be downloaded as an SWF file to run on software that supports them. On SoFurry, Flash files already download directly as a file instead of playing in the browser itself. Soon enough it will probably be the only way to enjoy many classic pieces of furry animation from the earlier days of the fandom in their original format – if you can find a working player.

FA:United convention closes doors permanently due to COVID-19

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Fur Affinity’s flagship convention, FA: United, announced that it would be closing their doors due to COVID-19, permanently. While many other conventions have ‘suspended indefinitely’, or ‘canceled for 2020/2021’, this marks the first event to indicate a more definite suspension as a result of the pandemic.

Fur Affinity prepares day-long move to new monster hosting

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King Ghidorah by theBeta-Soldier on DeviantArt
King Ghidorah by theBeta-Soldier

Furry art site Fur Affinity has announced its migration to new hosting on Wednesday, September 9. Previously set for August, then Monday, the final migration "may take" 18 hours; during which content modification will be disabled, but interactions will work.

The new hardware was announced in April: a "cluster-based server platform" named after a kaiju with 112 CPU cores, 1536GB of RAM and 153.6TB of "enterprise SSD".

If composed of four 28-core Xeon CPUs, 24x 6.4TB SSDs and 48x 32GB DDR4-2666 ECC DIMMs, the components alone have a retail value of ~US$100,000 – not including servers or switches.

Fur Affinity administrator resigns amid hate group policy controversy

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quoting_mungo, who has moderated multiple furry websites and would have been on Fur Affinity's administrative team for five years on January 27, 2018, resigned today, she announced in a Fur Affinity journal entry. Apparently originally aiming to resign mid-January or February, it appears decisions for and reactions to Fur Affinity's new policy regarding hate groups encouraged her to cut that time short.

Discussed briefly here on Flayrah previously, Fur Affinity user Pokefound uploaded a $15 commission they'd drawn, depicting a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic-styled character, wearing a swastika armband and SS collar tab, performing a Nazi salute against a background of Nazi Germany swastika flags. Believing it to be a violation of the hate group policy, another user reported it via Fur Affinity's trouble ticket system.

Fur Affinity updates code of conduct to disallow hate groups

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On September 4, Fur Affinity released an update to their code of conduct indicating that works or items that promote hate groups will no longer be tolerated on furry's most popular art site. The new rule in the code of conduct (2.7) states:

Do not identify with or promote hate groups and their ideologies
A hate group is one that advocates and practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a designated sector of society (e.g. Nazism, KKK, ISIS). Symbols specifically associated with these groups will not be permitted in user avatars, non-fictional content, or content intended solely to disrupt the community.

Users who identify with or promote hate groups and their ideologies may be permanently banned from Fur Affinity without warning.

The update has already created a stir in furry fandom. Many were pleased with the decision and felt it was a step in the right direction. However individuals within alt-furry used it to launch a particularly harsh attack on Dragoneer with a sock-puppet account named after his recently-deceased cat.

Fur Affinity restoring from six-day-old backups after server compromised; site source code distributed at BLFC

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Fur Affinity has been "pulled offline temporarily" after users' accounts and submissions went missing.

Update (21 May): FA returned for a day, but is now in read-only mode. Passwords were said to be hashed and salted, but if you've used the same one elsewhere, now is the time to change it to be unique per-site.

Update 2 (23 May): Fur Affinity has returned; however, all passwords have been reset, which is causing problems for those with an old/invalid email address.

It has been confirmed that an exploit was used to copy Fur Affinity's source code, later distributed at Biggest Little Fur Con. A subsequent attack deleted user profiles, submissions, and watches.

FA users took to Twitter and the Fur Affinity Forums looking for answers – which appeared to have been preemptively provided by a post asking "What would you do if you found an exploit on FA?", posted last Sunday on the Phoenixed Forums. However, more recent posts by the original poster disclaim responsibility.

The recent "ImageTragick" vulnerability in widely-used processing library ImageMagick was soon turned into an exploit and has been identified by FA as the original attack vector.

Fur Affinity community manager Dragoneer reports that backups exist, but are six days old:

The majority [of the site's data is secure], yes. The backup we have is 6 days old. We're still going through and trying to determine the extent of the issue, and once we have more information, we'll post it publicly and give a full, transparent run down of what happened.

Fur Affinity loses developer after stalls in promised compensation

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On January 26th Silver Eagle, who was brought on as a web developer for Fur Affinity, released a video posting his resignation. In it he talks about his experiences as a developer there, and all the troubles it has caused him emotionally and financially. Thousands of views later the video set off a firestorm of criticism in the direction of leadership at the fandom's most popular website.

Similar controversies have been played out many times before for Fur Affinity, but let's take a look at why this one has perhaps stirred more ire than others and why it has many furs talking about the impact our most popular website has on the lives of others. To do this, we must take a look at the background of the developer who came forward.

Fur Affinity - Users responsible for the actions of commenters

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On Janurary 21st, Fur Affinity staff had removed a user's journal based upon the comments within the journal for violating Code of Conduct rule 1.6, colloquially referred to as the "call out" rule. This decision will impact users by placing the responsibility of comments on the user hosting those comments on their journal or submission pages as much as the user making the comment. The user whose journal was removed, Validuz, was told that any comments found violating such rules are subject to removal of the journal hosting the comments.

Fur Affinity forum staff abandon their posts, future of forum uncertain

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Fur Affinity is suffering from another round of staff resignations. This time the damage mostly occurred in the forums after one of the art site's disgruntled moderators, Renashe, left and leaked conversations and information which revealed a tool which moderators could use to search for their names in comment sections on the website, among other items.

Following the suspension of Renashe, Kalmor, a moderator on the Fur Affinity Forum followed suit. They wrote a resignation journal which was promptly removed by staff. Afterwords Kalmor posted about the incident on the forums and linked to his twitter at which time he was permanently suspended from the forums and main site for violating the 'privacy' or Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). An agreement that most of the Forum staff never signed in the first place, according to Kalmor.

Following Kalmor's suspension three other staffers left in rapid succession, bringing the staff page down from 10 to 6. The remaining six, according to sources, are mostly not involved it the operations of moderation of the forums. It is certainly a far cry from the site leader page in April this year.

Update (Aug 28) - Fur Affinity Forums host Carenath comes forth to talk about plans for the future.

Update 2 (Aug 31) - The staff page for the Fur Affinity Forums is down from 6 to 1. Carenath replaces the six originally listed.

Update 3 (Sep 5) - A poll has been posted with new name proposals.

Update 4 (Sep 13) - Fur Affinity no longer has a forum, the newly-named Phoenix Forums are now fully independent. Links have been updated.

Update 5 (Sep 22) - IMVU has allegedly issued a cease-and-desist order against Phoenix Forums, which was taken offline for several days.

Update 6 (Sep 24) - Former host Carenath claims FA, IMVU staff pressed for database transfer, deletion on data protection grounds.

IMVU buys Fur Affinity; furry fans respond

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3D chat service IMVU has bought furry art community Fur Affinity for an undisclosed sum. According to the announcement, "FA will continue to operate independently", and former owner Dragoneer says he remains "in charge of the site, direction and improvements".

IMVU, which bills itself as "the world's largest 3D Chat and Dress-Up community", has marketed its service to furry fans since at least 2006. The company proposes to monetize their January 2015 purchase through "added advertising" presented via "an improved experience", rather than "taking FA content, redistributing it, reposting it, using it in-game".