Way back in May 2006, I wrote a little piece called “The State of the Furry Zine.”
This is a somewhat informal update to that survey.

No matter what kind of work you create, thought needs to go into where you’ll publish it. Writers have more to consider; each site handles text differently. Print publications still carry a different weight for writing, as do e-books; there’s a quantifiable difference between having your story read as a Fur Affinity post versus on a Kindle. But has the web won?

Five members of Fur Affinity staff announced their resignation yesterday:

• Photographurer, former photography department head
• Luftwoofe, former photography department administrator
• Writerwren, former writing department head
• Grammatist, former writing department administrator
• Silver R. Wolfe, former support administrator

All but Wolfe were brought from Furocity and placed directly into administration positions. Grammatist cited privacy concerns as the reason for his resignation; three others directed criticism towards the original FA staff members, and slammed Dragoneer for poor leadership.

I wasn’t as proactive as I thought I would be, and I’m pretty sure I missed a couple posted during the first of September, so apologies there. Otherwise, here was last month’s Newsbytes.

For historical purposes, a collection of links and other tidbits posted to Newsbytes in August.

In the hopes of garnering more revenue for its ever-expanding site, Fur Affinity has turned to VigLink, a tool which helps sites earn commission from online stores. Unfortunately for staff, its use violated the site's own terms of service, leading to cries of foul play once discovered.

Fur Affinity has now apologized for the unannounced roll-out, and updated their ToS to notify users. But what was all the fuss about?

Fur Affinity recently announced a restructuring and increase in staffing. On the main site, staff acknowledged "administrator inaction, bias, and a lack of accountability" but assured users that they "truly want to fix the issues, and [are] working toward a better Fur Affinity."

To see whether this change is going to be enough to improve Fur Affinity, I want to compare the administration structures of the three main furry art sites – Fur Affinity (FA), SoFurry (SF) and Inkbunny (IB) – plus a few details from commercial alternative deviantART (DA).

At the end of 2009, Yiffstar was relaunched with 'completely new code' as SoFurry. Reactions were not entirely positive; the forum was horrible to use, and the main site had numerous performance and navigational issues, though speed improved over time.

In April 2010, work began on SoFurry 2.0, originally planned to release in first quarter 2011. As time passed, various previews of the new Espresso theme were released and covered by both Flayrah and FNN – the latter reporting on SoFurry's 150,000-user mark by interviewing SoFurry owner Toumal and lead designer Alex Vance.

On 8 July, Toumal announced a public beta of SoFurry 2.0, running in parallel with SoFurry 1.0 for 'some time'. The beta launched today, albeit without chat.

In stark contrast, Fur Affinity's plans for new software, Ferrox, were announced in 2006, but stalled in 2009. Since then, the site has been plagued with coding problems.

Fur Affinity and Furocity owners Dragoneer and Gavin Daemonshyai have announced plans to share staff and resources between the two sites.

The two owners have worked together on FA: United, and according to Dragoneer they will "share responsibilities of the sites as equals (co-owners)", with Gavin's team bringing "coding expertise" and "improved administrative structure and coordination" to FA.

Gavin explained that while "the sites themselves are staying completely separate" (accounts will not be merged), Fur Affinity is gaining administrators and programming staff to implement requested improvements, such as the delayed summer update.

Fur Affinity also added a 12TB disk array this week, after running out of space for work.

Fur Affinity user Xaevo was suspended from the main site and banned from #furaffinity after being accused of password harvesting and insulting Summercat, a support administrator.

Xaevo posted a link in the chatroom to a site that he claimed would allow people to see their FA stats regardless of who they were logged in as. Summercat criticised the site asking for users' FA passwords and requested that the site be taken down as it was phishing.

[14:18:14] <Summercat> Xaevo, please take it down.
[14:18:23] <Xaevo> no, i see no reason to take it down

Xaevo continued to protest the accusations of phishing, saying that phishing only applied when you were masquerading as a trustworthy entity. He maintained that his source code was public and did not save any passwords. When Summercat called it password harvesting, Xaevo called him a 'noob', and was banned from the chat room and suspended from the main site.

Update: 45 minutes later, Xaevo's suspension was lifted.

The furry marketplace heated up today as FurBuy owner Jurann was "permanently banned" from Fur Affinity for "false threats against users holding auctions on FA instead of furbuy" and "disruption of the community, drama starting and interference with user transactions."

FA's Dragoneer gave his opinion of Jurann's attempts to pressure artists into using FurBuy:

Frankly, I'm sick of Jurann constantly threatening users, encouraging them to "Go to Furbuy...or else!"

In response, Jurann said Dragoneer "[took his] legal advice as a threat," while maintaining that FTC auction guidelines apply to Fur Affinity:

It's a simple fact that there ARE rules and guidelines, and they are quite clearly not being followed on FA at present.

Brazilian fur Hwei Chow has posted detailed interviews with furry artist Heather Bruton and FA owner Dragoneer in the international section of community portal FurryBrasil.

The interviews – named Muzzle to Muzzle – are presented in a roleplaying conversational style reminiscent of The Tame Talk Show, which Hwei produced.

Fur Affinity turned six this weekend, offering a preview of a new site template to go live May 21, plus a commission system with integrated ratings.

Site owner Dragoneer has promised that underlying security issues will be fixed too:

Things have been slack in the coding department, and we know that. It's time for a change, and we're long overdue. We're going to fix that. [...] The vulnerabilities will be fixed between now and then, and some of them require complete system re-writes

However, offers to help with these vulnerabilities have been rebuffed for now. It is also not the first time that a new layout has been promised.

Fur Affinity users are demanding answers after intruders stole and posted private message histories of over 40 users, including site owner Dragoneer and several staff.

All regular administrative access has been removed, and Dragoneer says it will not be restored until all problems are found:

Until we're 100% sure that the entire admin backend is revised, checked, double-checked and triple-checked we're playing it safe

The leaked notes appear both authentic and comprehensive, dating back to 2005, and their contents are already the subject of widespread debate.

Fur Affinity has banned adult artwork of underage characters, after payment processor AlertPay cited it as a reason to cancel the site's account.

Right now we have to make a choice. Do we continue on with cub artwork and protect the artwork in the name of freedom of speech? Or do we remove the one Achilles heel that has proven itself to be a liability and a frustration?

If we want to keep Fur Affinity alive we have no choice but to remove cub art.

Artists have 21 days before administrators begin removing such content from their accounts. Non-adult artwork will not be affected, nor will "chibi", "cutsey", or "stylized" characters.

Site administrator Dragoneer noted that no artist will be punished for the presence of existing artwork, and warned that harassment of artists will result in a three-month ban. Both Dragoneer and Pinkuh recommended SoFurry and Inkbunny as alternative hosts.