As someone who has been in a community of artists, I hear a common conundrum arise:

I really want to leave this art site, but it’s too popular and leaving would mean losing out on a valuable resource to gain/keep customers.

This article presents ways you can use your control over your own works to influence your customers to view them where you wish them to, while also maintaining a presence so that others may find you.

This is written as a neutral piece and the methods can be used on any free art posting site. To that end, we'll call the site you wish to vacate “BadVibeArt”, and the place you want to go “NewBeginningDoodles”. Both are general-use sites for stories and art alike, comparable to sites such as deviantART, Fur Affinity, Inkbunny, SoFurry or Weasyl.

Inkbunny is celebrating three years online by announcing a major redevelopment project – and a T-shirt contest.

We want to move to an open source model to get the community involved in extending the capabilities of the site, and so that anyone can easily create their own art/social site.

To do this we are creating the new site engine from the ground up. It will have all the features that people like from Inkbunny v1.0, but will use an established web framework, will have a new and improved interface and will launch with a bunch of new features we've always wanted to see added to the site.

The site, which saw its 300,000th submission this week, was launched in June 2010 after three months of closed testing. Since then, Inkbunny has added various features, including user-suggested keywords, but development has come in bursts due to time constraints.

A new ten-minute survey has been released, aimed at furry fans 18 and older.

The survey, which contains "items on personality, personal life, and basic demographics", was created to support research at University College Cork in Ireland, and is intended to "gather data on the kinds of people that make up the furry community":

The use of the internet to support a shared interest and activity is very interesting to me, and I also am curious about the more sexual side to the fandom.

My study will attempt to determine two things - 1) Who are the furries? (assessed by simple demographics) and 2) What is the place of the Furry fandom in the context of the existing literature on internet behaviours?

It was initially distributed on Inkbunny, where a researcher has been answering questions.

Compare: Latest survey results from the separate Anthropomorphic Research Project.

Furry art community Inkbunny has deployed a means for users to suggest and approve keywords. The long-anticipated feature was rolled out after several days of testing, leading to the addition of keyword history.

The feature had been requested by users wishing to improve the site experience for others, as keywords are used heavily by Inkbunny's search and blocking features:

While Inkbunny remains one of the most comprehensively tagged/keyworded archives among all the furry art sites, we believe this new feature will make immense improvements both to finding submissions by keywords you want to see, and blocking submissions with keywords you want to avoid.

Furry art community Inkbunny has announced several upgrades, including increased max. submission size (30Mb; 6000x6000), greater control over notices, improved keyword suggestion, and the ability to search by content rating, time range or user.

The update is the first since September 2011 – though some changes had been made earlier, but not announced.

User feedback has been generally positive so far, although the new "suggested submissions" feature (which highlights work favourited by watched users) received a mixed response.

Inkbunny hosts over 180,000 submissions and has 96,000 members; ~10,000 are active in any one day. It was recently nominated as Best Website for the 2011 Ursa Major Awards.

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?

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).

Furry art and story gallery Inkbunny has changed their content policy to permit limited photography and human-based art.

Humans and human-style characters are now allowed in art as long as they are not engaged in sexual activity and don't show genitals or sexual arousal. Stories containing humans were already permitted along similar lines.

Photographs of objects created "by you or for you" or acting as a background to another work may also be uploaded.

Launched in June, Inkbunny's features and policies won fans among those looking for a venue to sell their work, but many who draw humans or human-like characters avoided the site. Sculptors, photographers and fursuit builders also had little to contribute until now.

Furry art gallery Inkbunny says it is covering hosting costs from sales after three months of operation. The maximum file size of free works has also doubled to 20Mb. The site, launched in June, sells artists' prints and downloads for a 20% cut, and hosts over 15,000 works.

Meanwhile, all-ages art site ArtSpots has undergone a complete redesign – much to the surprise of users. While many praised the new layout, not all like the "blog-like" artist homepages, and some feel the new site lacks useful features like sketch chat.

The changes come not long after Fur Affinity updated its own menu style. The new design provides slightly cleaner visuals and more horizontal space, but also more prominent ads.

A new furry art and story community has launched, offering artists a way to sell digital downloads and prints.

The site – Inkbunny – permits non-human artwork of all ratings; however, only adults 18 or over may join.

Site founder Starling outlined the sales philosophy:

At Inkbunny we believe two revolutionary things about selling art; that people want to buy your work even if they can get it for free, and that you should not worry too much about piracy of your work.

Development took over a year, with nearly 800 works uploaded in a four-month private beta.