Mature furry imageboard e621 has apparently closed its doors:

Thanks to numerous threats to our host, false claims of illegal content, harassment and a few things that are much worse, e621 is being closed down permanently. It's been fun running it.

The closure is likely the result of allegations made earlier today that e621 hosted cartoon child pornography.

Update: All is impermanent. Varka (CEO of Bad Dragon) intends to take over the site.

ScotiaCon, Scotland's first Furry convention, has re-launched their website and set a new date: 15 to 17 July 2011. The ScotiaCon LiveJournal community has been deleted.

Editor's note: Prices have also been announced; £65 for regular members, £95 for sponsors.

SkippyFox (Vin) has launched an editable index of Anthrocon fursuit tag owners. The site comes less than a week after the 1000th and last tag was won by "^..^James" for $1600 during an intense bidding war at last weekend's charity auction, at which $5650 was raised.

First distributed at Anthrocon 2006, the tags were presented by the Dorsai Irregulars as a means to track migratory patterns. The popular items spawned several imitations; but some fursuiters felt demeaned by the dances required by certain DI and refused to participate.

As of closing ceremonies, plans had not been made for a replacement project for 2011. Dorsai representative Rene Gobeyn vowed to "get even more drunk than last time" during their traditional room party to come up with fresh ideas.

FA Rank – covered in more detail last February – has moved to its own domain: popufur.com

The service has also launched a Java-based distributed updater to spread the CPU load.

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.

Camp Feral!, the world's oldest ongoing outdoor furry convention, wants to show furs what it's like to attend from the comfort of their homes. Since the camp is a visual experience, as opposed to a hotel con which can be promoted easily with only a schedule and a theme, Feral! is giving people the opportunity to experience camp without having to attend...in the hopes that, in the future, maybe more furs will!

Fur Affinity is looking to bolster its advertisement income by drumming up donations with a page listing donors by name and donation amount.

The site hopes to cover expenses of $890 a month. As of May 30, six people had donated over $200, entitling them to a "supporter bag".

FA uses AlertPay for payment processing due to PayPal's prohibition on payment for sites with adult content. As it is not a charity, donations are not tax-deductible.

Furry bondage artist BondoFox has been voted the Bronze winner in the 2010 Bondage Awards for "Best Writer".

BondoFox, who runs the website BondoFox Advanced, was given the prize following both a public vote and from voting by selected judges.

Legacy users of FurNation's hosting must reactivate their accounts or be removed from the list of active sites, according to site admin Reyedog.

Users can get a free account with 50Mb storage; 500Mb and domain hosting for $12/year; or "unlimited" storage and bandwidth on iPage for $42/year. [tip: EarthFurst]

Update: A prior version of this story indicated inactive sites would be closed June 1; this was part of the notice placed on inactive sites, but is apparently not occuring.

A new site, Watchtail, was recently launched by Nedded, offering a video streaming service to the furry art community.

As of press time the site hosted six active streams; two had ten or more viewers.

Web hosting vendor Topclasshost has suffered a disk failure, taking down fursuit.co.uk, furmeets.co.uk, Sythyry's Journal (lately mentioned) and various other sites.

It's suggested that Topclasshost might not have backups for this server, leaving everyone who didn't have files saved elsewhere out of luck.

Furry auction site The Dealers Den is running a sweepstakes to promote increased activity.

Auctions, bids, referrals and invites earn varying numbers of points, which are to be totaled to calculate a user's proportionate chance of winning.

The competition is to end June 16, with the three winners receiving a $50 Amazon.com gift card, a ClawGFX t-shirt, or a Dealers Den t-shirt.

Founded last October by Sinabu, The Dealers Den is offering free advertising, but faces an uphill battle against decade-old competitors FurBid and FurBuy.

Furry art community Fur Affinity has implemented a secure login server. This should prevent computers on the same network (such as those on an hotel wireless system) from intercepting credentials, and deter some man-in-the-middle attacks.

The change comes shortly before FA: United – perhaps in the hope of avoiding a repeat of 2007's breach. Several other security issues remain.

The new login path does not work for the recently-added 'safe-for-work' subdomain. Users can manually load https://sfw.furaffinity.net/login and accept a certificate exception to login; they must subsequently reload http://sfw.furaffinity.net/

Update: 'Safe-for-work' logins should be fixed in the next update.

I've decided to harness the awesome power of tags with a "related stories" block on story pages which matches against the most specific tags. This will improve as old posts get tags. Popular categories are at the bottom of the front page; a tag search box is at the right.

It's been three months; how would you like to see Flayrah develop? What types of news or other content do you want to read? Do you want to see Flayrah's content on another site? (You can get email for stories or particular categories via Subscriptions on your user page.)

Remember, if you've got something interesting to say, you can always login and submit it!