Furry art community ArtPiles has opened its doors. The site is looking to sign up 100 users for an open beta.

Its creator, ekigyuu, was the founder of Furry Art Pile, a similar site which ran September 2006–September 2008 before being shut down, despite community objections. The site hosted over 30,000 works at the time.

Well, following the collapse of talks between Furry Art Pile and MyFursona - as discussed in the last edition of FT - it seems that a new bird is rising from the ashes.

So far all that’s known about ArtPiles is that it’s an “open source art community” and that it’s “coming soon” - this would be in line with Ekigyuu’s ideology to release the source code behind Furry Art Pile following closure, to allow other people to use or adapt the idea for their own needs. The old Furry Art Piles website - while spending nearly two months linking to a Rickroll - now redirects to the ArtPiles website

There’s more of this to come. Keep tuned.

Furry Art Pile, an art archive and social networking site, has ceased operation after a little less than two years.

With a merger of Furry Art Piles and MyFursona looking set for the near future, whatever are they going to call the new site?

Major furry archive and community Furry Art Pile suddenly announced it’s closure on August 27, 2008, sending repercussions across the furry community. Lone site administrator Dylan Hafertepen posted an offline message stating: “This isn’t fun for me anymore. I spend too much time everyday developing new features and optimizing the code to perfection; I never have time for my other projects.”

Many criticized his decision to bring the site offline without any warning to the users, and the site came back online later that day with a new closing date of September 1. Following the announcement there were a few people showing interest in taking control of the site, one of these being the consortium behind the furry fandom’s largest dedicated social-network, MyFursona. Talks between the two parties were not completed at the time of writing.