Furry Art Pile

Furry Art Pile
Author(s)	Founder: ekigyuu Administrator: ekigyuu
Website	Website: http://www.furryartpile.net/ LiveJournal: http://furryartpile.livejournal.com/
Launch date	September 24, 2006
End date	September 1, 2008
Rating(s)

Furry Art Pile, also known as FAP, was a furry art community which opened to the public on September 24, 2006. It relied on a system of tagging for organizing content. Mature artwork was permitted, but hidden by default.

History

Since its inception on September of 2006, the site grew exponentially, with 12,358 works uploaded to the site in June 10, 2007, to a high of 30,077 works in April 2, 2008, continuing on such steady rate until its shutdown on September 1st, 2008.

Furry Art Pile went down for week in late March 2007, as part of an upgrade to its most recent version.

Shutdown

FAP last displayed public notice

The founder announced on August 27, 2008 that:

Two years later, 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. [...] So, I'm closing FAP

This announcement, which stated that Furry Art Pile's archives would be deleted by the end of August was met with severe criticism.

Reopening, FAP's future?

The site was partially reopened on August 29 with planned public access for two more weeks, with Ekigyuu supposedly being into negotiations with an unidentified third party over a possible acquisition and continuation of Furry Art Pile; MyFursona has also stated its own interest in acquiring Furry Art Pile, with intentions of merging accounts between the two services.

However, when asked about selling or offering the site to new management, Ekigyuu denied that such negotiations were taking place at all; in addition, the announcement of the transaction by Alexander Grey was thrown into doubt due to Grey's age (he was born in 1991, making him 16 at the time of the announcement) and British citizenship, which would restrict access to, let alone administration of, a website with pornographic or adult content.

Ekigyuu also disclosed interest in releasing the source code for the website's server software under an open source license in preparation for the shutdown in preparation for the deletion of the service; with the alleged negotiations in progress, it is not known if this open-sourcing of the server software will still take place.

Final word

On August 31st, Ekigyuu made a post stating that the site will not be transferred to anyone else, and all site URL's began forwarding to a Rick Roll video on YouTube.

Art Piles

The domain name Furryartpile.com now redirects to ArtPiles.com. For over a year and a half, all that existed at the new domain was a placeholder image and a suggestion that the new site would be open on March 1st, 2009 or thereabouts. As of March 28th, 2010, ArtPiles is now live and accepting users for its limited (100 users) beta program.

Features

FAP's LJ logo

In addition of an external LiveJournal community, FAP other services included:

Embedded FAP

This feature, announced on June 29, 2007, allowed FAP members to display their latest works on their galleries in their personal websites, blogs and even their MySpace pages.

Tagging

Furry Art Pile's art classification is handled entirely using user-created and selected tags. However, certain tags carry a specific meaning, including the following:

• mature: Marks the work as mature, preventing it from being shown by default
• draft: Marks the work as unfinished, hiding them from appearing in the user's gallery (unless specifically searched for)
• featured: Places the work in the user's "Featured works" gallery, displayed above their normal gallery on their user page

In addition, some tags are used to identify works based on other properties:

• user:username Identifies the user that created the work
• favby:username Identifies works marked as favorites by the user
• type:genre Identifies images (art), writing (prose), or flash-based works (flash)
• color:hue Identifies works using the specified color
• workid:number Returns works related to the specified work

Full featured search

Besides being able to browse by tags, Furry Art Pile allows users to search with boolean search operators and spans of time. Search results can be sorted by date uploaded, popularity and relevance to the search string with up to 120 thumbnails per page.

Filters

Individual tags and users can be filtered or "hidden" with Furry Art Pile's tag filter.

RSS feeds

Tags, artists and all works were available as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds:

• [1] returns all recent works.
• [2] returns recent works that match a tag string.
• [3] returns recent works for a specific user.

Syndication feeds for message centers and comment threads were being developed, right up to the site's shutdown.

Software

Developer API

Furry Art Pile features an open developer API called fAPI that allows developers to create their own applications using the information on Furry Art Pile. Furry Art Pile was the only furry art website that offered an open API.

Open source

Main article: Guava (CMS)

Ekigyuu has announced intentions to release the source code of the content management system that Furry Art Pile used to host and upload content under the GNU GPL for other furry multimedia sites to use; this server software was codenamed "Guava". This will also include the release of the fAPI.

As of October 27, 2008, the new redirect for Furryartpile.com seems to indicate that this open source package will be called "Art Piles."