Fur Affinity

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Fur Affinity
Fa logo.png
Fur Affinity logo
Author(s) Owner: Frost Dragon Art, LLC[1]
Website
https://www.furaffinity.net/ (SFW)
Launch date 16 January–1 August 2005 (staff dispute & server issues)
10 December 2005–present
Genre Social media community
Rating(s)
Web PG
Web NC-17
Fur Affinity's front page, circa 2021

Fur Affinity, also known as FA or FurAffinity, is the furry fandom's largest online community, focusing on the promotion of art, music and stories.

The site was created in 2005 by Alkora as an alternative to various art community websites such as SheezyArt and DeviantArt, distinguished by allowing artistic freedom of expression regardless of content rating. It was led by Dragoneer until his August 2024 death.

History[edit]

Main article: History of Fur Affinity

Fur Affinity was launched on 16 January 2005 as an alternative to SheezyArt, with the forum going live on that date and the main site being transferred a few days later from FurPawz. Since then, it has suffered a few outages, most notably a month-long downtime over July 2008, but always managed to recover. In 2011, Fur Affinity announced a major revamp in connection to FA: United 4.[3]

Fur Affinity: United![edit]

Main article: FA: United

In August 2007, Fur Affinity held its own furry convention, Fur Affinity: United! (or FA:U) in Newark, New Jersey. The convention was a success, drawing 310 attendees and 25 fursuiters in the parade, and was followed by another in 2008, drawing 381 attendees. In February 2009, Dragoneer announced FA: United 3 "Games United" for 28-30 May 2010.[4] No event was scheduled for 2009 due to the economic downturn. FA: United 7, in August 2014, drew 707 attendees.

Services and features[edit]

Fur Affinity's features for users include the ability to allow users to track new updates from particular artists; highlight favorites; and upload a wide variety of art (images, music and stories). The site attempts to promote community through its comments system and individual journals.

While works of all ratings are accepted (other than photographic nudes, images whose intent are to slander or discredit others, and minors in sexual situations[5]), art rated as mature or adult is not shown to visitors, or to users who have not specified it as a preference (which requires giving a date of birth indicating an age over 18). Keywords and tags can be added to works, though a feature that allowed blocking based on tags was disabled due to performance issues.

Fur Affinity's search engine was "temporarily disabled" in mid-2006 due to it taking up too many resources.[6] A faux search feature was implemented for April Fool's Day 2007, much to the chagrin of some users.[7] Search was reimplemented on 5 February 2009; it was initially labelled "That Thing You Want" and randomly included rickrolls.[8]

Privacy features were added in May 2012 with users being able to block guests from seeing their content with messages such as "[Username] has elected to make their content available to registered users only" and being able to hide their adult, mature adult, or all favorites from public view.[9]

The site's artwork is inaccessible in Russia, as d.facdn.net (which serves the images) is listed on Russia's Internet blacklist. The site itself works fine, and even shows thumbnails.[citation needed]

On 13 September 2015, to coincide with the conclusion of FAU 2015, Fur Affinity unveiled a Gallery folders system[10], which had been promised in one form or another since shortly after the site launched in 2006. Some users[who?] criticized the way folders were implemented,[citation needed] including disappearing artwork after its implementation (found normally in the scraps folder), and the poor to no documentation regarding them.

At the start of the new year in January 2020. FA received its first complete overhaul of the websites UI (User-Interface) since 2007. The update included; a major color change, extra template choices, modern styled graphics, the revival of the top-of-page banner, and many other aspects.

Fur Affinity Plus[edit]

In addition, the site announced Fur Affinity Plus (FA ), a 5$ paid tier for membership which allows users to opt out of third-party advertising and use an FA -only icon next to their username to show support. This was announced as a means for the site to rely less on advertisements to sustain site management costs.[11] The paid tier was launched on February 11, 2020.[12] The paid tier was updated with more perks in March 2021, including allowing subscribers to browse 128 submissions per page on browse, search, and gallery views; thumbnails up to 300px; increased maximum caps on folders (75) and folder groups (30); and shortcuts around flood protections for uploading posts, comments and notes.[13]

Project Ferrox[edit]

Main article: Ferrox (software)

The FA development team was working on a new backend system called Ferrox which was to be used for the next major revision of Fur Affinity, and was to be made available as FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for other sites to use. By late 2009, the development of Ferrox had stalled, with the last change to the code being made on September 7, 2009. Days earlier, net-cat, who was acting as the lead Ferrox developer after Eevee had left, announced that the code was to be frozen, citing that "Nobody knows Python."[14]

Mascots[edit]

Fender, drawn by Mutley James

Fender is the Fur Affinity mascot, created by artist K-9 based on a character concept by Preyfar. He is half fox and half ferret, a "ferrox". On April Fool's Day 2007, Fender was depicted in the site's banner as a female dragon. This dragon was made a separate character and an official mascot of the site in May 2007, and named Rednef, or "Fender" spelled backward.

Controversies[edit]

Main article: History of Fur Affinity#Controversy

Being furry fandom's largest social art site for many years, Fur Affinity has been host to strenuous discussions on various topics, including the presence and later absence of cub pornography, staff appointments and departures, allegations of staff and user improprieties, and debate over what consists of suitable content for the site banner. Incidents of downtime and unauthorized access have also been discussed, both on Fur Affinity's forums and throughout the fandom.

Organization[edit]

Fur Affinity was previously owned by Ferrox Art LLC, a limited liability company founded 25 February 2008, registered in Lenhartsville, Pennsylvania.[15] On March 19, 2015, it was officially announced that Fur Affinity had been acquired by IMVU; the transaction had occurred in January 2015 but had not been publicly announced.[16] On February 1, 2021, Fur Affinity became independent again with ownership going back to Dragoneer, who has placed the website under the operation of a new company called Frost Dragon Art, LLC.[1]

Staff[edit]

Fur Affinity's staff as of August 2024 include:[17]

Staff Leads
  • Chase - Director of Operations
  • Shivadramon (Sciggles) - Director of Operations
Administrators
Tech Team

Two pseudonymous moderators, Quetzal and Gazelle, are also listed. A "System Account" is used to send anonymous notices.[18]

Past staff include Bazeel, Carenath, Cerbrus, Dragoneer, Glaide, Grammatist, Hendikins, Jasu Fox,[19] Keio, Kryphosdrgn, Kyoujin, Luftwoofe, Nero Silent, Oddy, Odin36519, Photographurer, Renashe Tradewind,[20] QMelon, quoting_mungo,[21] Sheepdust, Silver R. Wolfe, SSJ3Mewtwo, Starrykitten, Summercat, Surgat, Trpdwarf, Tsawolf, Writerwren and Xaerun.[22][citation needed]

Statistics[edit]

  • In late 2010, the monthly hosting bill for Fur Affinity was just under $1,700 [23]. This includes a full equipment rack, bandwidth, and IP addresses. The monthly cost likely increased with the addition of extra bandwidth (Increasing the total to 350Mbit) in early 2012.[24]
  • In less than a year since the site's re-launch, Fur Affinity gained over 45,000 users and over 300,000 submissions. [citation needed]
  • Alexa has previously ranked Fur Affinity in the top 4,000 sites on the web in 1 November 2007, showing greater traffic than the VCL for most of the previous year. The trend continued through 2008 and 2009. Fur Affinity has ranked as high as 3,475 on individual days, and close to 2,000 in the USA. In October 2010, Fur Affinity's rank fell to 7681.
  • Fur Affinity reached its 1,000,000th submission on 11 January 2008. It reached its 2,000,000th submission on 15 February 2009, and its 3,000,000th submission in November 2009.
  • As of 20 March 2015, the site had 11,142,451 active submissions (15,995,066 total created), 1,195,253 active users (1,218,456 created), 324,226,064 favorites, and an average of 671 accounts, 8,000 submissions, 42,462 comments and 10,452 page shouts were created per day.[25]
  • Fur Affinity say they served ~38.8TB of data to over 2.1 million visitors in February 2016.[26]

Hardware[edit]

Former Fur Affinity's servers Bahamut, Tiamat, Novastorm and Trogdor (unlabeled).

Fur Affinity owns various server hardware, some of which has been re-purposed or retired over time. Between 2010 and September 2020, the site was hosted out of an InfoRelay[27] (later acquired by Atlantic Metro) data center in Reston, Virginia.[28]

In April 2020, FurAffinity announced it was moving to a new "hardware platform" it called "King Ghidora"[29]. FurAffinity did not offer many specifics on this platform other than that it utilized "112 CPU cores, 1,536GB of memory, [and] 153.6TB of enterprise SSD storage" and that it was purchased from income from the FA subscription service. On September 9, FurAffinity announced the move was complete.[30] This transition relocated the FurAffinity servers to an undisclosed location, with Dragoneer only saying they had to ship a 14 Terabyte hard drive "cross country" as part of the move.[31] It is possible the servers were moved into a facility controlled by then-owner IMVU, which is headquartered in California.

While hosted at an InfoRelay, FA had access to 2Gbps of bandwidth leased as of November 2015.[32]

2014/15 upgrades[edit]

In September 2014, Fur Affinity bought additional hardware:[33][34]

  • File server: Supermicro SuperServer 6017R-72HDP 1U with Intel Xeon E5-2603 v2 Quad-Core CPU (1.8GHz, 10MB cache), 128Gb 1600MHz DDR3 ECC RAM, 12 WD 4TB SATAIII drives (7200 RPM, 64 MB cache)
  • Application servers (4): Asus RS300-E8-PS4 1U with Xeon E3-1240 v3 Quad-Core CPU (3.4GHz, 8MB cache), 32GB DDR ECC RAM, 2x128Gb SSDs
  • Advertising server: Xeon 1270 v3 Quad-Core CPU (3.5 GHz, 8MB cache), 32GB DDR3 ECC RAM and 2xSSDs

In Spring 2015, additional hardware purchases were announced, in connection with the IMVU purchase.

Pre-2020 hardware[edit]

Name Purpose Hardware Notes First Used Status
Routezilla Router Cisco 7301 router  ? Presumed in use
Switchthulu Network Switch 48-port Cisco Catalyst 3560. Replaced an older 24-port Cisco 3750, also called "Switchthulu"  ? Presumed in use
Neo Bahamut Database Backup Dual-core 2.0GHz Opteron 1212 with 2GB DDR2-667 RAM.[35] Storage consists of 4x 1TB hard drives in RAID5. Concern expressed by Dragoneer about its worth vs. power draw.  ? In use
Novastorm Database a Sun Fire X4150 manufactured by Wikipedia:Sun Microsystems with twin quad-core 2.5Ghz Xeon 5420 processors and 64GB of RAM (as of March 2010).[36] Storage consists of 2x 74GB 15K RPM hard drives in RAID1 and 6x146GB 15K RPM hard drives in RAID10. The server was initially purposed as the "Application server" but eventually converted to run the Database. This server was bought with donations following the July 2009 outage. Although Novastorm was replaced by Finn/Jake in September 2013, it is apparently still active, though its use is not clear.[37] August 2009 In use
Figment Virtualization Server
Ad server, Email server 		Dual quad-core 2.33Ghz Xeon 5345 with 32GB of RAM and 6x1TB[35] of storage. Figment was purchased with the intent of offering hosting[38] on it "sometime in April... or May, or maybe August" of 2010[39] and also served advertisements[40]. Server was named by Sciggles.[41] 2010 In use/"Spare Servers Pool"[42]
Sparkz Network Monitoring Twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. The server was named by FA donator Dax. This server is the only server in a group of four donated servers (The others being Shivan, Tonberry, and Lapse) that is known to have been put into service. November 30, 2010[43] In use
Finn* Database Server A custom-built server in a Supermicro SuperServer SYS-6027R-WRF chassis with at least one Intel Xeon 6C E5 2620 processor, 64GB of RAM, and 6 15k HDD's in an unknown RAID. This server was built by donations received in February 2013.[44] See note below. December 16, 2013 Still in use as of August 2016[45]
Jake* Database Server A custom-built server in a Supermicro SuperServer SYS-6027R-WRF chassis with at least one Intel Xeon 6C E5 2620 processor, 64GB of RAM, and 6 15k HDD's in an unknown RAID. This server was built by donations received in February 2013.[46] See note below September 16, 2013 (as "Finn")
November 2014 		Possibly in use
Smaug App Server 16-core Xeon, "full SSD", 128GB DDR4 RAM.[47] July 29, 2015[48] Presumed in use
Spike Storage Server 48TB disk drives[47][49]  ? Unknown
  • Finn and Jake are identical and were bought with the purpose of building a redundant database cluster. For unknown reasons, Finn was brought online first, with Jake supposedly following behind[50] later that week. In December 2013, an issue came up that put the site into "Read Only" for a week. FA then moved the database to Jake, which was apparently not put into service yet. However, in November 2014, Zidonuke said that Jake was sitting idle "for almost a year"[51], suggesting that when the database was moved, the names were swapped. As of November 2014, the idle database server was planned to be set as a slave for the purpose of handling notifications.

Additional retired hardware[edit]

Name Purpose Hardware Notes First Used Retired
Gecko Web Server The original FA server, is a dual 3.0Ghz Nocona Xeon system with 4GB of RAM. Storage consists of 2x 250GB hard drives. The server is still used to host Team Fortress 2 servers for the Furry Pound and Left 4 Dead servers for the Fur Affinity Steam Gamers group.  ?  ?
Tiamat Search Twin dual-core 2.0Ghz Opteron 2212 with 32GB DDR2-533 RAM  ? August 31, 2010[52]
Hardware Failure.
Removed May 2015.[53]
Shivan Unused/Unknown Twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. The server was named by FA donator TlaiLaxu.  ?  ?
Tonberry Unused/Unknown Twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM. The server was named by FA donator YiffyHusky.  ?  ?
Lapse Unused/Unknown Twin dual-core 2.4Ghz Opteron 2216 system with 48GB of RAM  ?  ?
Trogdor File/App Server A Dell Poweredge 2970 2U Server with 32GB RAM and twin AMD Opteron 2212 CPUs.[35] Storage consists of 6x 1TB hard drives - 4x in a RAID10 array, 1x RAID hotspare and 1x local backups. This server was bought with donations following the July 2009 outage. August 2009 October 2011[54]
Replaced by IO.
Removed May 2015.[55]
IO File/App Server An unspecified model which has dual Xeon E5435 CPUs[35], 16GB RAM, and 12 Terabytes worth of hard drives in it. This server replaced Trogdor. October 2011 December 25th, 2016[56]
Replaced by 48tb Storage Server, and replaced due to drive failures.[57]

Confirmed future features[edit]

Feature Official Mentions Status Notes
On-demand printing December 2005
November 2009
 		Not Implemented
Content filtering November 2006 Not Implemented Proposed for Ferrox.
New UI April 2007
May 2010
January 2011 		Implemented[58] Released from beta on December 31, 2019.
New "dark" theme May 2012
October 2012		 Part of new UI The new UI contains both "dark" and "light" themes, among others.
"Character Information" October 2012 In Progress A placeholder for a "Character Information" widget is present in the new dark theme.
Opossums (pss.ms) URL shortener August 2010 Not Implemented pss.ms is currently down.
Web hosting November 2009
March 2010 [4]
 		Not Implemented
Supporter ribbons November 2010 Not Implemented
Note/inbox search September 2010 Not Implemented
Artist list and reviews
"Commission Ratings" 		June 2006
January 2011 		Not Implemented
Improved commenting January 2011 Not Implemented

References[edit]

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Fender". "New Ownership, Updated Logo, & More". February 1, 2021. Fur Affinity. Retrieved on February 2, 2021.
  2. ↑ "All Our Base Are Belong To Us", Sciggles regains Furaffiity after major hack and obtains current ownership
  3. ↑ Fur Affinity Turns 6! - Dragoneer, Fur Affinity forum post (16 January 2011)
  4. ↑ FAU3 Announcement - Dragoneer, Fur Affinity journal (9 February 2009)
  5. ↑ Acceptable Upload Policy - Fur Affinity
  6. ↑ Admin mode on june 5th 2006 - Alkora, Fur Affinity forums (5 June 2006)
  7. ↑ Search is up! - Fur Affinity Forums (1 April 2007)
  8. ↑ SEARCH - Dragoneer, Fur Affinity journal (5 February 2009)
  9. ↑ Update Notices, Changelog & Banner journal posted to Fender's blog on May 24th, 2012. Retrieved 2012 November 25.
  10. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/7036344/ 09/13/2015 - Folders & Gallery Management Updates] News item dated 13 September 2015. Retrieved 27 October 2015
  11. ↑ [1]
  12. ↑ [2]
  13. ↑ [3]
  14. ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/49368-Code-freeze-on-current-Ferrox-codebase?p=1174129&viewfull=1#post1174129
  15. ↑ Ferrox Art LLC (entity number 3791597) - Pennsylvania Corporations, PA Department of State. Accessed 20 November 2013.
  16. ↑ [https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6588324 "FA Joins the IMVU Family" - Fur Affinity. March 19, 2015.
  17. ↑ "Staff" - Fur Affinity. Retrieved March 9, 2018.
  18. ↑ "Fur Affinity System Account" - Fur Affinity]
  19. ↑ Stepping down as Administrator - Jasu Fox, Fur Affinity (23 October 2015)
  20. ↑ My experiences as a member of Fur Affinity staff, and my recent removal. - GoingToTheOcean, Reddit (16 August 2016)
  21. ↑ Resigning from FA staff - quoting_mungo's journal. Retrieved March 9, 2018.
  22. ↑ Five Fur Affinity staff resign, some citing leadership failures - Rakuen Growlithe, Flayrah (29 October 2011)
  23. ↑ http://twitpic.com/2g8t5x - TwitPic Posted on August 19, 2010 by Dragoneer
  24. ↑ https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3484539/
  25. ↑ "[https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/578970926575931394 For those interested, here's some spiffy FA statistics! http://pastebin.com/DjsSCcuh"] - Dragoneer, Twitter (20 March 2015)
  26. ↑ "In February, FA served up 1,777,662,272 files (over 38.8TB total bandwidth) to 2,173,564 total visitors." - Fur Affinity, Twitter (5 March 2016)
  27. ↑ "Our historical uptime has actually been fairly solid since we moved to InfoRelay. Prior to that... yeah. It was bad." - Fur Affinity, Twitter (20 October 2014)
  28. ↑ "The current servers are hosted in a professional colo facility in Reston, VA." - Fur Affinity, Twitter (7 June 2010)
  29. ↑ 4/16/20 - New Hardware & Policy Updates - Fender (16 April 2020)
  30. ↑ 9/9/20 - Site Migration Complete Known Issues - Fender (9 September 2020)
  31. ↑ "To aid in the data transfer to the new FA host we bought a 14TB hard drive and filled it, shipped it cross country, then uploaded it to the new servers." - Dragoneer, Twitter (10 September 2020)
  32. ↑ "Tonight's maintenance was to upgrade FA to a 2 gigabit network link." - Fur Affinity, Twitter (3 November 2015)
  33. ↑ Fur Affinity Parts Wishlist - Dragoneer (3 September 2014)
  34. ↑ Banner Update, Upcoming Beta & Ad Server Upgrade - Fender (17 September 2014)
  35. ↑ 35.0 35.1 35.2 35.3 http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4383428/#cid:32107771
  36. ↑ Novastorm upgrade tweet - Dragoneer's Twitter (23 March 2010)
  37. ↑ https://trello.com/c/CLruJ1b5/65-upgrade-packages-on-novastorm
  38. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10203450025 - FA Twitter - March 8, 2010
  39. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10942579229 - FA Twitter - March 23 2010
  40. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10936829317 - FA Twitter
  41. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/10585322442 - FA Twitter
  42. ↑ https://trello.com/c/oy0HkfgT/6-repurpose-figment-in-spare-servers-pool
  43. ↑ @Furaffinity tweet
  44. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4389184
  45. ↑ Mainsite database maintenance on Aug 16, 2016 at 1PM UTC - Yak, Fur Affinity Forums (16 August 2016)
  46. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4389184
  47. ↑ 47.0 47.1 Filling Tiamat's old space will be Spike (16-core, full SSD, 128GB RAM) and Smaug (48TB storage server). - Fur Affinity, Twitter (10 May 2015)
  48. ↑ "Earlier today, we officially rolled the site over to our new app server, Smaug (a 16-core Xeon system running DDR4 and SSDs). Woosh!" - Fur Affinity, Twitter (29 July 2015)
  49. ↑ "Finn, Jake, Spike and Smaug" - Dragoneer, Twitter (6 September 2015)
  50. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5058966/
  51. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6265766#cid:43149324
  52. ↑ http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/22617961790 - FA Twitter
  53. ↑ "Tiamat, one of FA's oldest servers (2007), is finally off to greener pastures." - Fur Affinity, Twitter (10 May 2015)
  54. ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/108936-10-17-2011-File-read-only-mode
  55. ↑ "Turns out we are also saying a fond farewell to Trogdor. His days of FA burnination are over." - Fur Affinity, Twitter (10 May 2015)
  56. ↑ https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/813187858731331584 - Dragoneer, Twitter (Dec. 25 2016)
  57. ↑ https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/813281978900447236 - Dragoneer, Twitter (Dec. 26 2016)
  58. ↑ https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/9364332

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

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