Furbooru

Furbooru
Author(s)	Staff Administrators: Luna, Fletch Site developers: Luna, DJDavid98, Xena
Website	https://furbooru.org/
Status	Online
Launch date	April 24, 2020
Genre	Booru-style image board
Rating(s)

Furbooru is a booru-style image board that is the furry fandom equivalent of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic image board Derpibooru, created by the latter board's management. Furbooru runs on a fork of Philomena, the same open source content platform that Derpibooru uses.

The site's logo depicts its mascot Astra, a purple fox of ambiguous gender created by Aureai and the site's staff. Astra's name was chosen via a forum poll in July 2020.

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History

Furbooru was launched in April 2020. However, its history dates back a few years prior.

Early history

The management of Derpibooru had discussed as far back as 2014 about expanding the horizons of their site software beyond My Little Pony content. Concepts were proposed for Fanbooru / TheBooru, a general-purpose image booru, which would permit images from any popular franchise. The main selling point was a powerful filtering system, which would allow images to co-exist on the same database, separated by domain. For example, a user might visit a "furry" subdomain, and be scoped to only see things which are tagged as furry. The main (unscoped) site would act as a general hub for all content from all fandoms.

Initial prototypes were written by a small group of Derpibooru developers at the time. At least two meaningful attempts were made at implementing this idea between 2017 and 2019. However, due to lack of organization, and the large scope of the project, these quickly stalled in progress and eventually got cancelled.

In 2019, liamwhite, a Derpibooru developer at the time, publicly acknowledged many flaws in the closed-source booru-on-rails software used by the website, and announced that a replacement software was being implemented in the open-source Philomena project. The new website backend was written in a different programming language, Elixir, which promised better utilization of hardware resources. It was launched as an open beta on December 7, 2019 on Derpibooru, and replaced the old software approximately two weeks later, on December 20, 2019.

Launch

In early 2020, talks reignited among Derpibooru staff about launching a new image board. A small group of staff, consisting of Luna, Joey, Teaspoon and multiple developers and moderators of Derpibooru split off into a then-private Furbooru Discord server. A decision was made to scope the project down to only the furry fandom, and to use the new Philomena software as a basis for the website. A fork of it was created, with altered branding and theme color.

On April 22, 2020, the initial database of the site was seeded. Over the course of April 22 and April 23, the site branding was changed, and new code was tested for stability and issues. On April 24, the site was officially launched to the public as a beta.

On July 5, 2020, Furbooru officially exited the beta status, and users were given commemorative badges if they registered and had some activity up until July 31, 2020.

Policies and content

Furbooru prohibits any content which is illegal on the territory of the European Union and the Netherlands. As such, bestiality and underage NSFW content are strictly prohibited. While not strictly illegal in their jurisdiction, the site staff has elected to steer on the safer side, and prohibit cub/loli content entirely. In addition, content considered to constitute hate speech, such as racism or nazism, is also prohibited.

Furbooru maintains and respects a Do Not Post list, which any artist may add themselves to in order to control how their content is shared on the platform, including prohibiting posting their content there at all. Additionally, posting private content from pay-to-view sites, such as Patreon, is prohibited, with the exception of publicly-accessible versions of such content posted by the artist (like content previews, or advertisements).

Content may also be deleted from Furbooru if it's insufficiently related to the furry fandom. Under strict guidelines, some non-furry content may be posted (such as aliens, or images as part of comics about furry characters which do not contain any furry characters on them).

Events

Furbooru occasionally launches themed events on certain dates of the year. As of June 2024, Furbooru has observed the following events:

• April Fools 2021 (DerpiFur - a fake merger between Derpibooru and Furbooru)
• April Fools 2022 (Even Worse Kobold - a parody referencing the acquisition of e621 by Bad Dragon)
• April Fools 2023 (Something is Definitely Happening - nothing actually changed, but the staff pretended like it did)

Trivia

• The site was initially going to have an orange theme, but Joey suggested it to be purple, and after a quick round of voting among the founding staff of the site, it won by majority vote.
• As of June 2024, Furbooru receives 17k unique visitors and 500k requests per day, and transfers over 350GB of media daily.