Furocity
| Furocity | |
|---|---|
 VixelPixen, the Furocity mascot, as part of the site's banner. | |
| Author(s) | Owner, Lead Administrator & Site Founder: Gavin O. Daemonshyai |
| Website | http://www.furocity.com
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| Launch date | October 21, 2003 - September 30, 2009 (as a Gaming and Roleplaying site)
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| Genre | Multimedia archive |
| Rating(s) | ?
|
Furocity is a social networking website, image gallery and role-playing profile site aimed at the furry fandom. The site has been through major evolutions since its founding and had a registered userbase of over 34,000 people, although it is relatively inactive as of 2012.
Contents |
[edit] History
The site was founded in Fall 2003 by Gavin O. Daemonshyai and Vallen, New England-based coders. Originally, the site was strictly designed for roleplaying profiles, in response to Furcadia's limit on character descriptions. Over time though, the website became useful for other roleplaying games, such as World of Warcraft and Ragnarok Online, and soon became an important site for roleplayers, furry and non-furry alike.
- Around 2008, gallery and blogging functionality was added to the site in order for members to display their work. However, because many felt as though that these additional functions felt tacked on (including Gavin himself), an entirely recoded version of Furocity was written starting in Spring 2009, in order to shift the focus of the site to multimedia upload. This new version launched about six months later at the beginning of October, which also incorporated the support of written and musical submissions. Since the launch of the new version of the site, Furocity has amassed thousands of submissions from its users.
- On March the 4th, 2010, the server suffered a PSU failure which sent it offline.[1] The backup server was affected by a similar problem and the downtime persisted until April 5.[2]
- On July 14, 2011, a "merger" of staff and resources was announced between Furocity and Fur Affinity.[3] The sites themselves remained independent. Seven Furocity staff joined FA's ranks, but the majority left at the end of October 2011, citing friction with FA's existing staff.[4]
- On the evening of November 2, 2011, furocity.com began redirecting to Inkbunny with no explanation.
- From November 3 on, the site's Url would redirect to several sites and media, such as Inkbunny, SoFurry, a YouTube video of The End by The Doors, and cycling back to some of those addressees again, including Furocity.
- On November 7, A "Gavin" announced on a SoFurry post that Furocity had closed, in part due to the problems caused by the collapsed merger with Fur Affinity. People commented that this "Gavin" was in fact a hacker that had taken over the site.[5]
- On November 17, the site came back online under the control of its owners. The real Gavin explained the situation on his blog on Furocity, and pointed out that the November 7 SoFurry Gavin was an impostor.[6]
- In early September 2012, the site disappeared with no explanation, and remained offline for three weeks before returning.
- In late November 2012, the site disappeared with no explanation, and has been offline for sometime. When searched via Google web services; page results the following query in text.
"A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt"
[edit] Features and services
Furocity allows users to choose whether their profile centers around their gaming and roleplaying characters, or around their gallery submissions. The gaming/roleplaying page layout focuses on a character profile and description and user comments. Gallery-centric accounts minimizes comments and character profiles in favor of gallery uploads, favorites, and journal entries.
Like LiveJournal, the site has the ability to make a journal entry friends-only or even private, so that only people you have friended (as opposed to watched) could view specific journals.
[edit] AUP
Furocity is more restrictive than some art websites with regard to more extreme fetishes. As of December 2009, it was against the Acceptable Upload Policy to submit art revolving around the cub or bestiality fetishes.[7] A tag-based filtering system is used along with a multi-level rating system (General, Mature, Adult, Possibly Offensive), so that users can avoid looking at submissions which they find objectionable, assuming they were tagged and rated correctly.
[edit] Paid accounts
The site offers paid accounts to provide an incentive for monetary contributions to the site, much like deviantART. Paying users have larger upload limits, the ability to choose what sort of notifications (gallery entries and journals) they get from individual friends, and access to a commission queue in order to keep track of commissions. Features such as a folder sorting system, a page on which commission information are displayed, and the ability to delete, screen, and freeze comments are available to all users.
[edit] References
- ↑ Furocity tweet (4 March 2010)
- ↑ Daemonshyai tweet (6 April 2010)
- ↑ Fur Affinity/Furocity Merger Announcement - The Dragoneer, Fur Affinity Forums (14 July 2011)
- ↑ Five Fur Affinity staff resign, some citing leadership failures - Rakuen Growlithe, Flayrah
- ↑ Furocity Merger?. Comments about "Gavin"s post on the SoFurry forums. Retrieved November 8, 2011
- ↑ Gavin O. Daemonshyai's blog response to the November "situation" with Furocity. Retrieved November 17, 2011
- ↑ Acceptable Submission Policy