Talk:FurNation

Greenreaper wrote, They've dropped the whole idea of AnthroNation, it seems. Can anyone improve this article? I don't know much about the site . . .

Unofficially, it seems like the FurNation team has all but halted work on the site to focus on Second Life. Nexxus and Ratchett can be found there seemingly 24/7. Thier priorities seemed to change in the past year with FurNation's stance going from web hosting site to just being a 3D chat world in Second Life. It's been pretty visible within the community in the past.

Changes and tweaks to the FurNation Worlds Second Life areas seems to come almost daily while maintenance and support for the site take months (if not years) to complete, if at all. At AnthroCon 2005, the FurNation table showed this reflection as well, with FurNation's table hosting live demos of Second Life... and deterring their focus from selling wares, promiting the site and artists.

The site has gained something of a reputation in the past few years for being incredibly unresponsive to requests of support, taking months to response to single inquiries (the lack sheer lack of support has been one of the reasons people have been migrating to Furtopia and other alternatives). --Preyfar 11:08, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

I've been hearing about this off and on for a while, now. I predict an eventual catastrophic failure of the FurNation server (probably an inability to pay bandwidth fees); followed by Nexxus either dropping Second Life entirely to fix it, or lots of promises and then a limping return, or even no return at all. Considering how obsessed he appears to be, I don't think there's much chance of him taking a moderate approach. Back up your archives regularly, folks; you might not get a chance to retrieve them. -- Siege 11:44, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

I just want to add a little note about FurNation. This is a free service. You can dislike it, you can enjoy it, you can complain because it is not professionnal or complain because it is too cheap. Just remember one thing when you do this: It is free. If you don't like FurNation, best way to react is to seek for something more to your tastes. (same goes with a lots of Furry services) --Ozone Griffox 14:55, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Actually the same goes for ANY service. Furry is not unique or special in this regard.--Duncan da Husky 15:34, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Somewhat ironically, just last night I started advertising on the "FurNation" keyword on that basis, along with a few keywords (right now the link just goes to the main page, so don't bother clicking it unless you like giving Google more of my money than necessary ;-). It's not the best of ads - if anyone can think up some better wording, I'd be interested in hearing it. --GreenReaper^(talk) 16:36, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, that seems a bit adversarial, which doesn't really seem warranted given that we're completely different sites. Maybe something like, "Find out about furries from A to Z at WikiFur, The Furry Encyclopedia!" would be better? Huh, looks like there's not a lot furry-related that comes up with a search for "furry". Hey Giza, did you drop the "furry" AdWord for Anthrocon? What were the clickthroughs like? --Duncan da Husky 16:53, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Ideally it would mention FurNation in some way as that relates to whether or not the ad actually shows up (or rather how much has to be paid to get it to show up :-). I'll try poking at it a bit later.

Clickthrough rates are also fairly low if you're just using a keyword for the topic rather than the actually targetting content at it. I don't know for sure yet, but I'm betting that people are far more likely to click through the ad I placed for Anthrocon than they are for the ad I placed for yiff/yiffing/yiffstar/yiffy (55 clicks, 5,492 impressions, 1.0% clickthrough, $0.09/click, $4.84 spent), because it's actually got content relevant to the topic.

Generic keywords aren't the best. "Furry" costs a lot of money. The minimum I could get for it to even show up for search is $0.30/click, and you'd get about 120 clicks a day, so it would cost $36.00 a day. And the reason you'd get a lot of clicks is that people not interested in furry fandom would be clicking, so you'd be wasting at least half of that, probably more.

Actually, generic ads aren't much better. I'd recommend that if Anthrocon continues its ad campaign that it should use more specific ad text - right now it's got one message for all keywords, which isn't likely to work as well as targetted ad text for each keyword. See above comment re: yiffing. --GreenReaper^(talk) 17:32, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Doesn't bother me either way. A lot of people rely on it to store their art for them, as they would any archive they go to. What happened to FurNation's fundraising efforts? Did the magazine vanish? Did people stop contributing to it? No... Second Life has taken over efforts to fund the original service, as Preyfar describes, above. Free or not, it shouldn't take months for a server admin to respond to administrative requests, even if it's just "Hi, kind of busy, it'll take me a while to do that for you." -- Siege 16:59, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, as admin and community leader for FurAffinity, I still believe that is our duty as sites to provide top level service, whether or not we charge. The moment we made ourselves a community site we took the responsibility to provide said community with the best level of service we can provide, and failure to do so everyone involved on a whole. The service of our site, like FurNation, affects the fandom, people, attitudes.

It's like raising a child. Not everybody wants to raise a child, but they have the responsibility to raise the child as well as they can, because the actions of that child can be far reaching in other facets of life. People content at the service will be happy, people upset may take their anger out on it elsewhere. That's both my perosnal and professional stance as a community member and community leader.--Preyfar 17:41, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

As a FurNation representative I'd like to respond to a couple of the accusations being made here.

1. The magazine is not dead and still serves as a source of funding to pay the hosting costs of the FurNation server. The latest issue made its debut at AnthroCon this month and is now available to purchase at the FurPlanet website. Issue #8 is scheduled for release at 2007's Further Confusion.

2. Its hard to run a website, publishing business and Second Life community by yourself or with only one other person to assist you. Other websites that are only a website and nothing else have multiple people to admin the site so I'd expect that occasionally a request for assistance would fall through the cracks with only Nexxus and Rackett being there to handle things. To assist with that problem, Nexxus has begun to increase FurNation's staff so that support for web clients will be returned much quicker. I'm assisting in adding new websites and handling password requests, etc as well as lining up material for future issues of FurNation Magazine.

3. Having found a good staff of admins to handle FurNation Worlds on Second Life, Nexxus is stepping back a bit from SL in order to put more time into updating the web server and publishing comics. Also, its not hard for him to seem to be on SL 24/7 when he has 3 monitors and 2 computers with a switch to go between them. He can be on SL to respond to IMs there and work on laying out a magazine or running a server diagnostic at the same time.

4. Nexxus would be the first to admit that the FurNation main page needs a makeover. It is receiving that makeover now and should hopefully be online in the near future.

On a personal note, I'd like to say that no one at FurNation has gone out of their way to attack or defame any other site or admin. Yet, I've seen the esteemed admin of Fur Affinity attacking FurNation on here, LiveJournal and elsewhere. The FurNation staff are not looking for a competition with any other art hosting site, but I feel like we're being attacked here. I can't think of any furry sites off hand that have not had a problem with occasional downtime during their years of service. FurNation has been online over 10 years now. Look to your own site first before attacking another for having downtime issues. --FuzzWolf 23:02, 29 June 2006

Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)

That's what I get to see when I go to http://www.furnation.com/ : Bad Request (Invalid Hostname). What's wrong with it? --Unci 10:17, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

I get the same error, so it's not just you. This isn't anywhere near my field of expertise, but when I did some Googling it appears that the likely culprit is a misconfigured Microsoft IIS server.----DuncanDaHusky^(talk) 11:15, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

It seems to be back now. --Douglas Muth 13:33, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

Possible closure

I removed the PayPal donation link from the "possible closure" material I added as I wasn't sure it was appropriate to leave it in. If it's okay and someone wants to restore it, the link is https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&business=accounts%40nexxusomnimedia%2ecom&item_name=FurNation%20Web%20Service&no_shipping=0&no_note=1&tax=0&currency_code=USD&lc=US&bn=PP%2dDonationsBF&charset=UTF%2d8 (apologies to anyone else using Chrome, as this seems to screw up the page width). I figured it probably wasn't appropriate to leave in as the intent is to chronicle, not solicit by proxy. --Silvermink 16:07, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Spinoff vs. conversion

Moved from the article, posted by 71.164.217.54. --GreenReaper^(talk) 01:37, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

WEBMASTER NOTE: AnthroNation was a planned spinoff, not a replacement for FurNation.

Revival

Started a revival project 12/2019 named FurNationReborn(FNR) that aims at restoring what FurNation originally was: an art site that provided hosting. Nothing more, nothing less. Several attempts to reach out to Nexxus on the matter have been futile, even went so far as asking Marcus from AFR to buzz him to no avail. He's either not online anymore or doesn't care about FurNation in its entirety(I'm told the regions in SL are slowly sinking). I've also corrected most if all of the original hardware/software/staff problems that plagued FN and even have proper artist image protection that isn't javascript. Do I feel I have the brass to pull this off? Yep and I'm not alone. --Logansryche 06:01, 19 February 2020 (UTC)