Fchan

fchan, also known as Fchan and Furchan, is a furry imageboard. It was designed to be a 2ch style art community based on the wakaba system where users can request and post furry related images in English.

History
fchan was created in response to the loss of 5chan (and thus the furry boards that were hosted there) and as a response to the refusal of the 4chan administrators to create a furry board (some artists complained that their work was being posted without their consent to 4chan's /b/ board, which led 4chan owner "moot" to declare that "this is why we can't have a furry board").

Although some have suggested that fchan may have been created in response to the April Fool's joke on 4chan in which a fake furry board was opened and then closed a few days later with the banning of all those who posted in it, fchan predates 4chan's prank.

fchan was designed to be the first 2chan-style image-board to cater specifically to furry related material. It was originally created by Dr. Pon in November 2004 and was hosted for free on freeserverhost.com. However, it soon ran into bandwidth limitations there, and hosting services were offered by hentaiplanet.net. Dr. Pon stepped down as administrator due to a lack of time to oversee fchan, and the users nominated Sage Freehaven as the new admin. In mid-2005, Sage Freehaven started handing control to a new team, led by Sage Nadia, due to his impending loss of Internet access.

fchan was administered by Sage Nadia and moderated by Xenofur and Raven until late April 2006, when Sage Nadia stepped down and handed control over to Xenofur. Under Sage Nadia's administration, fchan deviated significantly from its original design of being a 2chan-style image-board: it is heavily moderated, not only for images, but also for comments deemed "disruptive" or otherwise overly antagonistic toward individuals, whether they be artists, other posters, or the site's staff. This is in sharp contrast with almost nonexistent moderation on 2chan, and the mostly-unobtrusive moderation of 4chan. In addition, the wakaba image-board software has been modified to highlight the site's most recent FAQs, and to provide a quick way for users to report comments and images they think should be removed. An attempt to create a furry image-board that stayed closer to the 2chan format, ChanPlz, was short-lived.

fchan has evolved into a furry community meeting ground, a place for new artists to post their work and get feedback (sometimes more negative than positive), as well as a showcase for lesser known artists.

In December, 2007, Nadia once again took control of fchan, resulting in some staff dismissal and some leaving of their own free will.

As an April Fool's day prank in 2010, the majority of the boards were re-routed to link only to /f/emale. The result was a backlash from a small percentage of site visitors feeling it was their duty to fight back by posting the most graphic /ah/ (alternative hard) material they could find, including multiple previously banned memes and live action animated gifs of animal slaughter, led to a decision by Nadia to shut the site down for a 24 hour period. Upon loading fchan, visitors were greeted with a page which explained the site was down due to immaturity. Her public statement also thanked another chan, /furi/, for playing into the joke as well as she had predicted.

Banned and restricted artwork

 * March 2006 - Art depicting drug references was relegated to the /ah/ board The official ruling by Nadia stated that depictions of drug use was allowed as long as it could not be interpreted as an instructional reference.


 * March 2008 - Fchan bans the posting of pornographic cub art. Current policy, as posted by Nadia on /dis/ states, "Discussing CUB porn on /dis/ is grounds for immediate deletion without warning. If you wish to discuss fchan's policies relating this, contact a mod on IRC directly, they will happily answer you." This announcement, and subsequent bans of some aggressive protesters, has drawn some criticism from the cub art community.


 * June 2008 - Art depicting incestuous situations was also banned, to prevent any "loopholes" allowing the previously-banned cub art to be posted.

Structure
Due to the longer history of fchan in comparison to other furry image boards, fchan possesses a base standard hierarchy structure that has been followed (to various extents) by other competing image boards.

Normal Image Boards

 * /f/ (Female) - "Lesbian or solo female pictures. (no males or herms allowed)"
 * /m/ (Male) - "Gay or solo male pictures. (no females or herms allowed)"
 * /h/ (Herm) - "Pictures featuring dickgirls/herms. (unless it's /a/, /ah/, /toon/, or /c/ material)"
 * /s/ (Straight/ Bisexual) - "Pictures of anything involving both genders. No solo pictures. (unless it's /a/, /ah/ or /c/ material)"
 * /toon/ (Toon) - "Images drawn in a toony style and non-morphic characters. It is NOT meant for cartoon characters drawn in a realistic style. These belong in their relevant boards," as per this thread
 * /a/ (Alternative) - "Pictures of anything that wouldn't be considered "normal" furry porn, but is considered acceptable fetish by the majority of the fandom. (bondage, bukkake, micro/macro, tentacles, oviposition, hypnosis/mind-control, etc.)"
 * /ah/ (Alt(hard)) - "Pictures of the really hardcore stuff and that which squicks the majority of the fandom (guro, non-consentual, rape, scat, violence, vore, watersports, drug use, etc.) Babyfurs that are not clearly adult, and Cub art, will not be tolerated."
 * /c/ (Clean) - "Non-pornographic furry pictures. This board should be worksafe at all times."

Specialized Image Boards

 * /artist/ (Artist)
 * /crit/ (Critique)
 * /b/ (Banner)

Message Boards

 * /dis/ (Discussion)
 * /req/ (Requests)
 * /faq/ (Rule Clarification)

Do Not Post Policy
While some artists (such as Kacey Miyagami, Wookiee and James Hardiman) use fchan as a free advertisement tool and a way to contact their fans, others have requested that their work not be distributed on fchan, resulting in a Do Not Post list. Anyone intentionally violating the Do Not Post list is banned from posting on the image boards. However, inclusion on the DNP requires an "opt out" request on the part of the artist, or third party representative, which has to be made directly to the admin of the site and includes an identity verification. This additional policy was put in place after a number of attempts by unauthorized parties who attempted to impersonate artists and get them placed on the DNP list when they either enjoyed their artwork being posted or were neutral to the site.

Some believe this policy runs counter to the wishes of artists who have left the fandom. These people are not around to apply for membership within the DNP list, and therefore their work will be distributed even if they have specified on the work itself that it is not to be copied.

Downtimes
fchan used to be hosted for free on the experimental server of a private hosting company. Due to this, there were a number of calamities that befell fchan, such as Hardware failures in the server, the server rack or its power supply; hardware damage during maintenance; power outages to the datacenter or problems when the ISP changes their DNS configuration. Since then, fchan has moved servers to hentaiplanet.net. Up until now only one database corruption and not a single downtime can be attributed to the software itself, while all downtimes can be attributed to server failures.

On March 2, 2011, the board was generally inaccessible for several days due to issues with their DNS registrar's configuration.

On March 25, 2011, the fchan.us domain's functionality had been restored.

On December 7, 2019, several of the imageboards were down and appeared to be going down slowly one by one. This had been going on for about two weeks now.

As of December 13, 2019 all boards are restored.