Weasyl

Weasyl is a social art gallery website that serves both the furry fandom and the broader online artistic community; it is "designed for artists, writers, musicians, and more to share their work with other artists and fans." Its primary features are media submissions, character profiles, and journal entries. Since its launch in September 2012, Weasyl has added a commission marketplace, redesigned its thumbnail system to support larger images, and released its source code as open-source software.

As of May 2014, with some 69,000 registered users, Weasyl hosted over 600,000 submissions, 36,000 characters, and 51,000 journals. By June 2015, the site had grown to over 1,000,000 submissions.

Founding
Development on what would later become Weasyl began in 2011 as an educational hobby project. On September 7, Kihari began posting submissions to Fur Affinity describing Fergal, his "ha-ha-only-serious project to design a functional artsite", including screenshots of its user interface. Within days of the first submission, Taw contacted Kihari to offer his assistance as a graphic designer; together they built a second prototype website, discarding the first attempt in order to change programming languages and database software.

On October 28, Fergal was made available as a demo to users who were interested in bug testing and suggesting new features. This version of the site was hosted entirely on an Acer Aspire One netbook. Users had to be preapproved in order to register; by the end of the year, 16 such accounts had been created, including those belonging to Ben and Fay V, who also volunteered to join the project as staff members.

The rest of the original staff joined on during the early weeks of 2012; by mid-February, Aden, Fiz, Judicant, Juste, Kaycee, Pencil Lion, Prawst, PunkJax, RabidRaccoon, Stereo, and Takun had come forward to help shape and promote the new website while it was being developed.

Rebranding as Weasyl
During a discussion on January 10 regarding the project's name, Ben proposed rebranding it as Weasyl, a deliberately misspelled reference to the art- and animal-related words easel and weasel. The site's domain name was registered the same day.

Fay V designed Wesley, the project's mascot. Most of the official artwork featuring Wesley that was used for site promotion and news posts was drawn by Fay V, Fiz, and Stereo.

PunkJax designed Weasyl's logo, which features a red beret containing the letter W in white font, optionally followed by the rest of the name.

Weasyl LLC was formed on March 5, 2012, becoming the website's operating organization. At the time of its founding, Ben and Kihari each held 50% ownership interest in the company.

Fundraiser and promotion
On June 1, the staff launched a two-month-long donation drive on Indiegogo to cover the project's startup costs, with a target goal of $5,000. Donations of $5 or more promised the donor an invitation to the site's closed beta release, which would allow the donor to create an account on the site and invite others to do so as well. The fundraiser came to a close on August 1, with over 200 donors contributing a total of $6,015. Proceeds from the donation drive were used, among other expenses, to pay for hosting on Amazon Web Services' cloud computing platform.

Aden, Ben, and Fay V presented a panel at Anthrocon on June 15 during which they discussed the project's goals and unveiled the new user interface that Aden, the team's front-end developer, had designed and created for the site. The panelists also answered questions from attendees and viewers of the panel's live video stream.

Weasyl Forums opened on July 26 and served as an official source for project announcements, as well as a means for staff and future users to interact with one another. Although the site had originally been scheduled to open to the public during the summer of 2012, the launch was delayed as development continued though the summer and into autumn; the forums, in the meantime, became the central hub of Weasyl's community. On September 16, the staff announced that the site would launch on the last day of that month.

Launch
On September 29, a landscaping crew severed the telephone line that provided Internet access to Kihari's home; because the problem could not be fixed until the following week, he would have to travel elsewhere to orchestrate Weasyl's launch. Despite the setback, the staff decided that they could still proceed with opening the site.

While final preparations were being made, members of Vivisector's IRC channel revealed that they had been able to access the website's private keys and an internal email account password due to a server misconfiguration that exposed portions of the source code. The problem was corrected and the compromised secrets were changed without further incident.

Weasyl launched into closed beta on the afternoon of September 30, and began sending invitation emails to fundraiser donors that same evening. As users began registering accounts and submitting content, many problems with the site became apparent; some users noted that web pages were responding very slowly, while others experienced software bugs, unintuitive behavior, and error messages, as dozens of threads in the support section of Weasyl Forums documented. Although the speed issues were assuaged by increasing the server's compute resources, the staff determined that the site was not acceptable in its current state, and the following day it was taken offline so that the problems could be addressed.

One user claimed to have discovered a security vulnerability in the site's password reset system and discussed the matter privately with Weasyl staff; however, it was concluded that the user had misunderstood how the system worked, and that the suspected vulnerability did not actually exist.

Public access to the site was restored on the evening of October 7 after a number of issues had been fixed. Several members of AnthroChat's #hackerfurs IRC channel assisted with changes to the code and server configuration that greatly improved the speed and stability of the site. Over the weekend of October 13, the site was once again taken offline in order to migrate from AWS to a server hosted by AYK Solutions; additional bugfixes were also made during the downtime.

Open beta
By mid-November, some 5,000 users had created accounts on Weasyl, and as the community continued to grow, the need for additional technical staff became clear. Ikani joined the project around this time, serving as its system administrator. Several more volunteers came forward over the following weeks, including Catalepsy, Kauko, Struguri, Weykent, and Zygen. The new technical staff were able to take over the responsibility of coding and maintaining the site, and development on Weasyl continued at a steady pace.

On Valentine's Day, February 14, 2013, the site transitioned to open beta, enabling any user to create an account without an invitation. Weasyl remained in open beta until January 29, 2016, when the staff removed the beta designation from the site's header logo, suggesting that the team considered the site to be usable and complete by that time.

Ownership changes
On March 1, 2013, Ben announced that he would be stepping away from his role at Weasyl LLC amid accusations that he had sockpuppeted on Fur Affinity's donation drive journal, suggesting that users should donate to other organizations instead. In a blog post on June 6, Ben stated that the accusation was "just a rumour" and suggested that without "actual physical evidence of a claim like that, don't believe everything you read." Ben officially submitted his resignation on December 27 and relinquished his ownership interest in Weasyl LLC shortly thereafter.

In a staff-only forum post on November 16, 2014, Kihari announced his "retirement as the manager of Weasyl LLC" and stated that he would be transferring control of the company to Ikani; the transfer of ownership interest was completed on November 22. Kihari remained on staff as a moderator and email support agent until his resignation on April 12, 2016.

Special features
Weasyl users can upload reference sheets of their original characters and fursonas by using character submissions; these are distinct from other submission types in that they specifically index biographical information and a physical description of the character.

Submissions can optionally be organized into user-defined folders; a special root folder is the default location.

If a user wishes to display artwork created by another person on their own profile page, a feature known as collections allows the user to post a link to the original submission in their own gallery. The purpose of this feature is to reduce duplicate submissions and give due credit to the artist, while still providing a means for other users (for example, those whose characters are depicted in the artwork) to direct their own followers to view the work.

Artists who broadcast themselves composing artwork using a live video feed can send streaming notifications to their Weasyl followers, including a content description and link to the stream page; these notifications can be set to expire automatically after a specified amount of time. The user's streaming status is also visible on their profile page.

Users can designate one another as friends, a relationship distinct from followers that allows them to share friends-only submissions with their chosen acquaintances.

Mascot
Weasyl's mascot is Wesley, an ermine dressed in a beret and vest. His tail is sometimes depicted as being tipped in wet paint, as if he had used it as a paintbrush. Wesley's markings change with the seasons; during the summer his fur consists of brown and tan colors, whereas during the winter it is white. Fay V designed the mascot with input from the rest of Weasyl's staff, and also created the original drawing of him. Since the character's inception, fan art of Wesley has been drawn by many different artists.

Server configuration
Weasyl is partitioned into several units, most of which seem to be virtual machines using VMware ESXi, providing what appear to be the following services:

Retired units include:

The names effigy, eisler, and median are mentioned in the context of handling requests, as were carlotta (to early January 2014) and saturn (to mid-April 2014).

The site has been hosted by EGIHosting, a Hurricane Electric reseller, since mid-December 2013.

In October 2014, Weasyl acquired a 32TB 12Gb/s SAS disk array with SSD cache and an additional dual 1Gb/s network card. The announcement came as current submission storage reached 75% of capacity and coincided with a series of DDoS attacks on major furry art sites, resulting in a burst of Weasyl users that may have hastened the need for the upgrade.

FenderBender
Shortly after Weasyl's launch, Dr. Dos created a software tool called FenderBender that assisted in copying one's Fur Affinity watch list to Weasyl; although not developed by Weasyl itself, the tool was promoted by the staff as a third-party project. The tool's name was a reference to Fender, Fur Affinity's mascot, and also alluded to the damage caused by a minor automobile accident. In December 2013, Fur Affinity spent several days in read-only mode due to a database issue, resulting in increased traffic for other furry art sites. Dragoneer, the owner of Fur Affinity at the time, rebuked Weasyl for the existence and name of the tool, accusing the staff of "trying to kick us while we're down with this insultingly named script." Both Dr. Dos and Weasyl defended the software, stating that it had been released several months prior and that no offense had been intended. Nonetheless, the project was soon renamed to SOFT, or Simple Ottermatic Follower Transfer.

Staff chat log leak
On November 29, 2014, a private staff chat log concerning the moderation of a journal entry was compromised via a Weasyl moderator's account and made available to the public. The journal contained links to rape accusations and was in violation of the site's policy against callouts, but the author had refused to modify it as suggested by the staff in order to bring it in line with the rules; this provoked the discussion in question, during which a response was planned and some staff members frankly expressed their frustration over the matter. By the time Weasyl staff publicly addressed the incident, they were "virtually certain" that the owner of the account through which the logs had been leaked "was acting of their own accord." While the account's owner was not named, Wag had been removed from the staff page the previous week. On December 16, Wag confirmed in a Twitter post that he had been removed as a result of the leak, but claimed that he was not responsible. He also claimed that Weasyl had found a security issue that might have allowed his account to be compromised, despite the staff's statement claiming otherwise.