Flayrah

Flayrah is an online furry news magazine, consisting of contributions by community members. Its stories have been syndicated by Furry 4 Life, FurNation, Furry News Network and Google News.

Flayrah was founded in January 2001 by Aureth, who remained webmaster until mid-2006, handing the site over to Frysco. In 2010, Flayrah was relaunched by GreenReaper.

Articles
Flayrah was influenced by Slashdot and intended to provide a "more topical, less flammable, and more enjoyable" alternative to alt.fan.furry, covering "fandom and convention news, product announcements and reviews, interesting websites, and other related tidbits." Stories after the 2010 revamp focused on original reporting and slightly longer pieces, with the addition of regular reviews (such as Furry Movie Award Watch (FMAW) ) in 2011, and interviews in 2012.

Over 100 articles from 2007-9 were imported under license from WikiFur, while more than 130 pieces came from the Furtean Times upon its closure in November 2010. Syndication of Rod O'Riley's In-Fur-Nation began November 2011. "Newsbytes", a front-page shoutbox introduced in November 2010 and extended to Twitter and Facebook in May 2013, is used to post breaking news, and links which do not merit a full story.

Other content
Comments are a key component of Flayrah – over 4,300 were posted in 2011, and 4,800 in 2012. They are user-moderated by ratings, including a sense of karma for registered and anonymous posters.

License
As of 2010, posts on Flayrah are by default licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, although this may be changed by the submitter.

History
Flayrah was originally spun off from a news site hosted by Aureth's Cornwuff Press. Staff members posted 1,992 news items in the first four years, starting with a story about World Tree RPG. Its name means "unusually good food" in the Lapine language used in Watership Down. The site was also meant to include similar material to the e-zine Fuzzy Logic, but this never materialized in significant amounts. However, some content did attract significant debate.

Flayrah became a regular stop for furry fans, despite sometimes irregular updates, but went offline at the end of June 2006 due to hosting issues, together with declining interest and a lack of time on the part of the webmaster. It returned in mid-August after Frysco expressed an interest in taking over the site. However, there was little activity, partly because the site had to be locked-down to registered users due to a lack of anti-spam features.

On 28 November 2009, Frysco announced that Flayrah would be closing for the second and perhaps the final time. GreenReaper decided that the site had too much historical content and promise to lose, and took it on, rewriting it using Drupal and merging existing stories with free content from WikiFur News for a relaunch in January 2010. While owned by GreenReaper and used as WikiFur's primary news source since January 2010, it is run as an independent project.

Traffic has increased steadily since 2010. Flayrah contributors posted over 300 stories in 2010, rising to 365 in 2011 and 677 in 2012.

Accolades
After being moved from the "Best Anthropomorphic Website" category, Flayrah has been nominated for the Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Magazine every year since 2011;   it won the award in 2011 and 2013.