Yaoihaven Reborn

Yaoihaven Reborn is a free yaoi, shota and furry site that takes comics and pictures from across the internet and organizes them in an easy-to-use interface. One of the larger draws to it is the community aspect, where users can create their own profiles, make friends, send messages, and partake in forum discussions.

Content uploaded to the site undergoes a quality filter through several staff members, and only content deemed good enough to be enjoyed by all visitors is added. This means the site contains the best content with no 'filler' (content added only to fill space). Since content is added only by approved staff members and editors, this ensures the quality standard is upheld.

WetPaint
Yaoihaven Reborn started out as Yaoihaven on Wetpaint, a free wiki host, back in 2009. Wolfy created the site due to his own experiences with difficulty finding high-quality yaoi and furry content online. In his own words:

The site ran for just under 4 years before WetPaint shut the site down in January of 2013, along with many other adult-oriented wiki sites, due to violations of the WetPaint TOS. There was a large outburst from fans of the site on the WetPaint forums shortly afterward, but WetPaint did not reverse their decision. There were no backups of the site made, but all the raw content was saved on Wolfy's hard drive.

Self-hosting
One of the site's doujinshi translators, Atoro, partnered with Wolfy to recreate the site from the ground up on its own server, instead of through a separate free host, to avoid future shutdowns. After a couple months of work, the site was opened on March 20th, 2013 as Yaoihaven Reborn, and was immediately overloaded with traffic, causing the site to go down. This happened a few more times, even as the site was moved from cloud hosting to dedicated servers. Finally, after moving to a decently powerful dedicated server, the site stayed up and ran well. The site had to undergo another server transfer on June 21st, 2013, again due to heavy traffic overloading the server. The site is currently hosted on a dedicated server owned by Atoro in Fremont, California.

Business
On May 20th, 2013, Yaoihaven Reborn established themselves as a Limited Liability Company (LLC) in order to legally open an adult-goods store on the site to help fund the costs or operation. The store was open before, although money was flowed through PayPal, who shut down the account being used and froze the money made from sales. The store was reopened as The Yaoi Store, and takes credit cards directly thanks to a merchant account, as well as checks, money orders, and Bitcoin.

The company is owned wholly by Atoro, and is based out of California, USA, where Atoro lives. Wolfy still maintains a passive role in content and moderation, but is not officially vested in the company side. The company has no physical office, and maintains an online-only presence.

Content
The site contains thousands of doujinshi, tens of thousands of images, and miscellaneous other content, including erotic writings, role-play chatrooms, animations, games, and videos. Some of the content, including the What Would You Do If... section, is provided completely from fans who submit works to be posted. This lets the fans take an active role in the site, and allows some aspiring writers to have their work promoted.

The content from the site is accrued from other websites, and organized into categories, sections, subsections, and artists.

The site's background image was commissioned by Tokifuji.

Translations
Several editors have done their own translations for doujinshi on the site, giving this site content that others don't have. Atoro has done several Tsukumo Gou translations, among others, and new translations are coming in regularly from fans and editors.

Site staff
The site is ran by Atoro, with the help of several administrators, editors, moderators, and fan volunteers.

Site administrators
Atoro is the owner and CEO, and is in charge of site direction. While in the early days of site redesign he would design and code himself, he has since brought more staff on to take over the design, programming, and server administration aspects. Running The Yaoi Store and some moderation on the forums and chat are his main areas of focus.

Wolfy is the original creator of the site, back when it was hosted on Wetpaint. He has left the site entirely in Atoro's control, and has not been an active part of design, development, or direction since late 2013.

System administrators
There are several staff who work almost exclusively on the hardware or coding side of Yaoihaven Reborn. They keep the site online, fast, and are always improving the code. The lead software engineer is Jadenn, who has been working on the site since early 2013, and is responsible for the custom interface and coding that goes into the site.

The two system administrators, who work on the hardware and LNMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP) side of the site, are SuigintouLain and Seanieb. Sue was the first sysadmin to come along, and was the one to save the site in the beginning of the self-hosting days why optimizing hardware and software. Seanieb volunteered to help with development and optimization in late 2013, and has been invaluable help since.

Editors
The Lead Content Editor is CookieKittyUke, who has been a part of Yaoihaven Reborn since 2013. He helps find, sort, and upload content, as well as divvy up work to be done by the rest of the content staff. He funnels information between the admins and the rest of the editorial staff, helping to streamline updates and information dissemination.

The other editors on the site are Takcody, who works on the shotacon section, Axdi, who works on the bara section, KaitoDarksnow, who works in the furry section, and a few general editors who don't specialize in any one genre. Takcody has an affinity towards Vocaloid and Digimon, and has provided much of the content available in those sections. Axdi has been with the site for about as long as Takcody, and has always been the primary source of bara.

Moderators
There are a few moderators for the site, who keep the peace among the forum users and the chatroom users. Moderators change often, but are always distinguishable by the flare next to their name.

Controversy
On April 15th, 2013, Yaoihaven Reborn received a DMCA copyright notice from Piracy Pitbull on behalf of HardBlush, requesting removal of almost all HardBlush content from the site. Prior to this incident, an agreement between Onta, the owner of HardBlush, and Wolfy, allowed HardBlush content to be on the site. When the site moved, Onta did not give the same approval, leading to the DMCA request.

On March 25th, 2014, the company behind Tomcat sent a DMCA request to take down all content created by them. Attempts were made to come to an agreement over providing a legitimate way for American audiences to legally acquire Tomcat content, as currently the content is only available to residents of Japan. No agreement has been made yet, and all Tomcat content has since been removed.

On August 1st, 2014, Aogami sent an informal request to have their content removed, as they felt it seemed confusing to viewers and unfair to commissioners with the Yaoihaven Reborn watermarks and unspecific copyright claim on the site. Since then, all Aogami content has been removed, the watermarks have been removed from all images , and the copyright information has been changed to specify that only the site software is copyright Yaoihaven Reborn.

Beginning late September 2014, the staff of YHR have been working on a new version of the site which will give artists the ability to edit their own galleries, upload and remove content themselves, and attribute work as it should be. This will give major benefits to both artists and viewers, as artists can now have creative control over their work on the site, and viewers can expect more content from many new and existing artists, in a DeviantArt, Inkbunny, or Fur Affinity kind of way. This is still in progress as the Gamma version.

External Link

 * Yaoihaven Reborn on Facebook
 * Yaoihaven Reborn on Twitter (Automatic x-post from Facebook)
 * Atoro Desu on Twitter (More updates than YHR Twitter feed)
 * Yaoihaven Reborn on Google+