Melbourne Furs

Melbourne Furs is a regional community centered around Facebook that serves furs in the Melbourne Australia, area.

History
In the beginning, furries from around Melbourne organized several meets through the use of the Ozfurs mailing list. The meets functioned without the aid of a central group of people or administrators. The meetings took place in such places as Galactic Circus, the Melbourne Show, Science Works, or just Melbourne proper, in general. These meets had large and good turnouts, and the community was thriving.

Facebook Group
In early 2010, a closed Facebook community with the name Melbourne Furs was co-founded by Lexdog, Jackaroo Dragon (JD), and Efimous Zhivotnaye (Fima). It was purposefully designed as an easy to find, online meeting place for new and old furs to keep in contact, organise meets, encourage fandom cohesion and ultimately, grow and prosper as a community. The group to this day prides itself on being the public face of furries in Melbourne, Australia.

Furmeets
As popularity grew, Fima organized a fortnightly art meet, dubbed the Bi-Weekly Art Meets (a point of grammatical contention to this day, much to the dismay of Fima, himself). Initially meant as a place for artists to get together, draw and share ideas and tips, it slowly gained momentum as a purely social get-together, which has seen as many as 50 attendees at any one time. The meets are considered a success because of this, despite operating independently of the community's founding and veteran members.

Side Projects
After the huge success that was the group, the administrators set their sights high, hoping to build upon the solid foundations that the group provided. Several pet projects were passed around as ideas, and despite none of them ever being seen through to completion, a noteworthy few had work begun on them:

The domain MelbourneFurs.com was purchased by Psyfurnosis on behalf of JD, with the intention of simplifying the group's furmeet schedule. Lexdog oversaw the websites' design and overall creation, but procrastination and communication issues lead to the site never being published.

A separate, Australia-wide website was in its concept phase, being worked on by JD. It was hoped to be used as a data collection service to aid the group's admins in the creation of meets and interstate conventions, should they ever get that far. Sadly, it suffered the same fate as MelbourneFurs.com and the idea was completely scrapped after Lexdog and JD ceased their participation in the fandom.

There was a podcast, suggested by Fima, which had been discussed since prior to the group's founding, but it also hasn't shown progress.

Internal Drama
After seeing the group to over 300 members, Lexdog opted to step down as an administrator for personal reasons and departed the group shortly after. With drama among the remaining group's founders, suspected to be concerning the direction of the group, JD's administrator status was revoked. Despite being rumoured to still own intellectual property rights for the group, he said his goodbyes and stopped his involvement in the community as a whole, staying in contact with only a select few.

Fima remained as the sole administrator of the group for a time, eventually accepting the aid of a furry named Reziah, and CynWolfe, an experienced moderator and former MiDFur convention host. After feedback from some of the community, an idea to form a small board of administrators to oversee the group was suggested. With testing being carried out without unanimous support among the group's most regular participants, the idea was scrapped.

To this day, Fima remains the primary administrator for the group and so far, there has been no copyright or trademark claims made against him.

Group tension
The creation of any kind of online hub, such as Facebook, was expected to happen eventually for the Melbourne Furs community; but the creation of the Facebook group, with its self-proclaimed "administrators", was done so at the hands of individuals who were not part of the original group. In place of the vast array of meet locations, meets are now held every two weeks at the Melbourne Central's food court, much to the chagrin of original members.

#Melbournefurs IRC channel
Prior to 2010, #Melbournefurs existed as a small community for local furs under the helm of VladSnakeDragon, with a regular activity until its steady decline in 2010, and finally ending as an abandoned channel. For a short period of time, the #Melbournefurs IRC channel experienced periods of idleness and lack of activity with no channel ownership until its revival in mid-2012 by Fozzaroo. Today (as of this writing), the Melbourne Furs IRC channel has a regular user activity of 20 to 25 people of mostly local Melbourne residents.