VCL

July 27, 2024

The VCL, previously short for the Velan Central Library, popularly known as the Vixen Controlled Library, is an archive of pictures and stories centered around anthropomorphic characters.

History
The site was founded by Brian W. Antoine as the Velan Central Library - initially, just his private art archive as an FTP site, named after Velar, a location from The Family nas Kan stories. Around 1999, a mirror run by the Ctrl-C computer club opened at the University of Linköping in Sweden, to which the vast majority of traffic was sent.

In January 2005, the Swedish mirror had to be taken down at short notice due to concerns over "objectionable content". Distribution was temporarily continued using a combination of the existing U.S. mirror and Coral cache network, but two more U.S. sites were created a month later. As of September 2011, the Swedish server run by Snout no longer hosts the VCL Forums. The Nas-Kan and Orcas mirrors run by Brian and Keiko also appear to be down as of June 2014.

The VCL used to be the world's largest furry art site, with around 40 images uploaded per day in January 2004, or 15,000 a year; as of 2014, while the site is still maintained, there are just a handful of daily uploads.

The VCL had a wiki, which was lost due to a crash without backups and rebuilt sometime in May-early July 2008. It was later overrun by spam and taken down entirely some time in 2013-14.

VCL's account creation information has been offline since circa late 2013.

Structure
The archive's structure is dynamic (by Web 1.0 standards), with pages in index format with sub-indices and directories. The new art page can be listed by order of the date they were uploaded, or alphabetically, with each page holding a limit of thirty image thumbnails per page. Indices are updated every half-hour or so. The individual directories of the artists are similarly arranged.

To help browse new additions by the site's thousands of artists, VCL users can use the the VCL Sieve. The Sieve is a filtration system which allows browsers of the site to pick-and-choose those artsts they want to see and those they do not. The act of filtering on VCL is referred to as "skulling". The term reflects the site's block button, a small graphic image of a skull over a black semi-circle.

It contained over 320,000 images as of July 2008. A significant portion of the VCL's content is of an adult nature, and its quality varies widely. VCL content rules forbid fan art from being added to VCL.

Funding
VCL is supported by donations and by Ch'marr. Those who donate receive a button.

VCL began displaying ads through Project Wonderful in July 2008.

LiveJournal communities

 * VCL Pick of the Day (abandoned)
 * The Weird, Wild, & Wonderful of VCL (abandoned)

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