Herpy: Reptile Lovers' Community

Herpy: Reptile Lovers' Community (formerly known as Herpy Image Archive from 2005 - 2012) is a mature art aggregator and interactive community for artists, writers, and fans of everything herpetophilia, and xenophilia including ornithophilia. The website is commonly known as Herpy among members. The website was Something Awful's "Awful Link of the Day" on December 15, 2010.

Herpy is also notable for being the place where Varka first announced his plans for Bad Dragon.

On May 23rd, 2016 Herpy was shut down by its host, Bad Dragon Enterprises, ending its 11-year run. Former administrator Dracokon has claimed he has no intentions of carrying on the website independently.

On July 6th 2016 the community was rebuilt by SIC Administrator Valcyrie. Even though all content was gone, the community userbase stayed through and are now working on building it back up from a clean slate. The new site bears no ties to its former host Varka or Bad Dragon, and is also changed domain from .net to .nu.

History
Herpy was established in February 2005 by Varka and BullGator as a reference resource both for artists as well as other visitors interested in the sexual aspects of reptilian behavior and anatomy. The original Herpy logo was designed by D.O.P.R., one of the many artists who maintain a personal gallery on the website. His logo was retired temporarily in 2009 but later became the official graphic of the community once again with slight alterations to reflect the website's new name.

The massive gallery and its corresponding community were originally hosted on their own server, however as of 2013 hosting considerations for Herpy are provided by Varka Enterprises. In its early years the community grew steadily with its gallery quickly pulling in over one million visitors per month and 1,000 registered users by October 2006. Despite these accomplishments the community remained "underground" in the fandom and received almost all of its traffic via search engines or word-of-mouth advertising. Herpy upgraded its forum software from phpBB to vBulletin in August 2010.

Varka was the community's administrator and site webmaster from 2005 through 2008. In On April 19, 2009 this role was given to Dracokon who continued to maintain the position until the shutdown of the site.

Involvement with Bad Dragon
On December 7, 2007 Varka posted a discussion thread in Herpy's General Lounge forum titled "Animal 'Toys' ;-)". In this thread he discussed his desire and plans to sculpt and create dragon-themed sex toys to serve a market that he felt was glazed over by the existing toy companies. At the time of the thread's posting the company did not have a name, but in a post made on December 14, 2007 Varka used the name "Bad Dragon" for the first time and announced that he had purchased the new business' domain name.

Varka made the announcement "We go live on Monday!" on April 12, 2008. Two days later, Dracokon claimed he allegedly made the first public post on the Bad Dragon forums.

After the takedown of May 23, 2016 Herpy was reborn under a new name and new domain on July 6th 2016, thereby also cutting all its former ties with Bad Dragon.

Issues with defacing
In the early hours of November 11, 2008 an unknown group of hackers abused a security hole in the registration bridge between Herpy's forum and gallery and crashed the website, deleting forums and threads and replacing most of the site's graphics with shock images. Herpy.net was taken down by Varka and replaced with a message stating the forums would be restored and online again soon. Herpy's gallery was the first item to be restored and the forums themselves came back online in April 2009.

In September 2013 Herpy was one of dozens of vBulletins affected by a security exploit caused by erroneous installation files left on the Herpy.net server. Damage to the website was insignificant and fixed within hours and the site's vBulletin software was patched and its extraneous server files cleaned up.

Herpy "2.0"
The term "Herpy 2.0" was formerly a playful joke coined by Dracokon when he first assumed his administrative position. The term was never used, but it was in reference to a number of upgrades and tweaks he applied to the forums over the course of his first few months in charge. The name was dropped in favor of performing ongoing website maintenance.

On August 24, 2010, when the forum software was upgraded from phpBB to vBulletin, the community was relaunched with a "2.0" suffix for several months. With the adoption of vBulletin Herpy obtained a built-in blogging platform where users could formally keep and share personal journals. To note this, the forum's previous "Members Only" private forum was depreciated and merged into the Otherkin forum to become a general "touchy issue" discussion center.

Original content
Herpy also obtained a content management system (CMS) with the vBulletin update. An immediate database crash resulted in the CMS system becoming broken and irreparable without a complicated database backup procedure. Dracokon announced work had begun on rebuilding and restoring the CMS; on September 23, 2013 he announced that the CMS system was in working order and declared its official launch.

Content published by Herpy is limited to articles covering the topics of herpetology, paleontology, and pop-culture topics pertaining to reptiles in general.

Contests & Giveaways
As an incentive to keep people in the community administrators Dracokon and BullGator have both held numerous giveaways at landmark Herpy milestones or on regular holidays. A list of previous giveaways is below starting with the most recent:
 * Happy KONukkah (December 2010): Prints of reptilian/cetacean photography (Dracokon)
 * Herpy Holidays! (December 2010): Temeraire books, figurines, & DVDs (BullGator)
 * 24,000 Forum Posts (November 2010): MacFarlane dragon figurine (BullGator)
 * Kon's Unbirthday (April 2010): How To Train Your Dragon promotional posters
 * 10,000 Forum Posts (February 2010): Spyro the Dragon & Ripto's Rage for PS1 and Dragon Rage for PS2 (BullGator)
 * Herpy Holidays! (December 2009): "Double Croc" T-shirts, Dragonology calendars, & Komodo dragon figurines (BullGator)
 * Herpy Holidays! (December 2009): Dragon Wars on DVD (Dracokon)
 * 3,000 Forum Posts (May 2009): MacFarlane dragon figurine (BullGator)
 * 9,000 Gallery Images (April 2009): MacFarlane dragon figurine (BullGator)
 * 2,000 Forum Posts (Date Unknown): Godzilla DVD set (BullGator)
 * Unknown Giveaway (Date Unknown): Life in Cold Blood documentary DVD set (BullGator)