Yerf newsgroups

The Yerf newsgroups were a Usenet-like a hierarchical set of chat groups created to provide Yerf members and non-affiliated users with specific topic areas, protected from the rest of Usenet (in short, the same reasons for which the Furrynet hierarchy was created).

History
The news server came online in early 1999, after parting ways with the old news.purrsia.com server. Help was provided by Tugrik d'Itichi, who facilitated the allocation space for the Unix machine hosting it, plus the necessary bandwidth to run it, while SmackJackal and Revar provided hardware and personnel support. Scotty Arsenault was in overall charge, after taking over Ratman's duties (he would be endowed with the title of "Honorable Founder" for the work he committed to the project up to this point). Later on, Dingo and Dusty were added to the staff.

This server, and the groups contained within, were used to discuss matters relating to both Yerf artists, visitors, and the furry community in general in what was intended to be a civil forum. There were bandwagons art exchanges, wherein the artists would draw their characters reacting to other Yerf artists' characters, convention talk, and art swap techniques, among others. But due to Yerf's little moderation, many flamewars broke out over many issues, such as the above-mentioned bandwagon art (Kobus [Sonny Windstrup] vs Trixi and Gene Catlow's gift art), Burned Fur alignment (Squee Rat and co. against everybody), general trolling (Alex Neonakis et al) and general or personal drama.

The newsgroups ceased operations in July 2002, being retired in favor of a web forum format. The intention of archiving the old newsgroup postings "in the near future" were put on hold, then permanently shelved with the crash, on December 27, 2004, of the Yerf main server, resulting in the total loss of all data, including the archived news server.

Servers

 * Original server: news.purrsia.com
 * Moved to: news.yerf.com

Newsgroups

 * yerf.admin - for topics regarding Yerf's rules, administration, and maintenance.
 * yerf.yap - for miscellaneous news and info about Furry fandom, or life in general, readers may find of interest. The debate was encouraged, but flaming was not acceptable. Posts that crossed that line and/or would offend people outright would get removed.
 * yerf.binary - for posting pictures from Yerf and non-Yerf artists, which included pictures that might not be acceptable for Yerf in one way or another. (i.e. "Humans," "Fan art," "Bandwagon pictures," etc,) with the exception of sexual or violent illustrations, which were deleted on sight.
 * yerf.recent - for the critique of pictures that were on Yerf.com. No binaries were allowed here.
 * yerf.test - testing ("One, two, three,...")