WildCritters

WildCritters is a furry image board, art archive and community in the style of e621, Furpiled.com, and other Danbooru-based boards. It specialized in cute chibi, cub, and/or feral furry art, typically of an erotic nature. Much of the art tends to be Japanese style furry art (Kemono). As of June 2018, the content policy had changed to roots and keeping to more kemono and chibi, cute content, by reducing anthropomorphic content that does not fit the criteria.

History
Originally created in 2008 by Furvy and Chu at the URL wildcritters.us, the website went through an unusual change in ownership on July 21, 2009. It went from the hands of Dunkinbean and Furvy to Spike, which caused it to go through some fundamental changes.

On August 1, 2010, the site went down due a security breach. On August 17, the site moved to wildcritters.ws after the owner of wildcritters.us stopped redirecting traffic to the server.

In December 2010, WildCritters opened up its original "critter" definition to include such things as humans with furry-styled highlights (e.g., tails or ears), referred to as halves. This, along with a more permissive policy on the granting of privileged accounts and concerns over the preservation of low-scoring images, led to the creation of a competing website at wildcritters.net, later known as VeeBooru.

The site has been offline since January 2018, The Wayback Machine has a capture of the site when it was still online from January 5, 2018. As of April 2018, it is considered shut down.

As of June 2018, the site was brought back up by another former administrator of Wildcritters, Lucky (Foxfire07 in FA, Battle Fennec in Discord and Twitter). The acquisition was a step towards rebranding Wildcritters back to a kemono and critter, cute based themed site that it formerly had before Pawsie/Spike took charge. During this time, Wildcritters.net and veebooru both merged with Wildcritters.ws for a short time. Currently, only Wildcritters.ws is active.

Wildcritters is steadily but slowly changing its current contents and changing it's content policy, as it no longer accept a certain level of humanoid and anthropomorphic content, keeping it to content-specific criteria such as kemono, critter, cute, chibi, etc. It will retain its original theme and content from when the booru and forums was first created in an attempt at going back to roots and originality.

Controversy
WildCritter's administrator, Spike, has consistently taken the position that artists who distribute their work for no charge should have no control over the further distribution of their work.


 * October 26, 2011, Spike (as Pawsie) denied a request by artist Justvisitinggg to have his artwork removed from the site, with the justification that:

The artist responded by removing all of his artwork under that alias from the galleries posted. Pawsie argued that the artist decision was "childish, selfish, blatantly being mean, and playing the victim".


 * May 3, 2014, Japanese kemono artist Sanae requested his artwork to be removed from WildCritters after some of his media was posted without his permission. A follow-up post seemed to be indicate that his request was granted.

On May 9, 2014, Sanae posted that Pawsie had just changed the changed the visibility option on the images (still on site, but invisible). When requested by Sanae to remove the images, Pawsie again invoked that free art was "Fair Use", with the only option to "sue him and win" to have an artist force him to remove their art.

In the journal comments, Spike maintains the opinion that his website fell under fair use and that the audience should be able to ignore the "creator's rights" in order to have access to their creations if they choose to distribute them without charge.

Defunct, acquisition and relaunch
In January 2018, WildCritters went defunct due to the neglect of maintenance and server hosting fees going unpaid. All data was assumed lost.

In July 2018, Wildcritters.ws was acquired by another administrator, Lucky, aka FoxFire07 (FA) (Battle Fennec in Discord and Twitter), with domain and rights transferred from Spike.

In August 2018, WildCritters relaunched, under the new ownership of Lucky (Wildcritters name), FoxFire07. The site is a work in progress, barebone design, and uses a custom booru, similar to Veebooru's. There are plans to upload the old archive in a new segment of the site, under a subdomain, while content, users, comments, forums, and other site data has been completely wiped out when it was last running in January 2018, due to maintenance neglect and missed payments to hosting services. It is now under a new hosting service, operating under CloudFlare.

Wildcritters.ws has regained 100 users so far since its relaunch, and the archive has more than 93,000 pictures. Veemon777 (Furaffinity user) helped restore the archive.

As of June 26th, 2021, the server is undergoing a transfer. With over 500+ posts served and the archive undergoing tedious filtering, the archives will be unavailable until further notice. An overhaul of the site is also in the works with it going from PHP-based to C+ and viceversa.

Another change will be the restoration of the site's theme, returning to its roots as a Kemono and critter, cute based content, and moving away from the more anthropomorphic aspect of the site that was unintended as server changed hands prior to Lucky's acquisition.