Toronto Furry

Toronto Furry, sometimes abbreviated as TorFur, refers either to furries living in the area around Toronto, Ontario, or to the Toronto Furry Mailing List (see below). It is one of the larger regional furry communities in Canada.

History
Toronto's furry community first emerged on The Trap Line, a FurNet BBS in the early 1990s. Although there were occasional room parties at Ad Astra (a local science-fiction convention), organized furmeets were fairly rare.

In the second half of the 1990s, a new generation of predominantly gay lifestyler furries emerged in Toronto that congregated around Silfur's social circle. Out of this group were created the Toronto Furry Mailing List, The Purple Nurple, The Yiffy Guide to Safer Sex and Camp Feral. The energy of the group was very active with regular meets held at a community center, and large parties were held for Hallowe'en and New Year's.

By 2002, however, due to a gradual drifting away of various members, the disuse of the community center space, and Terry Wessner moving out of town (whose condo had been an excellent gathering-spot), the momentum of the core group broke down and most meets reverted to small, private gatherings of close friends.

As of 2010, the organizational ability of furries in the Toronto area has been gradually recovering, aided by the creation of new message boards, Furnal Equinox, and more event cross-participation with other fans in southern Ontario. However, local disagreements and politics between members has resulted in the creation of numerous web pages, forums and IRC channels with competing similar-sounding names.

Mailing List
The Toronto Furry Mailing List (also frequently referred to as TorFur) is the longest-running resource for the Toronto Furry community, started by Silfur near the beginning of 1997. It is currently hosted on catsden.net and administrated by Potoroo, and has two sister lists for the announcement of events and debates (torfur-events and torfur-debate, respectively).

Websites
A web page for Toronto furries was created around 1998 which was later hosted by Benjamin at furry.ca. After not being maintained, it was taken down, Benjamin gave the site to Dan Skunk in May 2006 who hosted it on Furnation. In November 2008, Dan Skunk renamed the site Ontario Furries to better serve furries outside of Toronto.

An alternative website and forum was created at torfurs.com in early 2010, however as of 2011 it has been redirected and broadened to ontariofurs.com.

A third website, torfur.com, briefly existed during 2007-2008. It was hosted by Bad Karma Networks but is not currently used.

Chat
Several IRC channels linked to the Toronto Furry community exist on FurNet, the two primary of which are &#35;torfur and &#35;OntarioFurries. A partial timeline is as follows:


 * Apr. 2005: &#35;torfur registered by Dan Skunk.
 * Nov. 2005: Dan Skunk cedes control of &#35;torfur to Darqchild, who later passes it to Aaeden Aranor.
 * Jul. 2006: &#35;torfur falters over disputes between moderators.
 * Sept. 2006: &#35;toronto_furry registered by Squnq to provide an unmoderated alternative to &#35;torfur.
 * Oct. 2006: &#35;toronto-furry registered by Dan Skunk to provide a level of moderation somewhere between the other two groups.
 * Oct. 2006: &#35;nsftorfur registered so that &#35;torfur users can discuss mature topics.
 * 2007(?): Due to lack of activity on &#35;toronto_furry, it merges with &#35;toronto-furry.
 * Apr. 2008: Dan Skunk cedes control of &#35;toronto-furry to Scani to deal with personal issues.
 * Aug. 2008: Scani passes control of &#35;toronto-furry to Drake.
 * Sep. 2008: &#35;OntarioFurries registered by Dan Skunk.
 * Nov. 2009: &#35;torfur changes ownership to Scani.

Events
Events are usually organized by individuals on discussion forums. Semi-regular dining get-togethers in the past have included locations near Islington subway station, the Old Spaghetti Factory on The Esplanade, and brunch in Toronto's gay village. There are also group trips to the zoo, movies, etc.

The Islington Furmeet is a regular meet occurring every 4 months and hosted in the party room of an apartment building near the Islington subway station.

Notable annual events include Deuce's Centre Island BBQ on Victoria Day weekend, and conventions such as Camp Feral and Furnal Equinox.

Because southern Ontario is highly populated, it is not unusual for some people to drive longer distances to attend events in other nearby towns and cities. Toronto furries frequently subscribe to online resources on the provincial or national level, such as the Livejournal community, or the furry.ca forums.