Yiff.party

yiff.party was a web scraper website that used bots to crawl various different Patreon campaigns, mainly those of furry content creators. The unauthorizedly scraped content was then published for anyone to view for free. Because of the large scale art piracy that yiff.party engaged in, it led the site to become controversial and often criticized by creators and patrons alike during its operation.

2015
yiff.party was created on July 23 by an anonymous 8chan user on its "/furry/" board, in response to the growing number of Patreon creators, using the platform as a paywall by forcing their fans to pay in order to view their newest works. At first, yiff.party was accessible by anyone simply by going to the site, but due to increasing pressure from its hosting providers and creators who were being scraped on the site, access was restricted exclusively to 8chan users by using a special authorization URL that checks the browser's referrer to limit access from outside of 8chan.

2016
Patreon introduced a "charge upfront" feature for creators, which allows creators who have been registered for more than a month to charge new patrons upfront for access to content, as opposed to making access instantly available and making the first charge on the following month. Creators who enabled this feature were immune to yiff.party's scraping bots, until April 2017, when yiff.party implemented a "post importer", allowing users who are pledged to a creator on Patreon to import the posts they have access to, effectively bypassing the charge upfront restriction.



2017
yiff.party introduced an account registration system, which allows users who do not use 8chan to access yiff.party. However, in an effort to prevent leeching from outside users, accounts are only given to those who promise to contribute to the site by using its post importer.

2020
On November 14, 2020, the administration announced that yiff.party would shut down after 5 years of service.

Legal Action
During the first few months of the site being operational, it gained the attention of many well-known creators such as Kayla-Na, Zeta-Haru, and Zonkpunch, who, among others, submitted takedown requests to the site. These requests were then posted publicly by yiff.party, but removed several months later.

In September 2015, InkedFur submitted numerous takedown notices to yiff.party on behalf of several of its clients, and threatened to take legal action against the site.