Gulf Coast Furs

Gulf Coast Furs, often abbreviated as GCF, was an application-only website and forum for furries living along the Gulf Coast of the United States. The goal of the website was to promote In Real Life (IRL) interaction among furries in the area. The website existed to provide expansion of the community's original mailing list in addition to better facilitating event planning. The group, which has no relation to the modern GulfCoast Furs Telegram group, no longer exists and the region now has multiple different furry groups in the most populous areas.

Website
The website was built from Simple Machines Forum technology, featuring discussion boards, instant messaging, chatroom, calendar, gallery, member map, and member profiles.

Gated Community
Membership of Gulf Coast Furs was taken very seriously. To join the community, one had to register on the website with a short biography (one or two sentences). They then had to wait to be approved by an Administrator or "Volunteer" (one who has moderation capabilities), who used to personally sponsor them by engaging in chat, meeting IRL, or personalized hand-written email.

Administration Policies
Selroth founded the website using an "Open Administration" philosophy, which does not censor information or maintain secrets. All politics, drama, moderation, and administrative participation were dealt with in a sub-forum where members can freely choose to show or hide. The administration has since become closed. The decision to close the administration was made, then later verified with majority current-member votes. Eventually, the Gulf Coast Furs site redesigned a more sound Terms of Service to better prevent issues of the past.

Rule-Free Environment
There was no set of written rules or a Code of Conduct within the community, aside from laws inherited from the State. All drama was dealt with on a case-by-case basis in as real-time as possible. The intention was for the community to adapt to the members, and not the members adapting to the community. However, drama was allowed to grow within the site, resulting in the loss of a large number of members, some of which had been a part of the local community for over a decade.