Yiffstar

Yiffstar, also known as the Yiffy Story Archive, was a privately funded non-commercial archive of erotic furry fiction, artwork and music. Though focusing on furry stories with adult or sexual content, it also had sections for non-sexual fiction and artwork. Submitted content was moderated by a crew of volunteer reviewers. There was no censorship for content, other than the requirement of entries to be furry or animal related. Over 25,000 submissions had been accepted as of November 2007.

In December 2009, Yiffstar was renamed and relaunched under the name SoFurry.

History
The creation of Yiffstar was triggered by the demise of archives like gotfox.com and the stagnation of Mia's Index of Anthro Stories. Unlike Mia's, Yiffstar seeks to actively preserve anthropomorphic fiction, rather than building a link database. . There were 20,766 approved stories, 18,102 approved pictures and 481 approved songs as of 2008 August 28. The site had over 36,000 registered users as of 2007 November 4. Since its launch on September 19, 2002, Yiffstar grew to provide a forum, personal furry art and literature galleries, furry music, personal journals, a MUCK, a chat room, and an integrated oekaki board. . Most of the many upgrades to the site happened silently without noticeable downtime. Yiffstar was founded and was run by Toumal Rakesh.

Site relaunch as SoFurry
Yiffstar was relaunched as SoFurry on December 26, 2009. The site retained its existing database of art and stories and now contains new group features. On January 23rd 2012, SoFurry 2.0 was launched, again keeping all the existing content and user accounts. At the time of the 2.0 relaunch, the site had over 200,000 registered users.

Story archive
Literature was grouped by content as either "Male/Female", "Male/Male", "Female/Female", "Male solo", "Female solo", "Other", or "Clean". Subcategories involved the materials' content, such as the types of characters, and any fetishes that were involved. Popular locations were also available allowing users to search more easily though the database.

YS featured an "opt-out" toggle to filter out keywords for things that a user may find repulsive had been added making things even easier to browse by simply removing from view anything that meets the "offensiveness" criteria set by the user.

A rating system allowed users to vote on a scale between 1 and 5 as to the quality of a work. A separate comments system at the bottom of the work let visitors leave their thoughts. If a user really liked a piece of work they could add it to their favorites list, or watch the creator to see their future work in a separate view.

Art Gallery
Yiffstar featured two types of visual art: Regular digital art, and an online Oekaki board. The art galleries are the main hub of visual art on Yiffstar, featuring all the community functions available for stories: Favorites, Watchlists, Comments, Ratings etc.

Art can be grouped in folders by the artist, allowing them to separate different topics, group their art by year or any other criteria they desire.

The oekaki board is meant to be used as a visual comment, to allow visitors to draw whatever a particular submission inspires them to.

Music
Following repeated requests by users, Yiffstar adopted music uploads in 2007, again taking all the features available for story and visual art submissions and allowing them to be used for the new content format. Fears of repeated uploads of commercial music have so far been unfounded thanks to the work of the many volunteer reviewers.

Journals
Also in 2007, users gained the ability to run their own journal on Yiffstar. This feature has only basic functionality right now, with update notification and additional enhancements planned for early 2008.

Forums
Yiffstar contains a forum with an active furry community of over 32,000 registered users. . Some of the more popular sub-forums include "The Yiffstar Village" (general talk), "Endless Yiff role play" (adult), "Furry Sexuality", Yiffstar personals, a commission marketplace, "Story and Art Feedback" and many others.

YiffChat
YiffChat is Yiffstar's web-based chat, centered on sexual roleplay. Due to YiffChat's availability even through firewalls, and because of its ease of use, it is one of the most popular services of the site. YiffChat has 34 rooms as of 3 March 2007.

Private chats are possible either by whispering (by clicking the >> sign next to a username), or by creating a private room within the chat. For more information about another user, clicking ? on the right side of their user name will bring up their profile. Users can also be ignored (thus making their statements invisible to you) by clicking "ign". If present, the gender sign next to a user name tells whether their character is male, female or herm.

F.A.P
F.A.P initially started out as an image board in the spirit of 2chan. Adult furry art was posted in threads with specific topics, often grouping pictures of individual species of anthropomorphic creatures into a single thread.

In 2006, F.A.P switched to a software that provided a filtered, "image only" view of the Yiffstar Forums. Unlike other 2chan-based boards, F.A.P does not have a DNP list. The board employs a linking system called "Thumbnailizer". It effectively enables hotlinking to a variety of sites in a way that prevents traffic problems for the sites hosting the images, effectively downloading an image no more often than once every 24 hours regardless of how many people view the image on F.A.P.

F.A.P was down from May to December 2007 due to the forums switching from PHPBB to SMF. It has recently been recoded from scratch.

Random gay furry art
A small link on the sidebar leads to a simple page that refreshes every thirty-seconds with random images marked "male solo" or "male/male" from Yiffstar's Galleries. Sometimes the pictures that come up are of an erotic homosexual nature, sometimes they are simply pictures featuring males - it is fully random.

As of December 6th, 2009, the link is still present on the sidebar, but the function has been replaced with the following text:

"Sorry, I had to disable this service because its load cannot be flexibly spread across multiple servers. Please consider asking your favorite artists to upload their art to yiffstar.com!"

Defunct areas

 * Furry TS - A Teamspeak server named 'International Furry community' was geared for furry voice chat, socializing and role-, and gameplay. Connecting to and using the service is free.
 * Web-hosting - Though artists used to negotiate with Toumal over web space, this has been fully replaced by the Gallery features of the site.


 * InstantMessaging - Yiffstar used to run a free Jabber-compatible instant messaging server at im.yiffstar.com.


 * YIMU Island was Yiffstar's MUCK. Closed down in 2007 after disagreement between Toumal and several MUCK wizards over Muck ownership.

Yimu3D


Yimu3D is an in-development, furry, 3D interactive chat client, similar to Second Life in form. Development began in 2004 but has since stagnated because of a lack of 3d-modelers contributing models and animations to the project; as a result, the server for Yimu3D is currently not functioning. The client is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Work on Yimu3D is currently on-hold, but an alpha version can be downloaded from the Yimu3D Website(Note: This link will sometimes be down for a while); the project was announced and is hosted on Yiffstar.

Trivia

 * Yiffstar features shortcut URLs for most parts of the site. For example www.yiffstar.com/user/YourUsername takes visitors straight to the user page of a particular user, www.yiffstar.com/gallery/YourUsername goes to the galleries, www.yiffstar.com/stories/YourUsername takes visitors to the story index of that user.
 * Yiffstar's site banner is variable, being composed of a rotating series of user-donated images. Banner contests are held once per year.
 * The story archive is loosely based on an open-source content management system that was originally designed for a small, personal webpage. Over the course of five years, the site's code has grown from 20Kb to over 800Kb.
 * Yiffstar has moved servers several times, mostly for CPU performance or bandwidth reasons. Custom scripting allows the site to have individual parts run on separate servers, and to be moved around whenever necessary.
 * The Yiffchat "Louvre"-rooms allow users to post and share the URLs to images on other websites and have them being displayed in full right in the chat window - like fchan on steroids. This system initially worked for all URLs, but due to heavy abuse in May/June 2006 when the chat was spammed with links to photos which most people considered grotesque, it has been restricted to pictures on FurNation, Fur Affinity and VCL.
 * A range of Yiffstar-branded merchandise, including clothes, bags, stickers, an umbrella and a baby bib, is sold through spreadshirt.com (America) and spreadshirt.net (Europe).
 * Yiffstar is a member of the "Miscellany" category of the Recommended Anthropomorphics List published by the Ursa Major Awards