Ferrox (software)

Ferrox was a free and open source software application for the servers of web-based art and other multimedia archives. It was being developed by Fur Affinity to replace their current software.

History
In June, 2006 the site announced an impending upgrade to the site called Project Ferrox; Fur Affinity opting to eschew the version numbers (i.e. v1, v2 and v3) it had previously used.

Status announcements were regular during the following month, with Dragoneer announcing that a closed beta would begin soon and Alkora posting (now removed) screenshots of Ferrox to his Fur Affinity gallery.

The code reached an estimated 60% completion before being pushed back to an early Winter/Spring 2007 release in effort to follow new quality and coding standards. The effective release date was "when it's ready" as Ferrox was not going to be released until Fur Affinity staff felt it had undergone sufficient testing and bug hunting.

As months passed with no announcements, Ferrox was derided as vaporware.

Current development
A request for coders was posted to the Furaffinity forums on September 2007. Although not officially stated, Ferrox's code would be starting from scratch. Dragoneer has stated that this would be the third incarnation of Ferrox.

The project was initially headed by Crypto with six other coders. Due to other projects and scheduling conflicts, the development team was eventually reduced to Eevee and Net-cat.

Eevee intended to release Ferrox as open source at some point and, in October 2008, Ferrox's code was made publicly available; however, few contributions have been made to project from outside the development team.

Due to disagreements with Fur Affinity's policies, Eevee resigned from the Ferrox project on March 17, 2009.

Since then, the development has effectively stalled. On August 26th, 2009, Net-cat announced that for the time being, the code will be frozen and no contributions will be accepted.

After the December 2009 Fur Affinity outage, downloading of Ferrox code is currently broken. Unofficial mirrors are avaliable on GitHub.