History of Fur Affinity

History
The following is a history of Fur Affinity and its properties.

Furaffinity.net was launched on January 16, 2005, as an alternative to SheezyArt with the forum going live on that date and the main site being transferred a few days later from FurPaws. During that time period, Sheezy abruptly changed policies to both remove adult art and take a stronger stance against users and their uploads. Warnings were supposedly issued from the site's service provider, advising SheezyArt that they were not permitted to host adult content on their site.

Much of Sheezy's community was abandoned after the rules change took effect. This migration left many with few alternatives. Many of those who abandoned SheezyArt went on to sites such as Fur Affinity and y!Gallery; when the latter decided to ban anthro art in May 2006 to refocus on its core topic, Fur Affinity gained further traffic.

Server problems (2005)
Fur Affinity suffered from major security holes and hacking during the summer of 2005. The site was shut down on 1 August due to a disagreement between lead coder Jheryn and host provider Arcturus, the primary administrators of the site. At that time Fur Affinity had 12,174 user accounts and nearly 100,000 submissions. Arcturus and his supporters went on to create ArtPlz.

Thanks to the community, Fur Affinity was able to build a stronger, faster server than the site originally used for the operation. Over the course of 2005, Fur Affinity raised $1,500 in donations towards the purchase of a new primary server, though it did not go online until the middle of 2006.

Fur Affinity returned to operation in December 2005 with a solid backbone and more efficient coding, though full operational status was not reached until December 10 due to a defect in the motherboard which powered the server. Over 10,000 submissions were made in the first 12 hours subsequent to Fur Affinity's official re-opening, including both arts from returning users and pieces not previously posted.

April Fools Day (2007)
On April Fools' Day 2007, the FA banner depicted site mascot Fender as a busty female dragon, with similar coloration's to the original ferrox form and wearing his signature blue tie. Fender's account avatar displayed the dragoness as well. Fender's appearance returned to normal after about a week. In May 2007, it was announced that the female dragon form would become a separate character from Fender, and a second mascot for Fur Affinity, named Rednef ("Fender" backward). Since then, Rednef has appeared on many of the monthly and holiday-based banners, either alone or with Fender.

Fur Affinity: United!
In August 2007, Fur Affinity held its own furry convention titled Fur Affinity: United! (commonly abbreviated as FA:U), at the Ramada Newark Airport International (now Wyndham Garden Hotel Newark Airport), in Newark, New Jersey. The convention drew 310 attendees, with 25 fursuiters participating in the fursuit parade. The convention was a success and a hit among con-goers, so much so that another one followed the next year in August 2008, meeting an equal amount of success.

Dragoneer account breach (2007)
On 11 August 2007, Dragoneer's administrator account was compromised at FA: United‎ when he used the hotel's unsecure, public Wi-Fi connection to access it. The first sign of trouble was a note left on the front page that announced the following:

Assurances were made that the password database had not been compromised, and the main site came back online 48 hours later. The FA forums were not affected.

Server problems (2008; Augustgate)
On 1 July 2008, Fur Affinity was taken offline again due to a "server hardware fault", to be replaced by an image of Fender angrily stomping his computer followed by a notice about the failure and a link to that forum thread. By 7 July, Fur Affinity's members had donated $16,000-$18,000 to solve the issue, and Dragoneer posted on the FA forums that a new server, an HP ProLiant quad-core Opteron code-named Trogdor had been ordered.

On July 14, the order for Trogdor was canceled due to confirmed issues with the vendor. The final hardware order was:


 * Data Server - Dell Poweredge 2970 2U Server, 32GB RAM
 * Storage Array - 14 1TB hard drives
 * DB Server Upgrades — 24GB additional RAM
 * Web Server - Sun Fire x4150 1U Server, 4GB RAM

Fur Affinity resumed operation on August 5, 2008, at 11:30 pm (EST), in read-only mode. The site was stable again with all options and features prior to the outage by 9:20 am EST the next day. Since the prolonged outage, admins have gone out of their way to assure users that subsequent outages wouldn't be as bad or as lengthy as it, it came to be known, "the August incident".

April Fools Day (2009)
For April Fools' Day 2009, the homepage of Fur Affinity was snowing llamas. In addition to this, two spoof additions joined the randomly displayed mini-advertisements, which featured Rick Astley and Barack Obama. They linked to a Rickroll and the Barack Roll respectively. The banners were made by Hiro Judgement and Alexander Grey, although they were not credited for the work.

Server problems and IRC bans (July 2009)
On 29 July 2009, Fur Affinity suffered a temporary service outage (later found to be due to a power failure caused by lightning ). During the confusion, FA forum moderator Carenath accused members of the FurNet IRC channel of causing the outage, resulting in multiple people residing in both #furaffinity and #hackfurs being banned. FA admin Pinkuh is believed to have performed the bans, due to the request notice on Meredith's kick message. Despite an admission that the accusation was mere speculation, Pinkuh did not revoke the bans until the following day. Carenath reported apologized for his remarks later.

Some who questioned the decision were temporarily banned from FurNet by network administrator Snowpony, who cited "trolling and previous conduct." These bans were initially made without a reason, a violation of the FurNet code of conduct; those questioning them also received threats of being banned.

Server problems (November/December 2009)
Fur Affinity experienced an outage starting on 30 November 2009, when the site's ISP experienced technical difficulties due to broken fiber optic cables. By 2 December, the ISP still hadn't responded to FA staff email. The site's Twitter channel noted that staff was to visit the co-location facility later that day to investigate the issue.

They also announced tentative plans to switch to a new facility, maybe even in Canada, but eventually settled on a new host offering 25% more bandwidth that is still in Virginia.

Fur Affinity came back online with the forums first on Tuesday, December 8 and the rest of the site returned to full use at around 12:30 AM EST, Wednesday, December 9.

Server enhancements (2010)
In March 2010, deviantART-like profile ID images, in which one could post an image as a persistent identification badge (often containing basic information such as a name, date of birth, and likes/dislikes), were enabled for Fur Affinity user profile pages.

On April 17, the embedding of YouTube and other external Adobe Flash-based videos within journal posts was enabled. Embeds of videos are visible within post pages but are rendered as their respective URL text links when one sees the most recent journal post in the profile page.

In October 2010, a feature was introduced, which allows the owner of a submission or journal to hide a comment given in that submission, which is also possible for the owner of the comment. In addition, administrators could hide and unhide every comment posted to any submission sitewide.

Server hack (2010)
On December 17, a hacker was able to use a cross-site scripting (XSS) exploit that existed in the trouble ticket system to take control of an administrator account. The site was taken offline while this was fixed, and resumed normal operations a few hours later.

The next day, an administrator's personal email account was compromised, allowing the hacker to request a password reset on Fur Affinity. This time, the site was not taken offline, instead, the administrators all had their admin permissions pulled, but not before the hacker was able to wipe a number of user's galleries and download the private notes of several high-profile users. The forums were also accessed during this time and had the private Admin boards exposed to the public. FurAffinity has reported a total of 41 accounts were accessed. Dragoneer has since then apologized to those whose accounts were accessed and has offered them a free sponsorship-level membership to FA: United.

It should be noted that former FA developer, Eevee, had mentioned the possibility that a XSS exploit existed in the trouble ticket system a few months earlier, after Eevee had demonstrated that the hide comment feature was insecure and would allow anyone to hide any comment. Critics said that FurAffinity was well aware that the site code was vulnerable to attacks like the initial XSS exploits for years, but have been slow to fix it.

Furocity staff merge
In July 2011 Dragoneer announced that Furocity and FurAffinity would be "Joining forces", with many members of Furocity's staff joining FurAffinity.

Over a month later, 7 members of Furocity's staff were officially brought on board without warning the existing staff, some of whom were removed from their administrator positions. New "departments" were created to better serve the users.

10.000.000 user posts
In February 24, 2013, Fur Affinity reached the milestone of 10,000,000 submitted media. The file that made this possible was Simple Warren Bust, by artist Warren Duster.

Zaush
On December 2013, furry artist Zaush joins the Fur Affinity staff as a volunteer developer/designer to help on the site's further development, codenamed Project Phoenix.

Ursa Major Awards
Fur Affinity won the 2012 and 2013 Ursa Major Awards for Best Anthropomorphic Website.

DDoS Attack (2014)
On Tuesday, October 14th Fur Affinity suffered a major Distributed Denial of Service attack, which led to apparent copycat attacks on other furry sites.

IMVU Acquisition
In March of 2015, it was revealed that Fur Affinity (along with Ferrox LLC) had been sold in its entirety to IMVU for an undisclosed sum. The sale had taken place in January but was only revealed two months later. This move has proven to be extremely controversial, with many users expressing their dissatisfaction with the acquisition via submissions and icons. Dragoneer has publicly stated that IMVU does not plan to change the purpose or contents of Fur Affinity, but in April 2015 it was revealed that IMVU had ordered the admins to place large ads in a sidebar with submission information. This change was universally panned and subsequently reverted in under 24 hours.

Server Hack/Source Code Leak (2016)
On May 17th, 2016 at approximately 11:44 AM Eastern Time, Fur Affinity went offline, displaying the temporarily offline message. Using an exploit in FA's image processing software (ImageMagick), an unknown attacker gained a copy of Fur Affinity's source code. The exploit was patched earlier in May. This unknown attacker then distributed USB drives containing the source code at Biggest Little Fur Con 2016. At least two of these USBs have been found at Biggest Little Fur Con Con Ops. Anyone with information regarding the USBs has been asked to contact Dragoneer. While a USB that Dragoneer was given was being analyzed, someone launched a second attack against the site using the information from the source code. The attack targeted the site database, deleting user information, submissions and watches. The attack was stopped before any other damage could be done. Journals, notes, passwords and personal information were not affected. Backups have been restored to the FA servers. All submissions, favorites, watches, and profile updates made between the 11th of May and the time of the breach have been lost.

Whilst Dragoneer initially posted that "we have no hard evidence to believe that user account data has been compromised", on May 20 he admitted that "the attackers have access to personal user data, such as encrypted passwords and email addresses". As a result, all users were forced to reset their passwords.

In late September, the hackers released the contents of Fur Affinity's trouble ticket and suspensions databases.

Shock troll pictures (2017)
On December the 9th, 2017, a massive 600 account bot troll started uploading gore artwork to the front of Fur Affinity, flooding the artwork page. The accounts were created from October the 16th to November the 2nd as a pre-planned attack on Fur Affinity. In response, Fur Affinity shut down the Accounts responsible and the individual who made them. They shut down uploads for a short period. They had 5 minutes of server downtime and conducted maintenance on the server the next day

UI update (January 2020)
At the start of the new year in January, 2020. Fur Affinity received its first complete overhaul of the websites UI (User-Interface) since 2007. The update included; a major color change, extra template choices, modern styled graphics, the revival of the top-of-page banner, and many other aspects.

DDoS (February 2020)
On February the 20th, 2020, Fur Affinity's host Cloudflare was hit by a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) that left the site offline for 2 days. This attack spread throughout 100+ websites that were attached to Fur Affinity's host. The website came back online on February the 22nd, 2020.

Re-acquisition by Dragoneer
On Monday, January 25, 2021, Parent company IMVU announced that it had completed a round of funding bringing in $35 million and that it would re-organize under the name Together Labs. That Friday, Dragoneer tweeted that he had something to announce on Monday.

On Monday, February 1, 2021, Dragoneer announced that he had regained sole ownership of the site which was being divested by IMVU as a result of the reorganization announced a week prior. As a result of the reacquisition, Dragoneer's employment with IMVU was terminated, which caused him to lose his health insurance. Dragoneer tweeted that due to the loss of his insurance, he "had to drop [his] anti-depressants and bipolar medication cold turkey" and that the purchase of the site put him in considerable financial distress, saying he "took out loans and spent every dime [he] had on FA" and that it cost him more to buy it back than he sold it for. Dragoneer offered no explanation for how he planned to repay the loans, only replying to a Twitter user that "FA's fundings and my own are completely separate entities." and later claimed that he still had "some money", contradicting his earlier statements that he "spent every dime" on FA. Dragoneer has made references to another party that was also interested in acquiring the site, though has not mentioned their identity, and that he did what he did because he felt the other option "wasn't as good"

Community Response
The response to the news by the furry community was mixed. While many users of FurAffinity saw this as positive news, others expressed concern and alarm that Dragoneer was willing to take on debt and go off of important medications just to re-acquire the site. Some compared his actions to those made by investors from Reddit participating in the GameStop Short Squeeze that was ongoing at the time. Others suggested this is nothing more than a continuation of what critics like Vivisector have called a "death grip" on the site, in an attempt to remain a figurehead in the community and that this is the latest link in a chain of events that stems from "The Olive Garden Incident" that took place in 2003.

Pornographic cub art

 * August 2006 saw the restart of an internal administrative debate over the presence of pornographic underage furry artwork (or "cub art"). Such art was forbidden by the site's Terms of Service, which specified that "depictions of sexually immature characters in any sexual situation are not permitted on Fur Affinity", but bans for this rule were not uniformly enforced. As with previous discussions, administrators could not come to an agreement on whether or not to modify site policy. Over the following months, the issue developed into a public debate, with forum polls and discussion suggesting that the site's members were divided on the topic.


 * On November 5, 2006, it was announced that such work would be allowed, with the requirement of mandatory tagging. The main reasons given for this decision were that no actual minors were harmed during the artwork's creation, and that depictions of many other illegal activities, such as rape, murder, and drug use, were not permitted. Conversely, work that depicted human children, including anime characters, in sexual situations was also forbidden. Non-photorealistic art depicting minors is no longer forbidden (current policy on this point is mere that submissions "shall not violate the law of the United States of America, be it State or Federal.") Some artists had threatened to leave the site if it was not forbidden, and some of these did so.

This was due to AlertPay (their funding) dropping them, citing mature cub art as the reason. Artists were given 21 days to clean their galleries, and cub artists were given protection from harassment.
 * On November 24, 2010, Dragoneer officially changed site policy to:

This caused an uproar within the cub community, with several artists clearing their galleries, and migrating to Sofurry or Inkbunny (although several users and artists alike saw the cub porn removal as a positive aspect for FA, some of whom even praised Dragoneer for the decision).

It escalated to the point where Dragoneer and other admins received death threats from disgruntled artists. The ban also led furry musical comedy act Drama Armada to record the song "Where Has All The Cub Porn Gone?" (a parody of "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?" by Paula Cole).

Thanksgiving banner (2008)
The November 2008 Thanksgiving banner featured pictures of community mascots Rednef and Fender depicted as immensely obese after a turkey meal, to the point of resembling inflation art. Some FA users complained about the nature of the image as being "tasteless", "disgusting", a "fucking fetish", "shit", etc..., often referencing the fact that the artist's gallery was full of fat fetish pictures.

Counter-arguments against this initial argument, such as "there are fat people in real life", "fat isn't necessarily a fetish", "eating lots is kinda connected with this time of year", "it's just up for a day anyway," had no effect in dissuading the initial users, so after almost a dozen threads with neither the "for" nor "against" sides of the disagreement demonstrating any ability to come to an acceptable decision over the image, FA administrators replaced the image with the initial November Fall themed banner to stem the bad blood running though the archives and forum.

By late Thanksgiving Day, The banner was replaced with plain text reading "FurAffinity.net"; however new threads appeared complaining about the removal of the banner and, a few hours afterward, it was reinstated and went on to serve its term the rest of the day. After which the November banner was put back in use.

Thanksgiving banner (2009)
The Thanksgiving 2009 banner was a relatively harmless image of a turkey made to look like Fender being placed into an oven. This banner was still complained about, with users going so far as to claim it depicted the cooking or vore fetishes, though it is unclear how many of them were genuine complaints and how many were simply jokingly referring to the massive amount of complaints resulting from the 2008 banner.

Chewfox's appearance on The Tyra Banks Show

 * Main article: The Tyra Banks Show and Chew Fox

Former Furocity staff departure (2011)
In late October 2011, several of the Furocity administrators brought over after the merge abruptly resigned, citing gross negligence by the original Fur Affinity staff and owner, and the apparent disregard of such by Dragoneer.

Within a few weeks, Gavin Daemonshyai was the only Furocity staff member left on staff, and the original "department" system was abandoned. He was eventually removed from the administrative staff.

Dragoneer countered that the real reason the former admins left was due to doxing (exposing of one's personally identifiable information) online.

"Aged up" guideline (2012)
On February 8, 2012, it was announced by Sciggles that a new "age up" guideline was now in effect regarding Sonic characters' "cub art". Sexual artwork of the characters canon image would not be allowed, as they were considered, by FA staff, as cub characters.

No restrictions would be imposed on Sonic sexual material as long as the characters were "aged up" (with a diagram provided).

It was later clarified that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic would not be covered by this rule, except for Baby Spike and the Cutie Mark Crusaders, while Tiny Toons would be. No other animated shows were mentioned further in the post.

Pinkuh reiterated on the FA forums that this announcement was a reconfirmation of a "Sonic age up" policy posted on 2010 on the FA's forum.

On September 7, 2012, administrators began banning artists of "aged-up" Sonic adult art.

"Exodus"
On February 16, 2013, user Qarrezel posted an opinion piece ("Exodus"), on her Fur affinity account, where she expressed her frustration towards the apparent non-response of the Fur Affinity staff to deal with user Fredriksam's inferred stalking behavior towards her friend and client, Tarangryph.

On it, Qarrezel presented the case that not only had Fredriksam posted Tarangryph's personal information online, contacted her to try to gain more of it, and wrote disturbing sexual material involving her persona, but that the FA staff actually went out of the way to "punish" her by not banning the user, but by also removing all information Tarangryph had posted about her apparent stalker.

The FA staff responded to the issue in several ways:


 * Admin Qoph replied on the thread that immediate action was not taken regarding Fredriksam because the original ticket was issued by a third party person (user Svedge) with no evidence, and that they did exchange information about it with Tarangryph, but wanted to discuss the situation with Dragoneer because of the serious nature of the possible offense. On the removal of Tarangryph's journal containing all the "evidence" against Fredriksam, Qoph responded that that was a "normal action", in compliance by FA TOS' rules.
 * Admin Cerberusnl inquired Tarangryph further about the subject on her "Leaving FA." journal, and reaffirming that her journal, classified as a "callout journal", was a proper subject for deletion because of the TOS rules.
 * Dragoneer responded initially to the issue via ticket response saying that:

And that there was not enough solid evidence to ban the user "at that time."

The post generated more than 1900+ responses, most of them critical to the FA staff's response (or lack of it) to the issue. A number of FA users, including Qarrezel and Tarangryph, announced that they would be leaving Fur affinity because of it. Fredriksam was eventually suspended and had his IP address blocked when some evidence of stalking behavior (creating a sock puppet account, Garageman, to continue harassing Tarangryph) was posted on FA.

Dragoneer further expanded on the controversy on two later FA posts: TaranGryph, Stalking, Drama and FA. and Clarification on Off Site Content.

Exodus II (mid-January 2014)
Due to to Zaush's perceived actions, and/or the unnecessary drama some people felt it generated, a large group of user's moved their accounts to Weasyl, either emptying out their archives, leaving them as is but abandoned, or keeping accounts in both FA and Weasyl. Activity on Weasyl spiked at 16,000 daily users (four times the levels at the start of the year), but had slowly descended to 8,000 users by October 2014.

Exodus III, Porn ads (June 2015)
On June 22, 2015, a new admin post (Banner Update, Ad & Server Updates) announced various changes to the banner and advertisement display news and rules.

The biggest change was on the section Advertising Changes:

The ads, which ranged from adult to extremely explicit, were only to be displayed in the NSFW section of FA, where "mature" and above tag, media was displayed. The first issues were the amount, and content of the ads, even their appearance on FA's SFW mode.

This caused a number of artists to move, once more, to various hosting solutions (Weasyl, deviantART, Tumblr, Twitter and others), either cleaning their account or moving them to the "scraps" section.

An updated 06/22/2015 - Banner Update, Ad & Server Updates [EDITED] announced that:

Some users pointed out that the ads ran afoul of their own site content rules:

By June 25, adult ads are still displayed, but the SFW was fixed.

Silver Eagle, the "ClusterFur" and FurryDigital
In the fall of 2015 and spring of 2016, developer Silver Eagle worked with FA to build a new version of the site, using open-source software based on his previous Ponyville Live project. This rewrite was code-named "Daedalus", and Silver Eagle would become one of FA's first independent contractors, receiving payment for his time spent working on the project.

In late January 2016, a dispute involving payment for Silver Eagle's services arose, prompting him to release a YouTube video titled "The ClusterFur" describing his experiences, and to publish the unfinished project as a public GitHub repository named "FAOpen". FA's parent company, IMVU, acted quickly to process his payment (which was received less than a week later) and avoid further issues.

Fearing FA would refuse to use his code and his project would become abandonware, Silver Eagle finished the website as a personal hobby project and rebranded it completely, launching it as a new site named "FurryDigital". While the site did not bear FA's name or branding, as it had been based on the FAOpen codebase, many elements of the UI and rules/terms were very similar. IMVU almost immediately took issue with this, contacting Silver Eagle less than a week after the new site's launch and threatening possible legal action if he did not shut the site down. He promptly complied the next day, shutting down FurryDigital after 5 days of operation.

IMVU has not indicated whether shutting down FurryDigital will be sufficient to avoid legal action. The organization's silence on the issue was only interrupted on February 27, 2016, when FurAffinity permabanned Silver Eagle for "plagiarism and theft of Fur Affinity assets". This response prompted Silver Eagle to panic and fear further legal action, causing his brief hospitalization for suicidal ideation. He was released the following day, and has not heard further updates from IMVU regarding their plans.

Perhaps ironically, on March 3, 2016, FurAffinity published updates to their beta UI that moved their header navigation below the site-wide banner, added icons next to header items and renamed "Submit" to "Upload". All of these items had been previously included in the FurryDigital alpha prior to its shutdown.

Paddington Bear DMCA
In December of 2016, a company representing StudioCanal contacted Dragoneer and requested the removal of all images relating to their intellectual property, the Paddington Bear brand. This included all artwork of the character, adult or otherwise, drawings of characters wearing clothing similar to the character, drawings in which the word "Paddington" was used but was otherwise unrelated to the character, and photographs of real people standing in front of promotional posters for the Paddington film. The same company also sent a similar request to e621.

Dragoneer later published in a journal a message from Paddington and Company that explained that because a portion of the Paddington-related images on the site was pornographic in nature, which they believed violated fair dealing, they sent DMCA notices regarding all Paddington images on the site, stating:

"You have a lot of Paddington images on the site including many pornographic ones and to go through your site image by image to determine which is acceptable and which is offensive is impractical, especially as they change constantly. If you remove the pornographic images then you will find that this problem is easily resolved and you will not hear further from us or Surelock."

In the same journal, Dragoneer stated plans for the userbase "work with [Paddington and Company] to properly come up with a solution".

Staffing issues

 * (Date unknown) - Wolfblade, sponsored by DragonMyr, was made FA Admin, despite a 1 in favour, 13 against vote against him, prompting calls of cronyism..


 * 2012/2013 - Dragoneer's fiance (and later wife) Sciggles was appointed to an administrator position - despite having no prior administration or moderation experience - this time prompting calls of nepotism. Dragoneer had previously stated that Sciggles would not be made an administrator due to their relationship . After a brief absence, she was re-instated as administrator in 2013 as "Team Lead", a position in which she trains new administrators.


 * 2013 - Chase, an FA administrator who resigned from the staff in early 2011 following a fight with Dragoneer, was re-appointed in 2013, although Dragoneer required him to use a alternate account (Carmen) to hide his identity . This particular appointment resulted in the resignation of at least one FA staff member.


 * January 2014 - A month after Zaush joined the Fur Affinity team, users complaints (which had been building up slowly since December 2013) for FA's decision to accept his helps reaches a boiling point by January 16, 2014.


 * The fan based and non-furs' backlash was based on Zaush's allegations of sexual misconduct and bullying, and even outright rape of fellow female furs. These past allegations had been brought up for years, intensifying after Zaush's FA involvement. The result was a tremendous amount online discussion topics, pro/against Zaush, rational and/or drama (Lulz) based.


 * This debate spread to social media, critic, personal, and forum sites, the focal point being Fur Affinity itself. Regarding the situation and allegations, Dragonner and his staff put their support behind Zaush, with Dragoneer declaring the charges "baseless", "without merit", or "not serious enough" to pursue the idea of relieving or removing Zaush from his position. This decision continued to incise people opposed to the hire, upping the ante, specially on FA, which resulted on the suspension or banning of several individuals, and the removal or hiding of their posts in any topic the FA team feel was detrimental to Zaush or the site.


 * This lead to the further creation of discussion posts and entries, especially in social media, the creation of sites dedicated to the subject., and vandalism, especially of Zaush and Fur Affinity's articles on WikiFur.


 * November 2014 - New user Starrykitten is said to be "joining the Dev/Ops team" and is installed as "Tech Team Lead". Initial mood is positive, but after pressure reveal himself to be Zidonuke, a former hacker of furry site F-list, and that he's had secret "admin" access for a year; he subsequently resigns.

Hate group bans
Fur Affinity's Code of Conduct was updated September 4, 2017. The rule, 2.7, read as follows:

"Do not identify with or promote hate groups and their ideologies A hate group is one that advocates and practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a designated sector of society (e.g. Nazism, KKK, ISIS). Symbols specifically associated with these groups will not be permitted in user avatars, non-fictional content, or content intended solely to disrupt the community.

Users who identify with or promote hate groups and their ideologies may be permanently banned from Fur Affinity without warning."

Or, in short, "Do not promote hate while on the site."

On May 15, 2018, several dozen FA accounts were banned from the site for presumed violations of this updated policy. This included personal and group accounts related to AltFurry (FurRight), Furry Raiders and other perceived Alt-Right connected accounts.

Complaints came in swiftly, from dishonest denials of association by proven members of hate groups, to banned and not banned users acting in unison with hate groups to argue that biased staff had failed to also strike down leftist "hate/terrorist" individuals and groups (e.g. Deo Tas Devil, Antifa, "Far-Left"/"Alt-left" accounts and Communist Furs). Instructions were passed among the affected and sympathizers to vacate to other sites, specifically, Inkbunny,  and baseless accusations were made to pin blame (from Antifa-cowered FA staff to outright ban demands/orders from the online news site Dogpatch Press that did not occur). The sources of the accusations were then exposed as working for and tied to alt-right leaders outside the furry fandom. Evidence of these ties included FBI press releases, leaks from media group Unicorn Riot, a call inside the Furry Raiders by Milo Yiannopoulos to destroy furry conventions and instigate street fights with the Proud Boys at Midwest Furfest, and the actions and words of banned users admitting their intentions.

It would be three days after the bans (May 18), when frivolous legal proceedings initiated by Roy Calbeck were to take the form of a lawsuit against FA's parent company, IMVU, for:

IMVU filed a motion to dismiss the complaint on June 22, 2018, and on August 27, 2018, the court granted the motion without prejudice, finding that Arizona did not have jurisdiction in the case. The case was held up for ridicule by fandom lawyer Boozy Badger and Roy Calbeck was subsequently suspended from Twitter for abuse of service.

Days later after the ban, Dragoneer would be doxxed on AltFurry's Xanadu social media chat channel in retaliation for the bans.