PlayMouse

PlayMouse was a furry erotic art archive. The front page claims the site features "some of the sexiest and classiest furry artwork around"; but the rest of the site was down as of January 2013.

PlayMouse provided free gallery space for artists, community forums and a file sharing utility.


 * Address: http://www.playmouse.com/
 * Webmaster: KitFox
 * Ran from/to: 1995 - January 2013?

PlayMouse was in many ways inspired by the Playboy magazine (which is also evident in the website's name and logo), originally meant to feature pin-ups and softcore erotic art at its most risqué. However, due to the inclusion of PentMouse's content, this has in recent times been changed to allow for more hardcore erotic art to be posted as well, which lead to the creation of two new gallery sections: PentMouse (for hardcore male/female and female only interactions) and Yiffler (for everything else yiffy).

PlayMouse's site and gallery mascot was called Melissa; the PentMouse gallery also had its own mascot, named Clarissa. They were similar in being brown-furred anthropomorphic mice - although Clarissa was supposedly more daring than Melissa, reflecting the difference in attitude between their respective galleries.

In April 2007, amidst financial troubles due to the popularity of the site, PlayMouse instituted "premium accounts". Access to free accounts were throttled to alleviate bandwidth and thus cut costs, however free accounts could still access all previously uploaded images. Premium accounts bypassed the throttle, allowing users to view as many images within a given time period as they wanted, and also allowed access to a "premium gallery", which artists could choose to upload new images to.

This change was made in consultation with users of the Playmouse forums, however many users and artists were not aware of the discussion leading up to the change. The implementation of the change, coupled with a software bug, saw angry reactions from users and artists who thought their artwork was being taken advantage of for profit.

In response to the outcries, KitFox subsequently removed the throttle to non-premium members. According to KitFox, "The resulting load got it pulled and wiped. The whole file content of the site is gone, only the database remains. That could be considered a good bit of damage, and yes, the financial situation is still unresolved." A later post in the thread detailed the recovery of the site from a backup, sans ~10,000 images.

The site used Dragonfly CMS and the Coppermine Photo Gallery.