https://en.wikifur.com/w/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=Sniper+FoxWikiFur - User contributions [en]2026-10-10T06:27:37ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.23.16//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2014-10-09T19:34:49Z<p>Sniper Fox: Change past tense to present tense. Clarify donations / funding.</p>
<hr />
<div>{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
{{unref}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
'''Yiffy.net''' is an adult [[furry]] online community, featuring forums, live chat, an image gallery, and numerous other features. In August 2008, the site merged with two other sites - [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Furrum]] - to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Founded''': Mid-2002 (became part of Yiffy International in August 2008, then independent again in August 2014 after Yiffy International's closing)<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
{{main|History of Yiffy.net}}<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Just prior to the merge, Yiffy.net was home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally has a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
=== Banned content ===<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered taboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
=== New management and the "merger" ===<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
While it was certainly the end of a long and - for many - glorious era, a lot of furs took solace in the fact that the new Yiffy International, run by [[Karma]] and Sniper Fox, promised to be even bigger and better. However, as was shown on resignation boards and by accounts not being logged back into, there was also a percentage of Yiffy.net users who rejected the new site and left to find other homes on the 'net.<br />
<br />
=== Underage users ===<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net always operated a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users faced when registering, members were age-checked if there was suspicion of them being too young to be there (due to behaviour or accidental admission), and the moderation team also often requested proof of age from members who had been suspended due to causing significant amounts of drama, making the provision of ID a requirement to being allowed back to the site.<br />
<br />
If members were unable to provide such, then their IPs were banned from the site until they could show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This was seen in some quarters as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content based in a country with fairly stringent pornography laws, Yiffy.net had both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site.<br />
<br />
<br />
=== Leetspeak/netspeak ===<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This was later relaxed further and the site's ruling on leet/netspeak prior to its closure stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
<br />
=== The cull of 2008 ===<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a house-cleaning of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. This, coupled with the tendency for a large percentage of the site's members not bothering to read announcements, led to a number of active (but not posting) members being somewhat irritated when they discovered that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk. On the flip side, however, even after this event there was no notable increase in the proportion of site members actually reading official site announcements, which goes to show that you can only do so much to inform people and that the rest is up to them.<br />
<br />
=== Donations & Funding ===<br />
<br />
As of August 2014, Yiffy.net no longer runs banner ads or displays donation links<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Most references are from Yiffy.net's own discussion boards (both public and admin-only).<br />
Other information supplied by site staff or taken from archived web pages.<br />
With the closing of the site, page references are believed to no longer be in existence.<br />
<br />
{{Media archives}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2014-09-04T18:15:07Z<p>Sniper Fox: August, not July</p>
<hr />
<div>{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
{{unref}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
'''Yiffy.net''' was an adult [[furry]] online community, featuring forums, live chat, an image gallery, and numerous other features. In August 2008, the site merged with two other sites - [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Furrum]] - to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': Sniper Fox<br />
* '''Founded''': Mid-2002 (became part of Yiffy International in August 2008, then independent again in August 2014 after Yiffy International's closing)<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
{{main|History of Yiffy.net}}<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Just prior to the merge, Yiffy.net was home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally had a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
=== Banned content ===<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered taboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
=== New management and the "merger" ===<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
While it was certainly the end of a long and - for many - glorious era, a lot of furs took solace in the fact that the new Yiffy International, run by [[Karma]] and Sniper Fox, promised to be even bigger and better. However, as was shown on resignation boards and by accounts not being logged back into, there was also a percentage of Yiffy.net users who rejected the new site and left to find other homes on the 'net.<br />
<br />
=== Underage users ===<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net always operated a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users faced when registering, members were age-checked if there was suspicion of them being too young to be there (due to behaviour or accidental admission), and the moderation team also often requested proof of age from members who had been suspended due to causing significant amounts of drama, making the provision of ID a requirement to being allowed back to the site.<br />
<br />
If members were unable to provide such, then their IPs were banned from the site until they could show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This was seen in some quarters as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content based in a country with fairly stringent pornography laws, Yiffy.net had both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site.<br />
<br />
<br />
=== Leetspeak/netspeak ===<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This was later relaxed further and the site's ruling on leet/netspeak prior to its closure stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
<br />
=== The cull of 2008 ===<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a house-cleaning of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. This, coupled with the tendency for a large percentage of the site's members not bothering to read announcements, led to a number of active (but not posting) members being somewhat irritated when they discovered that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk. On the flip side, however, even after this event there was no notable increase in the proportion of site members actually reading official site announcements, which goes to show that you can only do so much to inform people and that the rest is up to them.<br />
<br />
=== Donations ===<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net was sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations were very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto Sniper Fox’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This was less of an issue after the change in leadership to [[Micah Coon]] and the move to a different server – the site’s technical admin at the time was also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understood of the problems with obtaining funds and was hence a lot more forgiving than previous hosts if the site was late in paying their server rent, sometimes going so far as to allow the site to run for several months before catching up on payments. <br />
<br />
Towards the end, however, a donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only [[Talija]] and [[TigerPaw]] contributing to the cost of the $80 licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Most references are from Yiffy.net's own discussion boards (both public and admin-only).<br />
Other information supplied by site staff or taken from archived web pages.<br />
With the closing of the site, page references are believed to no longer be in existence.<br />
<br />
{{Media archives}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/History_of_Yiffy.netHistory of Yiffy.net2014-09-04T18:12:14Z<p>Sniper Fox: Change history to reflect re-opening after Yiffy International closing</p>
<hr />
<div>{{cleanup}}<br />
{{wikify}}<br />
[[File:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
This article covers the '''history of [[Yiffy.net]]''' from its 2002 inception to its 2008 merger into [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
==History==<br />
[[File:Yiffy International Party On.png|right|thumb|Yiffy.net/Yiffy International "Goodbye" message]]<br />
=== 2002 – Inception ===<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net – or Yiffy.info as it was then known - was founded in mid-2002 by Sniper Fox, with the aim of being a "100% user-maintained portal site for everything in the [[yiffy]] part of the furry fandom". The site was run on Sniper Fox’s home PC using [[Wikipedia:phpBB|phpBB]] 2RC-4 software and by February 2003 the site had fifty registered users. <br />
<br />
=== 2003 – Take off ===<br />
<br />
In April 2003, Sniper Fox switched the site over to Chatterbox Forum, a more visually appealing forum that had guest-books on the user profiles. Within a couple of months, site membership had again hit double figures. The site then contained over 50 links to furry and furry-related websites, including furry artists and [[fursuiter]]s, and was a forum for role-playing.<br />
<br />
In October, a Yiffy.net store opened to sell site-branded merchandise, with all profits being put back into the site. In that month, membership also hit 500 users, and by the end of the year there were over 900 members.<br />
<br />
=== 2004 – Hitting the big time ===<br />
<br />
In January 2004 the site changed software again, moving back to the more advanced and moddable phpBB. It also broke the 1,000 user mark, 200 of whom visited every single day with up to 50 members online at any given time. The site now had a live chat program to go with its forums (or “furums” as they were called), user-selectable themes, polls, a “shout-box” and a gallery for user-submitted pictures. “Yiffy dollars”, earned by posting, could be used to purchase profile effects such as having one’s username highlighted in a colour of the users choice, changing usernames, expanding forum signatures and so on. There was also an on-site lottery where members could buy tickets, using their Yiffy dollars, in the hope of winning the jackpot.<br />
<br />
By Summer 2004, the site had doubled its user count since the beginning of the year, with 80,000 posts in around 1,700 topics. [[Micah Coon]] was added to the site’s moderation team, and later became one of the site's three administrators. However, not everything was going well – the site had always been user-supported but a combination of a lack of donations or store purchases and a lack of income through the site’s single banner advert meant that the site was struggling financially. This, coupled with the fact that the site’s Paypal account had been frozen due to Paypal finally realising that Yiffy.net was an adult site (something the site’s administrators had not known was an issue) meant that things were tough for Yiffy.net. In September, [[Magdalena]] and [[Tatyana]] joined the moderator team to help run the site; and in December, both [[Sinergy]] and [[Arundel]] joined as well.<br />
<br />
=== 2005 – Peak before a fall ===<br />
<br />
Half a year later and the site had fully recovered and now had 3,700 users and 150,000 posts in nearly 4,000 threads. After also upgrading to version 2.0.11 of phpBB, which introduced various new features, Sniper Fox also added Flash games to the site – over 100 simple arcade games with high scores, announcements of scoreboard leaders and medals to the highest scorers; something that proved to be a strain on the server’s resources but very popular with a lot of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Over the course of 2005 things continued to move onwards and upwards for Yiffy.net, new games were added and unpopular ones removed, the site changed servers twice to accommodate the continuing growth, [[Silver Griffin]] joined the moderator team in August and in November of that year Yiffy.net climbed to the top of Google’s search results for “Yiffy”. In three years Sniper Fox and his hard-working moderators had helped to turn Yiffy.net from a small board with just a handful of members to the largest and most well-known all-yiffy community on the web, with close to 5,000 members and 200,000 posts.<br />
<br />
=== 2006 – The beginning of the end? ===<br />
<br />
The beginning of 2006 saw yet another server move as the site continued to grow and prove to be too big a strain on the previous server, and also the addition of a voice-chat to Yiffy.net. The site’s moderator team also continued to grow, with two further members – [[Martin Settra]] and [[Lunara Copperhair]] - being promoted to help with the running of the thousands strong website that now had up to 827 users accessing it every day. By June, [[Martin]] had to step down from his post due to a lack of available time to spend working on the site and was replaced by [[Talija]] and [[Jinn]], the former something of a surprise promotion to many – she was a long-standing member but not one known for her patience or easy-going nature; this reputation did, however, mean that chat arguments and fights tended to end quickly when she logged in.<br />
<br />
In July 2006, the biggest and most significant event in Yiffy.net’s history thus far occurred – Sniper Fox stood down as head administrator and owner of the site for personal reasons. The reins were handed over to [[Micah Coon]], back with the moderator team after a while out, and [[Taryn]]. The news was received by the site’s members with very mixed feelings – a lot of people felt that Yiffy.net had been stagnating of late and that a new leader was what the place needed to take it forward; but on the other hand, Micah Coon had a fairly colourful history with the site to say the least and there were a number of users who left the site as soon as the news broke. [[Micah Coon]] quickly stamped his authority on the site, removing a few bans that he felt had been given by the previous site owner for personal reasons rather than any breach of the rules, and also sacked two moderators – [[Chazz Wolf]] and [[Zantari]] – who had been largely inactive for some time. This new appointment did, however, bring an end to the fighting between members of Yiffy.net and the only other site able to be called a rival – [[Furgasmic.com]], run until its recent closure by [[Rhianna Ravenclaw]], herself an active member of Yiffy.net. A few days later, another moderator joined the team, someone else who would a few months later go on to become a site admin – [[LadyDarkSphynx]]. Not long after this change in ownership, [[Talija]] stepped down as a moderator and left the site, due to personal differences with Micah Coon and the way the site was now being run. <br />
<br />
By the end of the year, Yiffy.net switched from phpBB to SMF and replaced the resource-intensive Flash Chat with the much more streamlined and simpler x7 Chat, moved to a new server, installed [[TigerPaw]] as the site’s Technical Administrator, and one of the greatest sources of contention and conflict the site’s had came into place – the ban on leetspeak and netspeak. Under the new rules, using such acronyms as lol, rofl, bbs or wtf could earn users a warning at first, then a day-long ban and then gradually longer bans with each offense. The move to SMF was another source of disquiet amongst the members of Yiffy.net – it may have been cheaper to run, less of a drain on resources, easier to use and a lot more stable and bug-free than its predecessor software but many on the site felt that it was a step backwards for such a famous site and that Yiffy.net had lost some of its individuality by adopting a format that was so prevalent throughout the web, especially on first-timer forums. Another point of contention was that the move to SMF took away a great number of features, such as user blogs, user image galleries, voice chat, flash games, "Yiff Dollars", a links section, and much more. After the move to SMF, Yiffy.net basically went from being a portal site with multiple features to just being a forum with chat.<br />
<br />
On the whole, 2006 was not a good year for Yiffy.net – activity levels were dropping to lower than any in the previous two years, post rates were also low and there was a growing sense of discontent amongst the members of the site, something that would continue into 2007...<br />
<br />
=== 2007 – Under new management ===<br />
<br />
2007 for Yiffy.net started with several changes in staff – [[Taryn]] had earlier stepped down from his position and left the site entirely due to time constraints, with [[LadyDarkSphynx]] being promoted in his wake in what was initially an interim position but later became permanent; and [[Alex Cross]] and [[Vulpes Proeliator]] were promoted to the moderator team to replace the three moderators who had left in the latter half of the preceding year. <br />
<br />
At the end of February and partially on the insistence of outward-bound moderator Sinergy/[[Cynergi]], [[Micah Coon]] asked [[Talija]] back to the site, promoting her to the position of administrator. Within days and after considerable discussion between Micah Coon and Talija, indeed it had been something she had demanded as a condition of her coming back to the site, the unpopular Netspeak Rule was relaxed considerably. The use of such acronyms and abbreviations in excess was still discouraged but members would no longer be in trouble for a simple “lol” or “brb”, though the stress was very much that such terms were fine in out-of-character areas of the forums and chat but still had no place in role-plays and in-character discussion. The site’s rules were also re-posted, having been absent from the boards for some time, and extensively re-written by the new addition to the admin team, along with a separate set of rules for the x7 Chat.<br />
<br />
The summer of 2007 saw the start of the staff of Yiffy.net opening up to their members – in a bid to dispel the inevitable rumours that surrounded anyone’s suspension, all suspensions and bans were publicly posted by the admin, detailing who, why and how long. There was also a crack-down on underage users, initiated by [[Alex Cross]] and heavily supported by the whole team. Now, anyone with even a whiff of suspicion could be asked to provide proof of age to the staff, with a reasonable notice period, and a thread was set-up to detail what was accepted, the easiest way to submit it and, importantly, which parts needed to be obscured so as to protect the submitter’s identity from potential fraud – all the staff needed to know was that the member was old enough to be there; nothing else. Furthermore, anyone serving a suspension of greater than a week was also required to prove their age before they would be allowed back. During the same period, there was also much cause for concern after Yiffy.net was one of several large furry sites targeted by Anonymous raiders of 4chan (among others). Quick thinking and keen observation by the site’s staff prevented any issues and successfully avoided the attack. Later in that year, and after a number of clashes with the rest of the Yiffy.net staff, Alex Cross would step down from his position and leave the site to spend more time on his own, budding website.<br />
<br />
=== 2008 – On the mend ===<br />
<br />
The first half of 2008 saw considerable change at Yiffy.net. Both [[Jinn]] and [[Silver Griffin]] left the moderator team and site as a whole to spend more time on real life concerns, while [[Ranix]], [[Azhtek]] and [[Steph Ravenblood]] were promoted to moderator to replace the three recent leavers. This influx of new blood and a determination amongst the existing staff to drag the site out of its stagnation resulted in almost constant work on the site in terms of improvements. <br />
<br />
Firstly, Yiffy.net switched from the somewhat unpopular SMF to adopt vBulletin in late January, which was a move that caused some confusion and concern at the time but since smoothed out for the most part. <br />
And, after months of discussion and hard work, the staff unveiled a new section on the site – Yiffy.net Social. This new area was to be centred around more social, out of character aspects of furry life, such as meets and conventions, as well as more diverse non-RP discussion and sections for artists of every variety to post and talk about their works. There was also the less significant but still popular introduction of a much wider variety of visual themes for the site. <br />
<br />
The site's administrators also continued their work to open the site up more to the members and created a forum purely for members to give their feedback and suggestions on what they'd like done with the site or what they don't like about existing features. <br />
<br />
Further changes that were still in progress prior to the site’s closure include RP nights in the site's chat, whereby users would play tabletop role-playing games online with other furs on the site. Numerous other changes were also in the pipeline, with the site's staff working hard to help restore the once proud site to its former glory and re-establish it as the first name in furry communities.<br />
<br />
=== 2008 – Three sites become Yiffy International ===<br />
<br />
In late Spring of 2008, two staff members left their posts – [[Ranix]] left the site and fandom altogether temporarily for personal reasons and [[Talija]] stepped down as administrator and left the site, citing "Failure to fulfil personal goals and failure to breathe new life into the site" as her reasons for doing so.<br />
<br />
Shortly afterwards, it was announced by one of the site's two remaining admin – [[Micah Coon]] - that Yiffy.net would be undergoing a merger with the portal site [[Yiffy.tk]]. The new, combined site was planned to have all the features of its component parts - forums, chat, art and reviewed links - as well as the advantage that the owner of Yiffy.tk would also own the dedicated server that the new site would be running on, meaning free, dedicated hosting and almost 24/7 tech support. It was also announced at this time that [[Micah Coon]] would not hold a staff position at the new site. Shortly after this, [[Furrum]] was also announced to be joining the new [[Yiffy International]] site.<br />
<br />
The plan was for Sniper Fox and [[Karma]] to run the non-forum side of the new combined site and for an admin team comprising [[LadyDarkSphynx]], [[Azhtek]] and [[Talija]] to take care of the forum and chat side of things, as well as the general day-to-day issues. The plan was initially communicated to just the site’s staff and then later to the general user population after further details were solidified.<br />
<br />
In early August, things came to a head when Sniper Fox publicly announced on Yiffy.net that the merger would be going ahead within the next few days. A snag was hit shortly before the merger went live, however, when it was discovered and announced that the threads on the current Yiffy.net forum would not be transferred across but that the old site would be left in a read-only format so that furs could save any threads they wanted to keep. This announcement was met with a large amount of complaint but the site's staff did what they could to assure users and to make saving of old threads as easily as possible.<br />
<br />
Soon after the announcement that the site would debut with Flash Chat, and that it wasn't feasible to port the threads over, there was a falling out between the proposed new administrators. All three proposed administrators of the merged site's forums and chats announced that they would not be returning to the site after the merger due to a breakdown in the working relationship between themselves and the two site owners, the exact details of which were not revealed. No moderators were brought over from Yiffy.Net or Furrum.com, but prior staff were encouraged to re-apply after the merger was completed.<br />
<br />
Over the course of 12th August / 13th August, [[Yiffy International]] went fully live, with yiffy.info, yiffy.net as well as furrum.com now pointing to [[yiffy.tk]], the home of the merged sites.<br />
<br />
=== May 14, 2014 ===<br />
<br />
Yiffy International closes, yiffy.net's URL points to a "goodbye" splash page.<br />
<br />
=== August 27, 2014 ===<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET reopens as an independent site after Yiffy International's closing.<br />
<br />
{{WikiFurSourced|Yiffy.net}}<br />
[[Category:History by website]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2014-09-04T18:10:54Z<p>Sniper Fox: Change founded date to reflect re-opening after Yiffy International closing</p>
<hr />
<div>{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
{{unref}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
'''Yiffy.net''' was an adult [[furry]] online community, featuring forums, live chat, an image gallery, and numerous other features. In August 2008, the site merged with two other sites - [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Furrum]] - to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': Sniper Fox<br />
* '''Founded''': Mid-2002 (became part of Yiffy International in August 2008, then independent again in July 2014 after Yiffy International's closing)<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
{{main|History of Yiffy.net}}<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Just prior to the merge, Yiffy.net was home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally had a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
=== Banned content ===<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered taboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
=== New management and the "merger" ===<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
While it was certainly the end of a long and - for many - glorious era, a lot of furs took solace in the fact that the new Yiffy International, run by [[Karma]] and Sniper Fox, promised to be even bigger and better. However, as was shown on resignation boards and by accounts not being logged back into, there was also a percentage of Yiffy.net users who rejected the new site and left to find other homes on the 'net.<br />
<br />
=== Underage users ===<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net always operated a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users faced when registering, members were age-checked if there was suspicion of them being too young to be there (due to behaviour or accidental admission), and the moderation team also often requested proof of age from members who had been suspended due to causing significant amounts of drama, making the provision of ID a requirement to being allowed back to the site.<br />
<br />
If members were unable to provide such, then their IPs were banned from the site until they could show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This was seen in some quarters as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content based in a country with fairly stringent pornography laws, Yiffy.net had both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site.<br />
<br />
<br />
=== Leetspeak/netspeak ===<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This was later relaxed further and the site's ruling on leet/netspeak prior to its closure stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
<br />
=== The cull of 2008 ===<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a house-cleaning of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. This, coupled with the tendency for a large percentage of the site's members not bothering to read announcements, led to a number of active (but not posting) members being somewhat irritated when they discovered that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk. On the flip side, however, even after this event there was no notable increase in the proportion of site members actually reading official site announcements, which goes to show that you can only do so much to inform people and that the rest is up to them.<br />
<br />
=== Donations ===<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net was sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations were very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto Sniper Fox’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This was less of an issue after the change in leadership to [[Micah Coon]] and the move to a different server – the site’s technical admin at the time was also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understood of the problems with obtaining funds and was hence a lot more forgiving than previous hosts if the site was late in paying their server rent, sometimes going so far as to allow the site to run for several months before catching up on payments. <br />
<br />
Towards the end, however, a donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only [[Talija]] and [[TigerPaw]] contributing to the cost of the $80 licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Most references are from Yiffy.net's own discussion boards (both public and admin-only).<br />
Other information supplied by site staff or taken from archived web pages.<br />
With the closing of the site, page references are believed to no longer be in existence.<br />
<br />
{{Media archives}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/FurrumFurrum2011-12-12T20:22:19Z<p>Sniper Fox: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Infobox website <br />
| title = Furrum<br />
| image = [[Image:FurrumLogo.png|right|273px]]<br />
| caption = <br />
| author = '''Owners:''' [[Dakcoon]]<br />
** '''Site Founder:''' Dakcoon<br />
** '''Admins''': Dakcoon, [[User:Afevis|Afevis]], Draconis<br />
| url = http://www.furrum.net/<br />
** '''Oekaki''': http://www.furrum.net/oekaki/<br />
** '''IRC''': http://www.furrum.net/vbjirc.php (login required)<br />
| status =<br />
| began = April, 2008 - June 22, 2008<br />
** February 2, 2009 - present<br />
| ended = December 12, 2011?<br />
| genre = Furry forum<br />
| rating = ?<br />
}}<br />
'''Furrum''' is a [[furry]] [[forum]] with almost 400 users, including several self-described [[4chan|/b/tards]].<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
<br />
The original forum was created and brought online by Dakcoon on April, 2008. As of December 12, 2011 (likely before this date as well) the site is no longer responding.<br />
<br />
==== Forum raid ====<br />
<br />
Beginning on June 12th, 2008, Furrum was raided by the '''Patriotic Nigras''', a [[Griefer|griefiers]] group on [[Second Life]], and 4chan's '''/b/tards'''.<ref>[http://wiki.patrioticnigras.org/wiki/Furrum Wiki article about the raid] from the Patriotic Nigras' point of view. Retrieved June 23, 2008</ref> <br />
<br />
It began with flooding of the forums, escaliting to [[Wikipedia:Denial-of-service attack|"Denial-of-Service"]] attacks after a few days. <br />
<br />
This eventually led to the site's web-host closing it down on June 22, due to the raid's high loads on the server, which started to affect other customers hosted alongside Furrum.<ref name="FurrumWebhost">[http://www.furrum.com/ Message from Furrum's webhost], on the Furrum homepage. Retrieved June 23, 2008</ref><br />
<br />
The [http://wiki.patrioticnigras.org/wiki/Main_Page Patriotic Nigra wiki] claims that Furrum was raided and DDoSed because of:<br />
{{q|Their blatant acceptance for [[bestiality]], diaperfaggotry and delusions of [[real life|irl]] magical powers}}<br />
In fact, there was only one thread about beastiality and [[diaperfur]]s which was quickly denounced by most members. Another stated reason was that:<br />
{{Q|A handful of Furrum [[furfags]] such as [[User:Afevis|Afevis]], [[KKMD]] and [[Warszawa|WarszawaScream]] were caught spamming [[4chan]] with their furfaggotry in an attempt to advertise their forum}}<br />
<br />
== Site relaunch ==<br />
<br />
Based on an e-mail sent at the time (June 2008) by the forum's web-host (and posted on the Furrum front page,) they were informed that they may reactivate Furrum in "a few days" if the raiding stops.<ref name="FurrumWebhost"/> On June 28th, the front page was changed to state that they will "be back soon" and members should "stay tuned".<br />
<br />
It was proposed that the site be merged into [[Yiffy International]],<ref>''[http://www.flayrah.com/3265/big-fat-furpile-yiffynet-yiffytk-and-furrum-merger The big fat furpile: The Yiffy.net, Yiffy.tk and Furrum merger]'' - [[Alexander Gray]], [[FurteanTimes.com]] (1 September 2008)</ref> but this did not come to pass, and it would take several months (February 2, 2009) for Dakcoon and Afevis to reopened an older version of the site at http://www.furrum.net/<br />
<br />
== Rules and services ==<br />
<br />
Regarding general rules, spam, bestiality media, copyrighted material and posting of NSFW artwork on the wrong forum is the norm. Additional rules are covered for each additional dedicated forums.<br />
<br />
==== Services ====<br />
<br />
Dedicated areas along the forum include a drawboard, IRC and calendar. The forum is divided in the following sections:<br />
*General Furrum Chat - General discussion section (SFW)<br />
*Furrum Artstuffs - Artwork posting and discussion section (furry/non-furry, SFW)<br />
** Creative Writing (Subforum)<br />
* Fur-specific Forum - Furry-related discussion section (SFW) <br />
** Furcon and [[drama]] pit (subforum)<br />
*Technology HQ - General technology, science, computer, and consumer electronics discussion section (SFW)<br />
* Entertainment Furrum <br />
* Music forum - General music discussion section (SFW)<br />
* Movie and Television Show Discussion - General movie/cinema/television show discussion section (furry/non-furry, SFW)<br />
** Toons and Anime (subforum)<br />
* Games Games Games Games - General video game and PC game discussion section, and any other type of games (furry/non-furry, SFW)<br />
<br />
-Registration required:<br />
* [[Yiff]] pit - Furry smut only art, stories, etc (NSFW) <br />
** Alternative media (subforum)<br />
* 4CHONS MOUNTAINS - 4chan.org's furries only (NSFW)<br />
<br />
== References ==<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
{{website-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2008 births]]<br />
[[Category:2008 deaths]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2008-12-27T09:01:32Z<p>Sniper Fox: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
'''Yiffy.net''' was an adult [[furry]] online community, featuring forums, live chat, an image gallery, and numerous other features. In August 2008, the site merged with two other sites - [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Furrum]] - to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': Sniper Fox<br />
* '''Founded''': Mid-2002 (became part of Yiffy International in August 2008)<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
{{main|History of Yiffy.net}}<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Just prior to the merge, Yiffy.net was home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally had a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
==== Banned Content ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered taboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
==== New Management and the "Merger" ====<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
While it was certainly the end of a long and - for many - glorious era, a lot of furs took solace in the fact that the new Yiffy International, run by [[Karma]] and Sniper Fox, promised to be even bigger and better. However, as was shown on resignation boards and by accounts not being logged back into, there was also a percentage of Yiffy.net users who rejected the new site and left to find other homes on the 'net.<br />
<br />
==== Underage users ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net always operated a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users faced when registering, members were age-checked if there was suspicion of them being too young to be there (due to behaviour or accidental admission), and the moderation team also often requested proof of age from members who had been suspended due to causing significant amounts of drama, making the provision of ID a requirement to being allowed back to the site.<br />
<br />
If members were unable to provide such, then their IPs were banned from the site until they could show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This was seen in some quarters as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content based in a country with fairly stringent pornography laws, Yiffy.net had both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site.<br />
<br />
<br />
==== Leetspeak/Netspeak ====<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This was later relaxed further and the site's ruling on leet/netspeak prior to its closure stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
<br />
==== The Cull of ’08 ====<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a house-cleaning of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. This, coupled with the tendency for a large percentage of the site's members not bothering to read announcements, led to a number of active (but not posting) members being somewhat irritated when they discovered that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk. On the flip side, however, even after this event there was no notable increase in the proportion of site members actually reading official site announcements, which goes to show that you can only do so much to inform people and that the rest is up to them.<br />
<br />
====Donations====<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net was sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations were very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto Sniper Fox’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This was less of an issue after the change in leadership to [[Micah Coon]] and the move to a different server – the site’s technical admin at the time was also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understood of the problems with obtaining funds and was hence a lot more forgiving than previous hosts if the site was late in paying their server rent, sometimes going so far as to allow the site to run for several months before catching up on payments. <br />
<br />
Towards the end, however, a donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only [[Talija]] and [[TigerPaw]] contributing to the cost of the $80 licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Most references are from Yiffy.net's own discussion boards (both public and admin-only).<br />
Other information supplied by site staff or taken from archived web pages.<br />
With the closing of the site, page references are believed to no longer be in existence.<br />
<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2008-10-14T18:14:36Z<p>Sniper Fox: Revert changes to end date (site is not ended), fix tag around Micah's name in history section.</p>
<hr />
<div>{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
Yiffy.Net was an adult [[furry]] online community featuring forums, live chat and an image gallery, as well as numerous other features throughout the years. In August of 2008, the site's incumbent staff all either left or stepped down and the founder of Yiffy.info/net - [[Sniper Fox]] - merged the site's user database with two other sites - [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Furrum]] - to form [[Yiffy International]], marking the end of the internet's first and (for much of its time) most famous all-furry community site.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Founded:''' January 2002 (Became part of [[Yiffy International]] in August 2008)<br />
<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
====2002 – Inception====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net – or Yiffy.info as it was then known - was founded in the summer of 2002 by [[Sniper Fox]], with the aim of being a:<br />
{{q|100% user-maintained portal site for everything in the yiffy part of the furry fandom}}<br />
And was the first all-furry forum in existence. The site was run on phpBB 2RC-4 software off of Sniper Fox’s home PC and by February of the following year the site membership had risen to fifty registered users and things were starting to take off. <br />
<br />
====2003 – Take Off! ====<br />
<br />
In April 2003, [[Sniper Fox]] switched the site over to Chatterbox Forum, a much more visually appealing software than its predecessor that also had guestbooks on the user profiles, and within a couple of months site membership quickly hit double figures. From that point onwards, growth was exponential and the site started to thrive. With over 50 links to furry and furry-related websites, including furry artists and fur-suiters amongst others, Yiffy.info / Yiffy.net was succeeding in its founders goal of making it not only a good furry portal site but also a popular and oft-visited forum for role-playing and [[Sniper Fox]] was continually looking to further improve the site, making it bigger and better.<br />
<br />
In October of that year, [[Sniper Fox]] opened up a Yiffy.net store that sold site-branded merchandise, with all profits being put right back into the site. In that same month, membership also hit 500 users, a huge number for a site in what was still very much a developing fandom, and by the end of the year there were over 900 members – Yiffy.net was growing fast.<br />
<br />
====2004 – Hitting the Big Time====<br />
<br />
Then, in January 2004, the site changed software again, moving to the much more advanced and moddable phpBB and breaking the 1,000 user mark, with over 200 visiting every single day and up to 50 members online at any given time. The site now had a live chat programme to go with its forums (or “furums” as they were called), user-selectable themes, polls, a “shout-box” and a gallery for user-submitted pictures. Also on the site were “Yiffy dollars” that were earned by posting and could be used to purchase profile effects such as having one’s username highlighted in a colour of the users choice, changing usernames, expanding forum signatures and so on; related to this there was also an on-site lottery where members could buy tickets, using their Yiffy dollars, in the hope of winning the jackpot.<br />
<br />
By the summer of 2004 had double its number of users since the beginning of the year and had a staggering 80,000 posts in around 1,700 topics and there was also a new addition to the site’s moderation team – [[Micah Coon]], who later became one of the three site administrators. However, not everything was going well – the site had always been user-supported but a combination of a lack of donations or store purchases and a lack of income through the site’s single banner advert meant that the site was struggling to keep going financially. This, coupled with the fact that the site’s Paypal account had been frozen due to Paypal finally realising that Yiffy.net was an adult site (something that the site’s administrators did not realise was an issue) meant that things were tough for Yiffy.net. In September, [[Magdalena]] and [[Tatyana]] joined the moderator team to help with the running of the site and later, in December, both [[Sinergy]] and [[Arundel]] joined them as well. Five new moderators in a year showed just how fast Yiffy.net was growing.<br />
<br />
====2005 – Peak Before a Fall====<br />
<br />
Half a year later and the site had fully recovered and now had 3,700 users and 150,000 posts in nearly 4,000 threads. After also upgrading to version 2.0.11 of phpBB, which introduced various new features, [[Sniper Fox]] also added Flash games to the site – over 100 simple arcade games with high scores, announcements of scoreboard leaders and medals to the highest scorers; something that proved to be a strain on the server’s resources but very popular with a lot of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Over the course of 2005 things continued to move onwards and upwards for Yiffy.net, new games were added and unpopular ones removed, the site changed servers twice to accommodate the continuing growth, [[Silver Griffin]] joined the moderator team in August and in November of that year Yiffy.net climbed to the top of Google’s search results for “Yiffy”. In three years [[Sniper Fox]] and his hard-working moderators had helped to turn Yiffy.net from a small board with just a handful of members to the largest and most well-known all-yiffy community on the web, with close to 5,000 members and 200,000 posts.<br />
<br />
====2006 – The Beginning of the End? ====<br />
<br />
The beginning of 2006 saw yet another server move as the site continued to grow and prove to be too big a strain on the previous server, and also the addition of a voice-chat to Yiffy.net. The site’s moderator team also continued to grow, with two further members – [[Martin Settra]] and [[Lunara Copperhair]] - being promoted to help with the running of the thousands strong website that now had up to 827 users accessing it every day. By June, [[Martin]] had to step down from his post due to a lack of available time to spend working on the site and was replaced by [[Talija]] and [[Jinn]], the former something of a surprise promotion to many – she was a long-standing member but not one known for her patience or easy-going nature; this reputation did, however, mean that chat arguments and fights tended to end quickly when she logged in.<br />
<br />
In July ’06, the biggest and most significant event in Yiffy.net’s history thus far occurred – [[Sniper Fox]] stood down as head administrator and owner of the site, for personal reasons. The reins were handed over to [[Micah Coon]], back with the moderator team after a while out, and [[Taryn]]. The news was received by the site’s members with very mixed feelings – a lot of people felt that Yiffy.net had been stagnating of late and that a new leader was what the place needed to take it forward; but on the other hand, [[Micah Coon]] had a fairly colourful history with the site to say the least and there were a number of users who left the site as soon as the news broke. [[Micah Coon]] quickly stamped his authority on the site, removing a few bans that he felt had been given by the previous site owner for personal reasons rather than any breach of the rules, and also sacked two moderators – [[Chazz Wolf]] and [[Zantari]] – who had been largely inactive for some time. This new appointment did, however, bring an end to the fighting between members of Yiffy.net and the only other site able to be called a rival – [[Furgasmic.com]], run until its recent closure by [[Rhianna Ravenclaw]], herself an active member of Yiffy.net. A few days later, another moderator joined the team, someone else who would a few months later go on to become a site admin – [[LadyDarkSphynx]]. Not long after this change in ownership, [[Talija]] stepped down as a moderator and left the site, due to personal differences with Micah Coon and the way the site was now being run. <br />
<br />
By the end of the year, Yiffy.net switched from phpBB to SMF and replaced the resource-intensive Flash Chat with the much more streamlined and simpler x7 Chat, moved to a new server, installed [[TigerPaw]] as the site’s Technical Administrator, and one of the greatest sources of contention and conflict the site’s had came into place – the ban on leetspeak and netspeak. Under the new rules, using such acronyms as lol, rofl, bbs or wtf could earn users a warning at first, then a day-long ban and then gradually longer bans with each offense. The move to SMF was another source of disquiet amongst the members of Yiffy.net – it may have been cheaper to run, less of a drain on resources, easier to use and a lot more stable and bug-free than its predecessor software but many on the site felt that it was a step backwards for such a famous site and that Yiffy.net had lost some of its individuality by adopting a format that was so prevalent throughout the web, especially on first-timer forums. Another point of contention was that the move to SMF took away a great number of features, such as user blogs, user image galleries, voice chat, flash games, "Yiff Dollars", a links section, and much more. After the move to SMF, Yiffy.net basically went from being a portal site with multiple features to just being a forum with chat.<br />
<br />
On the whole, 2006 was not a good year for Yiffy.net – activity levels were dropping to lower than any in the previous two years, post rates were also low and there was a growing sense of discontent amongst the members of the site, something that would continue into 2007...<br />
<br />
====2007 - Under New Management====<br />
<br />
2007 for Yiffy.net started with several changes in staff – [[Taryn]] had earlier stepped down from his position and left the site entirely due to time constraints, with [[LadyDarkSphynx]] being promoted in his wake in what was initially an interim position but later became permanent; and [[Alex Cross]] and [[Vulpes Proeliator]] were promoted to the moderator team to replace the three moderators who had left in the latter half of the preceding year. <br />
<br />
At the end of February and partially on the insistence of outward-bound moderator Sinergy/[[Cynergi]], [[Micah Coon]] asked [[Talija]] back to the site, promoting her to the position of administrator. Within days and after considerable discussion between [[Micah Coon]] and [[Talija]], indeed it had been something she had demanded as a condition of her coming back to the site, the unpopular Netspeak Rule was relaxed considerably. The use of such acronyms and abbreviations in excess was still discouraged but members would no longer be in trouble for a simple “lol” or “brb”, though the stress was very much that such terms were fine in out-of-character areas of the forums and chat but still had no place in role-plays and in-character discussion. The site’s rules were also re-posted, having been absent from the boards for some time, and extensively re-written by the new addition to the admin team, along with a separate set of rules for the x7 Chat.<br />
<br />
The summer of 2007 saw the start of the staff of Yiffy.net opening up to their members – in a bid to dispel the inevitable rumours that surrounded anyone’s suspension, all suspensions and bans were publicly posted by the admin, detailing who, why and how long. There was also a crack-down on underage users, initiated by [[Alex Cross]] and heavily supported by the whole team. Now, anyone with even a whiff of suspicion could be asked to provide proof of age to the staff, with a reasonable notice period, and a thread was set-up to detail what was accepted, the easiest way to submit it and, importantly, which parts needed to be obscured so as to protect the submitter’s identity from potential fraud – all the staff needed to know was that the member was old enough to be there; nothing else. Furthermore, anyone serving a suspension of greater than a week was also required to prove their age before they would be allowed back. During the same period, there was also much cause for concern after Yiffy.net was one of several large furry sites targeted by Anonymous raiders of 4chan (among others). Quick thinking and keen observation by the site’s staff prevented any issues and successfully avoided the attack. Later in that year, and after a number of clashes with the rest of the Yiffy.net staff, [[Alex Cross]] would step down from his position and leave the site to spend more time on his own, budding website.<br />
<br />
====2008 – On The Mend====<br />
<br />
The first half of 2008 saw considerable change at Yiffy.net. Both [[Jinn]] and [[Silver Griffin]] left the moderator team and site as a whole to spend more time on real life concerns, while [[Ranix]], [[Azhtek]] and [[Steph Ravenblood]] were promoted to moderator to replace the three recent leavers. This influx of new blood and a determination amongst the existing staff to drag the site out of its stagnation resulted in almost constant work on the site in terms of improvements. <br />
<br />
Firstly, Yiffy.net switched from the somewhat unpopular SMF to adopt vBulletin in late January, which was a move that caused some confusion and concern at the time but since smoothed out for the most part. <br />
And, after months of discussion and hard work, the staff unveiled a new section on the site – Yiffy.net Social. This new area was to be centred around more social, out of character aspects of furry life, such as meets and conventions, as well as more diverse non-RP discussion and sections for artists of every variety to post and talk about their works. There was also the less significant but still popular introduction of a much wider variety of visual themes for the site. <br />
<br />
The site's administrators also continued their work to open the site up more to the members and created a forum purely for members to give their feedback and suggestions on what they'd like done with the site or what they don't like about existing features. <br />
<br />
Further changes that were still in progress prior to the site’s closure include RP nights in the site's chat, whereby users would play tabletop role-playing games online with other furs on the site. Numerous other changes were also in the pipeline, with the site's staff working hard to help restore the once proud site to its former glory and re-establish it as the first name in furry communities.<br />
<br />
====Now - Yiffy International - Three sites become one====<br />
<br />
In late Spring of 2008, two staff members left their posts – [[Ranix]] left the site and fandom altogether for personal reasons and [[Talija]] stepped down as administrator and left the site, citing "Failure to fulfil personal goals and failure to breathe new life into the site" as her reasons for doing so.<br />
<br />
Shortly afterwards, it was announced by one of the site's two remaining admin – [[Micah Coon]] - that Yiffy.net would be undergoing a merger with the portal site [[Yiffy.tk]]. The new, combined site was planned to have all the features of its component parts - forums, chat, art and reviewed links - as well as the advantage that the owner of [[Yiffy.tk]] would also own the dedicated server that the new site would be running on, meaning free, dedicated hosting and almost 24/7 tech support. It was also announced at this time that [[Micah Coon]] would not hold a staff position at the new site. Shortly after this, [[furrum.com]] was also announced to be joining the new [[Yiffy International]] site.<br />
<br />
The plan was for [[Sniper Fox]] and [[Karma]] to run the non-forum side of the new combined site and for an admin team comprising [[LadyDarkSphynx]], [[Azhtek]] and [[Talija]] to take care of the forum and chat side of things, as well as the general day-to-day issues. The plan was initially communicated to just the site’s staff and then later to the general user population after further details were solidified.<br />
<br />
In early August, things came to a head when [[Sniper Fox]] publicly announced on Yiffy.net that the merger would be going ahead within the next few days. A snag was hit shortly before the merger went live, however, when it was discovered and announced that the threads on the current Yiffy.net forum would not be transferred across but that the old site would be left in a read-only format so that furs could save any threads they wanted to keep. This announcement was met with a large amount of complaint but the site's staff did what they could to assure users and to make saving of old threads as easily as possible.<br />
<br />
Soon after the announcement that the site would debut with Flash Chat, and that it wasn't feasible to port the threads over, there was a falling out between the proposed new administrators. All three proposed administrators of the merged site's forums and chats announced that they would not be returning to the site after the merger due to a breakdown in the working relationship between themselves and the two site owners, the exact details of which were not revealed. No moderators were brought over from Yiffy.Net or Furrum.com, but prior staff were encouraged to re-apply after the merger was completed.<br />
<br />
Over the course of 12th August / 13th August, [[Yiffy International]] went fully live, with yiffy.info, yiffy.net as well as [[furrum.com]] now pointing to [[yiffy.tk]], the home of the merged sites.<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
At the end, Yiffy.net was home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally had a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
==== Banned Content ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered tabboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
<br />
==== New Management and the "Merger" ====<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. As several existing staff also resigned, it became clear that something was very wrong behind the scenes. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
The actual merger itself was little more than Yiffy.net's user database being imported into the new Yiffy International, thus marking the end of Yiffy.net and the birth of a much larger furry forum site.<br />
<br />
While it was certainly the end of a long and - for many - glorious era, a lot of furs took solace in the fact that the new Yiffy International, run by [[Karma]] and [[Sniper Fox]], promised to be even bigger and better. However, as was shown on resignation boards and by accounts not being logged back into, there was also a percentage of Yiffy.net users who rejected the new site and left to find other homes on the 'net.<br />
<br />
==== Underage users ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net always operated a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users faced when registering, members were age-checked if there was suspicion of them being too young to be there (due to behaviour or accidental admission), and the moderation team also often requested proof of age from members who had been suspended due to causing significant amounts of drama, making the provision of ID a requirement to being allowed back to the site.<br />
<br />
If members were unable to provide such, then their IPs were banned from the site until they could show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This was seen in some quarters as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content based in a country with fairly stringent pornography laws, Yiffy.net had both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site.<br />
<br />
<br />
==== Leetspeak/Netspeak ====<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This was later relaxed further and the site's ruling on leet/netspeak prior to its closure stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
<br />
==== The Cull of ’08 ====<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a house-cleaning of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. This, coupled with the tendency for a large percentage of the site's members not bothering to read announcements, led to a number of active (but not posting) members being somewhat irritated when they discovered that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk. On the flip side, however, even after this event there was no notable increase in the proportion of site members actually reading official site announcements, which goes to show that you can only do so much to inform people and that the rest is up to them.<br />
<br />
====Donations====<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net was sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations were very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto [[Sniper Fox]]’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This was less of an issue after the change in leadership to [[Micah Coon]] and the move to a different server – the site’s technical admin at the time was also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understood of the problems with obtaining funds and was hence a lot more forgiving than previous hosts if the site was late in paying their server rent, sometimes going so far as to allow the site to run for several months before catching up on payments. <br />
<br />
Towards the end, however, a donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only [[Talija]] and [[TigerPaw]] contributing to the cost of the $80 licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Most references are from Yiffy.net's own discussion boards (both public and admin-only).<br />
Other information supplied by site staff or taken from archived web pages.<br />
With the closing of the site, page references are believed to no longer be in existence.<br />
<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2008-08-28T15:19:48Z<p>Sniper Fox: Clean minor grammar & past/present tense errors.</p>
<hr />
<div>{{cleanup}}<br />
{{wikify}}<br />
{{npov}}<br />
{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
Yiffy.Net was an adult [[furry]] online community featuring forums, live chat and an image gallery. It merged with [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Furrum]] in August of 2008 to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Technical Administrator''': [[Karma]]<br />
* '''Moderators''': Currently None<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' Jan 2002 - present (part of [[Yiffy International]] since August 2008.)<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
====2002 – Inception====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net – or Yiffy.info as it was then known - was founded in the summer of 2002 by Sniper Fox, with the aim of being a:<br />
{{q|100% user-maintained portal site for everything in the yiffy part of the furry fandom}}<br />
And was the first all-furry forum in existence. The site was run on phpBB 2RC-4 software off of Sniper Fox’s home PC and by February of the following year the site membership had risen to fifty registered users and things were starting to take off. <br />
<br />
====2003 – Take Off! ====<br />
<br />
In April 2003, Sniper Fox switched the site over to Chatterbox Forum, a much more visually appealing software than its predecessor that also had guestbooks on the user profiles, and within a couple of months site membership quickly hit double figures. From that point onwards, growth was exponential and the site started to thrive. With over 50 links to furry and furry-related websites, including furry artists and fur-suiters amongst others, Yiffy.info / Yiffy.net was succeeding in its founders goal of making it not only a good furry portal site but also a popular and oft-visited forum for role-playing and Sniper Fox was continually looking to further and improve the site, making it bigger and better.<br />
<br />
In October of that year, Sniper Fox opened up a Yiffy.net store that sold site-branded merchandise, with all profits being put right back into the site. In that same month, membership also hit 500 users, a huge number for a site in what was still very much a developing fandom, and by the end of the year there were over 900 members – Yiffy.net was growing fast.<br />
<br />
====2004 – Hitting the Big Time====<br />
<br />
Then, in January 2004, the site changed software again, moving to the much more advanced and moddable phpBB and breaking the 1,000 user mark, with over 200 visiting every single day and up to 50 members online at any given time. The site now had a live chat programme to go with its forums (or “furums” as they were called), user-selectable themes, polls, a “shout-box” and a gallery for user-submitted pictures. Also on the site were “Yiffy dollars” that were earned by posting and could be used to purchase profile effects such as having one’s username highlighted in a colour of the users choice, changing usernames, expanding forum signatures and so on; related to this there was also an on-site lottery where members could buy tickets, using their Yiffy dollars, in the hope of winning the jackpot.<br />
<br />
By the summer of 2004 had double its number of users since the beginning of the year and had a staggering 80,000 posts in around 1,700 topics and there was also a new addition to the site’s moderation team – Micah Coon, who later became one of the three site administrators. However, not everything was going well – the site had always been user-supported but a combination of a lack of donations or store purchases and a lack of income through the site’s single banner advert meant that the site was struggling to keep going financially. This, coupled with the fact that the site’s Paypal account had been frozen due to Paypal finally realising that Yiffy.net was an adult site (something that the site’s administrators did not realise was an issue) meant that things were tough for Yiffy.net. In September, Magdalena and Tatyana joined the moderator team to help with the running of the site and later, in December, both Sinergy and Arundel joined them as well. Five new moderators in a year showed just how fast Yiffy.net was growing.<br />
<br />
====2005 – Peak Before a Fall====<br />
<br />
Half a year later and the site had fully recovered and now had 3,700 users and 150,000 posts in nearly 4,000 threads. After also upgrading to version 2.0.11 of phpBB, which introduced various new features, Sniper Fox also added Flash games to the site – over 100 simple arcade games with high scores, announcements of scoreboard leaders and medals to the highest scorers; something that proved to be a strain on the server’s resources but very popular with a lot of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Over the course of 2005 things continued to move onwards and upwards for Yiffy.net, new games were added and unpopular ones removed, the site changed servers twice to accommodate the continuing growth, Silver Griffin joined the moderator team in August and in November of that year Yiffy.net climbed to the top of Google’s search results for “Yiffy”. In three years Sniper Fox and his hard-working moderators had helped to turn Yiffy.net from a small board with just a handful of members to the largest and most well-known all-yiffy community on the web, with close to 5,000 members and 200,000 posts.<br />
<br />
====2006 – The Beginning of the End? ====<br />
<br />
The beginning of 2006 saw yet another server move as the site continued to grow and prove to be too big a strain on the previous server, and also the addition of a voice-chat to Yiffy.net. The site’s moderator team also continued to grow, with two further members – Martin and Lunara Copperhair - being promoted to help with the running of the thousands strong website that now had up to 827 users accessing it every day. By June, Martin had to step down from his post due to a lack of available time to spend working on the site and was replaced by Talija and Jinn, the former something of a surprise promotion to many – she was a long-standing member but not one known for her calm temperament.<br />
<br />
In July ’06, the biggest and most significant event in Yiffy.net’s six year history occurred – Sniper Fox stood down as head administrator and owner of the site, for personal reasons. The reins were handed over to Micah Coon, back with the moderator team after a while out, and Taryn. The news was received by the site’s members with very mixed feelings – a lot of people felt that Yiffy.net had been stagnating of late and that a new leader was what the place needed to take it forward; but on the other hand, Micah Coon had a fairly colourful history with the site to say the least and there were a number of users who left the site as soon as the news broke. Micah quickly stamped his authority on the site, removing a few bans that he felt had been given by the previous site owner for personal reasons rather than any breach of the rules, and also sacked two moderators – Chazz Wolf and Zantari – who had been largely inactive for some time. This new appointment did, however, bring an end to the fighting between members of Yiffy.net and the only other site able to be called a rival – Furgasmic.com, run until its recent closure by Rhianna Ravenclaw, herself an active member of Yiffy.net. A few days later, another moderator joined the team, someone else who would a few months later go on to become a site admin – LadyDarkSphynx. Not long after this change in ownership, Talija stepped down as a moderator and left the site, due to personal differences with Micah Coon and the way the site was now being run. <br />
<br />
By the end of the year, Yiffy.net switched from phpBB to SMF and replaced the resource-intensive Flash Chat with the much more streamlined and simpler x7 Chat, moved to a new server, installed TigerPaw as the site’s Technical Administrator, and one of the greatest sources of contention and conflict the site’s had came into place – the ban on leetspeak and netspeak. Under the new rules, using such acronyms as lol, rofl, bbs or wtf could earn users a warning at first, then a day-long ban and then gradually longer bans with each offense. The move to SMF was another source of disquiet amongst the members of Yiffy.net – it may have been cheaper to run, less of a drain on resources, easier to use and a lot more stable and bug-free than its predecessor software but many on the site felt that it was a step backwards for such a famous site and that Yiffy.net had lost some of its individuality by adopting a format that was so prevalent throughout the web, especially on first-timer forums. Another point of contention was that the move to SMF took away a great number of features, such as user blogs, user image galleries, voice chat, flash games, "Yiff Dollars", a links section, and much more. After the move to SMF, Yiffy.net basically went from being a portal site with multiple features to just being a forum with chat.<br />
<br />
On the whole, 2006 was not a good year for Yiffy.net – activity levels were dropping to lower than any in the previous two years, post rates were also low and there was a growing sense of discontent amongst the members of the site, something that would continue into 2007...<br />
<br />
====2007 - Under New Management====<br />
<br />
2007 for Yiffy.net started with several changes in staff – Taryn had earlier stepped down from his position and left the site entirely due to time constraints, with LadyDarkSphynx being promoted in his wake in what was initially an interim position but later became permanent; and Alex Cross and Vulpes Proeliator were promoted to the moderator team to replace the three moderators who had left in the latter half of the preceding year. <br />
<br />
At the end of February and partially on the insistence of outward-bound moderator Sinergy/Cynergi, Micah Coon asked Talija back to the site, promoting her to the position of administrator. Within days and after considerable discussion between Micah and Talija, indeed it had been something she had demanded as a condition of her coming back to the site, the unpopular Netspeak Rule was relaxed considerably. The use of such acronyms and abbreviations in excess was still discouraged but members would no longer be in trouble for a simple “lol” or “brb”, though the stress was very much that such terms were fine in out-of-character areas of the forums and chat but still had no place in role-plays and in-character discussion. The site’s rules were also re-posted, having been absent from the boards for some time, and extensively re-written by the new addition to the admin team, along with a separate set of rules for the x7 Chat.<br />
<br />
The summer of 2007 saw the start of the staff of Yiffy.net opening up to their members – in a bid to dispel the inevitable rumours that surrounded anyone’s suspension, all suspensions and bans were publicly posted by the admin, detailing who, why and how long. There was also a crack-down on underage users, initiated by Alex Cross and heavily supported by the whole team. Now, anyone with even a whiff of suspicion could be asked to provide proof of age to the staff, with a reasonable notice period, and a thread was set-up to detail what was accepted, the easiest way to submit it and, importantly, which parts needed to be obscured so as to protect the submitter’s identity. Furthermore, anyone serving a suspension of greater than a week was also required to prove their age before they would be allowed back. During the same period, there was also much cause for concern after Yiffy.net was one of several large furry sites targeted by Anonymous raiders of 4chan (among others). Quick thinking and keen observation by the site’s staff prevented any issues and successfully avoided the attack. Later in that year, and after a number of clashes with the rest of the Yiffy.net staff, Alex Cross would step down from his position and leave the site to spend more time on his own, budding website.<br />
<br />
====2008 – On The Mend====<br />
<br />
So far 2008 has seen considerable change at Yiffy.net. Both Jinn and Silver Griffin have left the moderator team and site as a whole to spend more time on real life concerns, while Ranix, Azhtek and Steph Ravenblood were promoted to moderator to replace the three recent leavers. This influx of new blood and a determination amongst the existing staff to drag the site out of its stagnation has resulted in almost constant work on the site in terms of improvements. <br />
<br />
Firstly, Yiffy.net switched from the somewhat unpopular SMF to adopt vBulletin in late January, which was a move that caused some confusion and concern at the time but has since smoothed out for the most part. <br />
And, after months of discussion and hard work, the staff unveiled a new section on the site – Yiffy.net Social. This new area was to be centred around more social, out of character aspects of furry life, such as meets and conventions, as well as more diverse non-RP discussion and sections for artists of every variety to post and talk about their works. There was also the less significant but still popular introduction of a much wider variety of visual themes for the site. <br />
<br />
The site's administrators have also continued their work to open the site up more to the members and created a forum purely for members to give their feedback and suggestions on what they'd like done with the site or what they don't like about existing features. <br />
<br />
Further changes currently in progress include RP nights in the site's chat, whereby users can play tabletop role-playing games online with other furs on the site. Numerous other changes are in the pipeline, with the site's staff working hard to help restore the once proud site to its former glory and re-establish it as the first name in furry communities.<br />
<br />
There have thus far been no gigantic reversal in the site’s fortunes but membership and activity are steadily on the rise and the feedback that the staff have received on their recent changes has been promising. It’s slow-going for now but things are definitely on the up at Yiffy.net.<br />
<br />
====Now - Yiffy International - Three sites become one====<br />
<br />
In late Spring of 2008, two staff members left their posts - Ranix left the site and fandom altogether for personal reasons and Talija stepped down as administrator and left the site, citing "Failure to fulfil goals and failure to breathe new life into the site" as her reasons for doing so.<br />
<br />
Shortly afterwards, it was announced by one of the site's two remaining admin - Micah - that Yiffy.net would be undergoing a merger with the portal site Yiffy.tk. The new, combined site was planned to have all the features of its three component parts - forums, chat, art and reviewed links - as well as the advantage that the owner of Yiffy.tk would also own the dedicated server that the new site would be running on, meaning free, dedicated hosting and almost 24/7 tech support. It was also announced at this time that Micah would not hold a staff position at the new site, at least not when it went live. Shortly after this, furrum.com was also announced to be joining the new Yiffy International site.<br />
<br />
The plan was for Sniper Fox and Karma to run the non-forum side of the new combined site - dubbed "Yiffy International" by the pair - and for an admin team comprising Ikari, Azhtek and Talija. This plan was first communicated just to the staff, then later to the general user population after more details were solidified.<br />
<br />
In early August, things came to a head when Sniper Fox publicly announced on Yiffy.net that the merger would be going ahead within the next few days. A snag was hit shortly before the merger went live, however, when it was discovered and announced that the threads on the current Yiffy.net forum would not be transferred across but that the old site would be left in a read-only format so that furs could save any threads they wanted to keep. This announcement was met with a large amount of complaint but the site's staff did what they could to assure users and to make saving of old threads as easily as possible.<br />
<br />
Soon after the announcement that the site would debut with Flash Chat (for testing purposes only, it was later removed and replaced with AJAX chat), and that it wasn't feasible to port the threads over there was a falling out between the proposed new admins. Three proposed administrators of the merged site's forums and chats all announced that they would not be returning to the site after the merger due to a breakdown in the working relationship between themselves and the two site owners, the exact details of which were not revealed. No moderators were brought over from Yiffy.Net or Furrum.com, but prior staff was encouraged to re-apply after the merge was completed.<br />
<br />
Over the course of 12th August / 13th August, Yiffy International went fully live, with yiffy.info, yiffy.net as well as furrum.com now pointing to yiffy.tk. The start has certainly been rocky but both Sniper Fox and Karma have numerous years of website management experience and plenty of technical capability.<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Just before the merge, Yiffy.net wass to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally had a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
==== Drugs ====<br />
<br />
While drugs had cropped up in various roleplays and discussions on previous versions of the site, with the merger there was a new forum called "420", that focused purely on recreational drug use, particularly cannabis. There was some objection to this, with some members stating in the site discussion threads that they felt this was encouraging illegal drug use. However, the site's owner, Karma, has moved to assure members that this is very much not the case and that the 420 forum's intent is to educate people about drugs in a responsible way - both the good and bad effects - and that it promoted legalisation of cannabis rather than its actual use.<br />
<br />
==== Banned Content ====<br />
<br />
Previously, Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered tabboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
After the site's August merger to become Yiffy International, the rules as a whole were taken down and re-written from scratch, apparently on an on-going basis. Pursuant to Canadian law, it was announced on the site's rule page that Cub (under age) and Bestiality roleplaying and images would not be allowed on the site.<br />
<br />
The site allows furry-human role play and artwork.<br />
<br />
==== New Management and the Merger ====<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. As several existing staff also resigned, it became clear that something was very wrong behind the scenes. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
==== Underage users ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net has always operated a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users face when registering, members are age-checked if there is any suspicion of them being too young to be there, and the moderation team will also often request proof of age from any member who causes trouble and receives a suspension.<br />
<br />
If they are unable to provide such, then their IPs are banned from the site until they can show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This was seen in some quarters as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content, Yiffy.net has both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site. On a few occasions, users banned under this rule have even went on to create their own site, knowingly allowing underage users.<br />
<br />
With the move from Yiffy.net to Yiffy International, the site's hosting also changed from the United States to Canada. Governed by a different set of laws, this position changed slightly. While underage users are still not allowed on the site by policy, they are no longer "checked at the door" with a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act COPA]-compliant "I agree to this be an adult" statement upon account creation. Instead, users are only challenged to prove their age when a dispute arises or the staff otherwise has cause to believe the users to be underage.<br />
<br />
==== Leetspeak/Netspeak ====<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This has since been relaxed further and the current ruling on leet/netspeak then stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
However, when the site merged in to Yiffy International in August 2008, and with Sniper Fox back at the helm and all the previous admin and moderation staff either forced out or resigned, the rule was abolished entirely, with both Sniper Fox and Karma of the opinion that users should be able to type whatever they like. Under the new policies, as long as they weren't being disruptive to the site or to others, users have the freedom to express themselves in any way they like. This new stance has been met with a slightly mixed reaction but the general consensus seems to be one of acceptance, or at least no strong protest.<br />
<br />
==== The Cull of ’08 ====<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a purge of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. As a result, a number of members were somewhat irritated to find out that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk.<br />
<br />
====Donations====<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net is sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations have been very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net has faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it’s narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto Sniper Fox’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This has been less of an issue, more recently – the site’s technical admin is also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understands of the problems with obtaining funds and is hence more forgiving than previous hosts if the site is late in paying their server rent. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, a recent donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The recent move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only Talija and TigerPaw contributing to the cost of the licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Some references are from the site's own discussion boards and postings of rules and regulations.<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=123 A Word on Underage Users]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome to Yiffy International!]<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy_InternationalYiffy International2008-08-20T15:28:15Z<p>Sniper Fox: /* Sources */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:yiffyinternational.png|right]] <br />
Yiffy International is an adult furry community that was created by a merger between [[Yiffy.Tk]], [[Yiffy.Net]] and [[Furrum]]. It describes itself as a premier furry venue and at inception boasted over 4,600 registered users, almost 2,000 furry sites in its directory and a plethora of furry art in its artist galleries and image board, [[Ychan]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.tk http://yiffy.net http://yiffy.info<br />
* '''Founders''': [[Sniper Fox]], [[Dakcoon]], [http://k-fox.net Bad Karma Networks]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' August 2008 - present (Predecessor sites date back as far as January 2002)<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
==== August 2008 - The new site goes live ====<br />
[[Image:Yiffyint_merge.jpg|right]]Yiffy International was formed as a merger of 3 sites: [[Yiffy.Net]], [[Yiffy.Tk]], and [[Furrum]] in August of 2008.<br />
<br />
The following statement along with the logo at right was released by the administrators on August 18th, 2008 to welcome users to the new site as well as provide a brief explanation and rationalization for the merger:<br />
<blockquote>Yiffy.Tk was a vibrant site with a slow forum, Yiffy.Net was a vibrant forum but needed a full site and Furrum.com had recently been dropped by its webhost due to attacks. We all came together to give our users a more robust and active venue than we could offer on our own, and to give those who lost their accounts on Furrum a new place to start.</blockquote><br />
<br />
Users from all 3 sites were merged into one database along with their profile fields and avatar images. To provide the latest features the forums from all three sites were dropped and a brand new board was integrated into the custom content management system. Instructions were promptly posted on Yiffy International's forums describing steps users could take to save their old threads to their computer or to port them over to the new site.<br />
<br />
Due to a [[Yiffy.net#Now_-_Yiffy_International_-_Three_sites_become_one|falling out]] with some of the [[Yiffy.Net]] members that were to become staff of the new site, only the founders of [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Yiffy.Net]] were in administrative positions when the site went live. At the time of this writing the Yiffy International administration is considering who to fill the moderating roles with.<br />
<br />
When the site launched in August 2008, all of the more popular features and content from [[Yiffy.Tk]] were retained, including the site directory, [[Ychan]], Oekaki, the fiction library, and a site-wide favorite system. After a brief trial of one of Yiffy.Net's original chat applications - FlashChat - it was decided that it would be replaced by Yiffy.Net's more recent package, AJAX Chat. A Java based client for IRC is also available.<br />
<br />
== Future Goals ==<br />
==== Internationalization ====<br />
The Yiffy International administration intend on loading all static content into discreet language files and introducing regional language settings.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Sources ==<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome To Yiffy International!] announcement.<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/help/About+Yiffy+International About ] page at Yiffy International.<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17 Internationalisation] topic at Yiffy International.<br />
<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy_InternationalYiffy International2008-08-20T15:01:39Z<p>Sniper Fox: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:yiffyinternational.png|right]] <br />
Yiffy International is an adult furry community that was created by a merger between [[Yiffy.Tk]], [[Yiffy.Net]] and [[Furrum]]. It describes itself as a 'premier furry venue' and at inception boasted 4,600 registered users, almost 2,000 furry sites in its directory and a plethora of furry art in its artist galleries and image board, [[Ychan]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.tk http://yiffy.net http://yiffy.info http://furrum.com<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Karma]] and [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Karma]] and [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Moderators''': [[Nyo Kun]]<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' August 2008 - present (Predecessor sites date back as far as January 2002)<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
==== August 2008 - The new site goes live ====<br />
[[Image:Yiffyint_merge.jpg|right]]Yiffy International was formed as a merger of 3 sites: [[Yiffy.Net]], [[Yiffy.Tk]], and [[Furrum]] in August of 2008. The goal of the merged site was to take strengths of each site and combine them to benefit the members of the furry fandom. While [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Yiffy.Net]] specialized in yiffy / adult content, [[Furrum]] was a general furry site, so the combined site allowed both types of content.<br />
<br />
The following statement along with the logo at right was released by the administrators on August 18th, 2008 to welcome users to the new site along with provide a brief explanation and rationalization for the merger:<br />
<blockquote>[[Yiffy.Tk]] was a vibrant site with a slow forum, [[Yiffy.Net]] was a vibrant forum but needed a full site and [[Furrum]] had recently been dropped by its webhost due to attacks. The site administrators state they merged to give their users a more robust and active venue than they could offer on their own, and to give those who lost their accounts on Furrum a new place to start.</blockquote><br />
<br />
Users from all 3 sites were merged into one database along with their profile fields and avatar images. Due to technical hurdles, and amid some controversy, the site started with a freshly installed forum rather than importing all the threads and posts from the merging sites. Instructions were promptly posted on Yiffy International's forums describing steps users could take to save their old threads to their computer or to port them over to the new site, though few took advantage of the later option.<br />
<br />
Due to a [[Yiffy.net#Now_-_Yiffy_International_-_Three_sites_become_one|falling out]] with some of the [[Yiffy.Net]] members that were to become staff of the new site, only the founders of [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Yiffy.Net]] were in administrative positions when the site went live. As soon as Yiffy International was launched and deemed stable, [[Nyo Kun]] was named as the first moderator.<br />
<br />
When the site launched in August 2008, all of the more popular features and content from [[Yiffy.Tk]] were retained, including the site directory, [[Ychan]], Oekaki, the fiction library, and a full site favorite system. After briefly trying and disliking Flash Chat, Yiffy International decided on using AJAX Chat as their online chat tool, though a Java based IRC client is still available. At the time of the launch, the site had over 4,000 active accounts, with all 3 contributing site having done inactive member purges shortly before merging.<br />
<br />
== Future Goals ==<br />
==== Internationalization ====<br />
The Yiffy International administration intend on loading all static content into discreet language files and introducing regional language settings.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Sources ==<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome To Yiffy International!]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/help/About+Yiffy+International About Yiffy International]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17 Internationalisation]<br />
<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy_InternationalYiffy International2008-08-20T14:57:54Z<p>Sniper Fox: /* History */ Add more details</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:yiffyinternational.png|right]] <br />
Yiffy International is an adult furry community that was created by a merger between [[Yiffy.Tk]], [[Yiffy.Net]] and [[Furrum]]. It describes itself as a 'premier furry venue' and at inception boasted 4,600 registered users, almost 2,000 furry sites in its directory and a plethora of furry art in its artist galleries and image board, [[Ychan]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.tk http://yiffy.net http://yiffy.info http://furrum.com<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Karma]] and [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Karma]] and [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Moderators''': [[Nyo Kun]] and [[Vulpes Proeliator]]<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' August 2008 - present (Predecessor sites date back as far as January 2002)<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
==== August 2008 - The new site goes live ====<br />
[[Image:Yiffyint_merge.jpg|right]]Yiffy International was formed as a merger of 3 sites: [[Yiffy.Net]], [[Yiffy.Tk]], and [[Furrum]] in August of 2008. The goal of the merged site was to take strengths of each site and combine them to benefit the members of the furry fandom. While [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Yiffy.Net]] specialized in yiffy / adult content, [[Furrum]] was a general furry site, so the combined site allowed both types of content.<br />
<br />
The following statement along with the logo at right was released by the administrators on August 18th, 2008 to welcome users to the new site along with provide a brief explanation and rationalization for the merger:<br />
<blockquote>[[Yiffy.Tk]] was a vibrant site with a slow forum, [[Yiffy.Net]] was a vibrant forum but needed a full site and [[Furrum]] had recently been dropped by its webhost due to attacks. The site administrators state they merged to give their users a more robust and active venue than they could offer on their own, and to give those who lost their accounts on Furrum a new place to start.</blockquote><br />
<br />
Users from all 3 sites were merged into one database along with their profile fields and avatar images. Due to technical hurdles, and amid some controversy, the site started with a freshly installed forum rather than importing all the threads and posts from the merging sites. Instructions were promptly posted on Yiffy International's forums describing steps users could take to save their old threads to their computer or to port them over to the new site, though few took advantage of the later option.<br />
<br />
Due to a [[Yiffy.net#Now_-_Yiffy_International_-_Three_sites_become_one|falling out]] with some of the [[Yiffy.Net]] members that were to become staff of the new site, only the founders of [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Yiffy.Net]] were in administrative positions when the site went live. As soon as Yiffy International was launched and deemed stable, [[Nyo Kun]] and [[Vulpes Proeliator]] were named as the first two moderators.<br />
<br />
When the site launched in August 2008, all of the more popular features and content from [[Yiffy.Tk]] were retained, including the site directory, [[Ychan]], Oekaki, the fiction library, and a full site favorite system. After briefly trying and disliking Flash Chat, Yiffy International decided on using AJAX Chat as their online chat tool, though a Java based IRC client is still available. At the time of the launch, the site had over 4,000 active accounts, with all 3 contributing site having done inactive member purges shortly before merging.<br />
<br />
== Future Goals ==<br />
==== Internationalization ====<br />
The Yiffy International administration intend on loading all static content into discreet language files and introducing regional language settings.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Sources ==<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome To Yiffy International!]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/help/About+Yiffy+International About Yiffy International]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17 Internationalisation]<br />
<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy_InternationalYiffy International2008-08-20T14:43:49Z<p>Sniper Fox: Work in progress, saving to collaborate with Karma</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:yiffyinternational.png|right]] <br />
Yiffy International is an adult furry community that was created by a merger between [[Yiffy.Tk]], [[Yiffy.Net]] and [[Furrum]]. It describes itself as a 'premier furry venue' and at inception boasted 4,600 registered users, almost 2,000 furry sites in its directory and a plethora of furry art in its artist galleries and image board, [[Ychan]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.tk http://yiffy.net http://yiffy.info http://furrum.com<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Karma]] and [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Karma]] and [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Moderators''': [[Nyo Kun]] and [[Vulpes Proeliator]]<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' August 2008 - present (Predecessor sites date back as far as January 2002)<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
==== August 2008 - The new site goes live ====<br />
[[Image:Yiffyint_merge.jpg|right]]Yiffy International was formed as a merger of 3 sites: [[Yiffy.Net]], [[Yiffy.Tk]], and [[Furrum]] in August of 2008. The founders of [[Yiffy.Net]] and [[Yiffy.Tk]] <br />
<br />
The following statement along with the logo at right was released by the administrators on August 18th, 2008 to welcome users to the new site:<br />
<blockquote>[[Yiffy.Tk]] was a vibrant site with a slow forum, [[Yiffy.Net]] was a vibrant forum but needed a full site and [[Furrum]] had recently been dropped by its webhost due to attacks. The site administrators state they merged to give their users a more robust and active venue than they could offer on their own, and to give those who lost their accounts on Furrum a new place to start.</blockquote><br />
<br />
Users from all 3 sites were merged into one database along with their profile fields and avatar images. Due to technical hurdles, and amid some controversy, the site started with a freshly installed forum rather than importing all the threads and posts from the merging sites.<br />
<br />
Due to a [[Yiffy.net#Now_-_Yiffy_International_-_Three_sites_become_one|falling out]] with some of the [[Yiffy.Net]] staff that were to become staff of the new site, only the founders of [[Yiffy.Tk]] and [[Yiffy.Net]] were in administrative positions when the site went live. As soon as Yiffy International was launched and deemed stable, [[Nyo Kun]] and [[Vulpes Proeliator]] were named as the first two moderators.<br />
<br />
== Future Goals ==<br />
==== Internationalization ====<br />
The Yiffy International administration intend on loading all static content into discreet language files and introducing regional language settings.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Sources ==<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome To Yiffy International!]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/help/About+Yiffy+International About Yiffy International]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17 Internationalisation]<br />
<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2008-08-20T14:21:32Z<p>Sniper Fox: Clarify ran from/to dates</p>
<hr />
<div>{{cleanup}}<br />
{{wikify}}<br />
{{npov}}<br />
{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
Yiffy.Net was an adult [[furry]] online community featuring forums, live chat and an image gallery. It merged with [[Yiffy.Tk]] in August of 2008 to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Technical Administrator''': [[Karma]]<br />
* '''Moderators''': Currently None<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' Jan 2002 - present (part of [[Yiffy International]] since August 2008.)<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
====2002 – Inception====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net – or Yiffy.info as it was then known - was founded in the summer of 2002 by Sniper Fox, with the aim of being a:<br />
{{q|100% user-maintained portal site for everything in the yiffy part of the furry fandom}}<br />
And was the first all-furry forum in existence. The site was run on phpBB 2RC-4 software off of Sniper Fox’s home PC and by February of the following year the site membership had risen to fifty registered users and things were starting to take off. <br />
<br />
====2003 – Take Off! ====<br />
<br />
In April 2003, Sniper Fox switched the site over to Chatterbox Forum, a much more visually appealing software than its predecessor that also had guestbooks on the user profiles, and within a couple of months site membership quickly hit double figures. From that point onwards, growth was exponential and the site started to thrive. With over 50 links to furry and furry-related websites, including furry artists and fur-suiters amongst others, Yiffy.info / Yiffy.net was succeeding in its founders goal of making it not only a good furry portal site but also a popular and oft-visited forum for role-playing and Sniper Fox was continually looking to further and improve the site, making it bigger and better.<br />
<br />
In October of that year, Sniper Fox opened up a Yiffy.net store that sold site-branded merchandise, with all profits being put right back into the site. In that same month, membership also hit 500 users, a huge number for a site in what was still very much a developing fandom, and by the end of the year there were over 900 members – Yiffy.net was growing fast.<br />
<br />
====2004 – Hitting the Big Time====<br />
<br />
Then, in January 2004, the site changed software again, moving to the much more advanced and moddable phpBB and breaking the 1,000 user mark, with over 200 visiting every single day and up to 50 members online at any given time. The site now had a live chat programme to go with its forums (or “furums” as they were called), user-selectable themes, polls, a “shout-box” and a gallery for user-submitted pictures. Also on the site were “Yiffy dollars” that were earned by posting and could be used to purchase profile effects such as having one’s username highlighted in a colour of the users choice, changing usernames, expanding forum signatures and so on; related to this there was also an on-site lottery where members could buy tickets, using their Yiffy dollars, in the hope of winning the jackpot.<br />
<br />
By the summer of 2004 had double its number of users since the beginning of the year and had a staggering 80,000 posts in around 1,700 topics and there was also a new addition to the site’s moderation team – Micah Coon, now one of the three site administrators. However, not everything was going well – the site had always been user-supported but a combination of a lack of donations or store purchases and a lack of income through the site’s single banner advert meant that the site was struggling to keep going financially. This, coupled with the fact that the site’s Paypal account had been frozen due to Paypal finally realising that Yiffy.net was an adult site (something that the site’s administrators did not realise was an issue) meant that things were tough for Yiffy.net. In September, Magdalena and Tatyana joined the moderator team to help with the running of the site and later, in December, both Sinergy and Arundel joined them as well. Five new moderators in a year showed just how fast Yiffy.net was growing.<br />
<br />
====2005 – Peak Before a Fall====<br />
<br />
Half a year later and the site had fully recovered and now had 3,700 users and 150,000 posts in nearly 4,000 threads. After also upgrading to version 2.0.11 of phpBB, which introduced various new features, Sniper Fox also added Flash games to the site – over 100 simple arcade games with high scores, announcements of scoreboard leaders and medals to the highest scorers; something that proved to be a strain on the server’s resources but very popular with a lot of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Over the course of 2005 things continued to move onwards and upwards for Yiffy.net, new games were added and unpopular ones removed, the site changed servers twice to accommodate the continuing growth, Silver Griffin joined the moderator team in August and in November of that year Yiffy.net climbed to the top of Google’s search results for “Yiffy”. In three years Sniper Fox and his hard-working moderators had helped to turn Yiffy.net from a small board with just a handful of members to the largest and most well-known all-yiffy community on the web, with close to 5,000 members and 200,000 posts.<br />
<br />
====2006 – The Beginning of the End? ====<br />
<br />
The beginning of 2006 saw yet another server move as the site continued to grow and prove to be too big a strain on the previous server, and also the addition of a voice-chat to Yiffy.net. The site’s moderator team also continued to grow, with two further members – Martin and Lunara Copperhair - being promoted to help with the running of the thousands strong website that now had up to 827 users accessing it every day. By June, Martin had to step down from his post due to a lack of available time to spend working on the site and was replaced by Talija and Jinn, the former something of a surprise promotion to many – she was a long-standing member but not one known for her calm temperament.<br />
<br />
In July ’06, the biggest and most significant event in Yiffy.net’s six year history occurred – Sniper Fox stood down as head administrator and owner of the site, for personal reasons. The reins were handed over to Micah Coon, back with the moderator team after a while out, and Taryn. The news was received by the site’s members with very mixed feelings – a lot of people felt that Yiffy.net had been stagnating of late and that a new leader was what the place needed to take it forward; but on the other hand, Micah Coon had a fairly colourful history with the site to say the least and there were a number of users who left the site as soon as the news broke. Micah quickly stamped his authority on the site, removing a few bans that he felt had been given by the previous site owner for personal reasons rather than any breach of the rules, and also sacked two moderators – Chazz Wolf and Zantari – who had been largely inactive for some time. This new appointment did, however, bring an end to the fighting between members of Yiffy.net and the only other site able to be called a rival – Furgasmic.com, run until its recent closure by Rhianna Ravenclaw, herself an active member of Yiffy.net. A few days later, another moderator joined the team, someone else who would a few months later go on to become a site admin – LadyDarkSphynx. Not long after this change in ownership, Talija stepped down as a moderator and left the site, due to personal differences with Micah Coon and the way the site was now being run. <br />
<br />
By the end of the year, Yiffy.net switched from phpBB to SMF and replaced the resource-intensive Flash Chat with the much more streamlined and simpler x7 Chat, moved to a new server, installed TigerPaw as the site’s Technical Administrator, and one of the greatest sources of contention and conflict the site’s had came into place – the ban on leetspeak and netspeak. Under the new rules, using such acronyms as lol, rofl, bbs or wtf could earn users a warning at first, then a day-long ban and then gradually longer bans with each offense. The move to SMF was another source of disquiet amongst the members of Yiffy.net – it may have been cheaper to run, less of a drain on resources, easier to use and a lot more stable and bug-free than its predecessor software but many on the site felt that it was a step backwards for such a famous site and that Yiffy.net had lost some of its individuality by adopting a format that was so prevalent throughout the web, especially on first-timer forums.<br />
<br />
On the whole, 2006 was not a good year for Yiffy.net – activity levels were dropping to lower than any in the previous two years, post rates were also low and there was a growing sense of discontent amongst the members of the site, something that would continue into 2007...<br />
<br />
====2007 - Under New Management====<br />
<br />
2007 for Yiffy.net started with several changes in staff – Taryn had earlier stepped down from his position and left the site entirely due to time constraints, with LadyDarkSphynx being promoted in his wake in what was initially an interim position but later became permanent; and Alex Cross and Vulpes Proeliator were promoted to the moderator team to replace the three moderators who had left in the latter half of the preceding year. <br />
<br />
At the end of February and partially on the insistence of outward-bound moderator Sinergy/Cynergi, Micah Coon asked Talija back to the site, promoting her to the position of administrator. Within days and after considerable discussion between Micah and Talija, indeed it had been something she had demanded as a condition of her coming back to the site, the unpopular Netspeak Rule was relaxed considerably. The use of such acronyms and abbreviations in excess was still discouraged but members would no longer be in trouble for a simple “lol” or “brb”, though the stress was very much that such terms were fine in out-of-character areas of the forums and chat but still had no place in role-plays and in-character discussion. The site’s rules were also re-posted, having been absent from the boards for some time, and extensively re-written by the new addition to the admin team, along with a separate set of rules for the x7 Chat.<br />
<br />
The summer of 2007 saw the start of the staff of Yiffy.net opening up to their members – in a bid to dispel the inevitable rumours that surrounded anyone’s suspension, all suspensions and bans were publicly posted by the admin, detailing who, why and how long. There was also a crack-down on underage users, initiated by Alex Cross and heavily supported by the whole team. Now, anyone with even a whiff of suspicion could be asked to provide proof of age to the staff, with a reasonable notice period, and a thread was set-up to detail what was accepted, the easiest way to submit it and, importantly, which parts needed to be obscured so as to protect the submitter’s identity. Furthermore, anyone serving a suspension of greater than a week was also required to prove their age before they would be allowed back. During the same period, there was also much cause for concern after Yiffy.net was one of several large furry sites targeted by Anonymous raiders of 4chan (among others). Quick thinking and keen observation by the site’s staff prevented any issues and successfully avoided the attack. Later in that year, and after a number of clashes with the rest of the Yiffy.net staff, Alex Cross would step down from his position and leave the site to spend more time on his own, budding website.<br />
<br />
====2008 – On The Mend====<br />
<br />
So far 2008 has seen considerable change at Yiffy.net. Both Jinn and Silver Griffin have left the moderator team and site as a whole to spend more time on real life concerns, while Ranix, Azhtek and Steph Ravenblood were promoted to moderator to replace the three recent leavers. This influx of new blood and a determination amongst the existing staff to drag the site out of its stagnation has resulted in almost constant work on the site in terms of improvements. <br />
<br />
Firstly, Yiffy.net switched from the somewhat unpopular SMF to adopt vBulletin in late January, which was a move that caused some confusion and concern at the time but has since smoothed out for the most part. <br />
And, after months of discussion and hard work, the staff unveiled a new section on the site – Yiffy.net Social. This new area was to be centred around more social, out of character aspects of furry life, such as meets and conventions, as well as more diverse non-RP discussion and sections for artists of every variety to post and talk about their works. There was also the less significant but still popular introduction of a much wider variety of visual themes for the site. <br />
<br />
The site's administrators have also continued their work to open the site up more to the members and created a forum purely for members to give their feedback and suggestions on what they'd like done with the site or what they don't like about existing features. <br />
<br />
Further changes currently in progress include RP nights in the site's chat, whereby users can play tabletop role-playing games online with other furs on the site. Numerous other changes are in the pipeline, with the site's staff working hard to help restore the once proud site to its former glory and re-establish it as the first name in furry communities.<br />
<br />
There have thus far been no gigantic reversal in the site’s fortunes but membership and activity are steadily on the rise and the feedback that the staff have received on their recent changes has been promising. It’s slow-going for now but things are definitely on the up at Yiffy.net.<br />
<br />
====Now - Yiffy International - Three sites become one====<br />
<br />
In late Spring of 2008, two staff members left their posts - Ranix left the site and fandom altogether for personal reasons and Talija stepped down as administrator and left the site, citing "Failure to fulfil goals and failure to breathe new life into the site" as her reasons for doing so.<br />
<br />
Shortly afterwards, it was announced by one of the site's two remaining admin - Micah - that Yiffy.net would be undergoing a merger with the portal site Yiffy.tk. The new, combined site was planned to have all the features of its two component parts - forums, chat, art and reviewed links - as well as the advantage that the owner of Yiffy.tk would also own the dedicated server that the new site would be running on, meaning free, dedicated hosting and almost 24/7 tech support. It was also announced at this time that Micah would not hold a staff position at the new site, at least not when it went live. Shortly after this, furrum.com was also announced to be joining the new Yiffy International site.<br />
<br />
The plan was for Sniper Fox and Karma to run the non-forum side of the new combined site - dubbed "Yiffy International" by the pair - and for an admin team comprising Ikari, Azhtek and Talija. This plan was first communicated just to the staff, then later to the general user population after more details were solidified.<br />
<br />
In early August, things came to a head when Sniper Fox publicly announced on Yiffy.net that the merger would be going ahead within the next few days. A snag was hit shortly before the merger went live, however, when it was discovered and announced that the threads on the current Yiffy.net forum would not be transferred across but that the old site would be left in a read-only format so that furs could save any threads they wanted to keep. This announcement was met with a large amount of complaint but the site's staff did what they could to assure users and to make saving of old threads as easily as possible.<br />
<br />
Soon after the announcement that the site would debut with Flash Chat (for testing purposes only, it was later removed and replaced with AJAX chat), and that it wasn't feasible to port the threads over there was a falling out between the proposed new admins. Three proposed administrators of the merged site's forums and chats all announced that they would not be returning to the site after the merger due to a breakdown in the working relationship between themselves and the two site owners, the exact details of which were not revealed. No moderators were brought over from Yiffy.Net or Furrum.com, but prior staff was encouraged to re-apply after the merge was completed.<br />
<br />
Over the course of 12th August / 13th August, Yiffy International went fully live, with yiffy.info, yiffy.net as well as furrum.com are now pointing to yiffy.tk. The start has certainly been rocky but both Sniper Fox and Karma have numerous years of website management experience and plenty of technical capability.<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net is currently home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally has a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
==== Drugs ====<br />
<br />
While drugs had cropped up in various roleplays and discussions on previous versions of the site, with the merger there was a new forum called "420", that focused purely on recreational drug use, particularly cannabis. There was some objection to this, with some members stating in the site discussion threads that they felt this was encouraging illegal drug use. However, the site's owner, Karma, has moved to assure members that this is very much not the case and that the 420 forum's intent is to educate people about drugs in a responsible way - both the good and bad effects - and that it promoted legalisation of cannabis rather than its actual use.<br />
<br />
==== Banned Content ====<br />
<br />
Previously, Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered tabboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
After the site's August merger to become Yiffy International, the rules as a whole were taken down and re-written from scratch, apparently on an on-going basis. Pursuant to Canadian law, it was announced on the site's rule page that Cub (under age) and Bestiality roleplaying and images would not be allowed on the site.<br />
<br />
The site allows furry-human role play and artwork.<br />
<br />
==== New Management and the Merger ====<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. As several existing staff also resigned, it became clear that something was very wrong behind the scenes. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
Within the first day of the merger going live and even before that, Karma also showed that he was not someone who appreciated whining or criticism, reacting strongly to both in site discussion threads.<br />
<br />
==== Underage users ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net has always operated a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users face when registering, members are age-checked if there is any suspicion of them being too young to be there, and the moderation team will also often request proof of age from any member who causes trouble and receives a suspension.<br />
<br />
If they are unable to provide such, then their IPs are banned from the site until they can show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This was seen in some quarters as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content, Yiffy.net has both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site. On a few occasions, users banned under this rule have even went on to create their own site, knowingly allowing underage users.<br />
<br />
With the move from Yiffy.net to Yiffy International, the site's hosting also changed from the United States to Canada. Governed by a different set of laws, this position changed slightly. While underage users are still not allowed on the site by policy, they are no longer "checked at the door" with a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act COPA]-compliant "I agree to this be an adult" statement upon account creation. Instead, users are only challenged to prove their age when a dispute arises or the staff otherwise has cause to believe the users to be underage.<br />
<br />
==== Leetspeak/Netspeak ====<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This has since been relaxed further and the current ruling on leet/netspeak then stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
However, when the site merged in to Yiffy International in August 2008, and with Sniper Fox back at the helm and all the previous admin and moderation staff either forced out or resigned, the rule was abolished entirely, with both Sniper Fox and Karma of the opinion that users should be able to type whatever they like. Under the new policies, as long as they weren't being disruptive to the site or to others, users have the freedom to express themselves in any way they like. This new stance has been met with a slightly mixed reaction but the general consensus seems to be one of acceptance, or at least no strong protest.<br />
<br />
==== The Cull of ’08 ====<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a purge of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. As a result, a number of members were somewhat irritated to find out that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk.<br />
<br />
====Donations====<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net is sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations have been very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net has faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it’s narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto Sniper Fox’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This has been less of an issue, more recently – the site’s technical admin is also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understands of the problems with obtaining funds and is hence more forgiving than previous hosts if the site is late in paying their server rent. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, a recent donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The recent move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only Talija and TigerPaw contributing to the cost of the licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Some references are from the site's own discussion boards and postings of rules and regulations.<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=123 A Word on Underage Users]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome to Yiffy International!]<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2008-08-20T14:09:42Z<p>Sniper Fox: Since all "citation needed" references were removed, cleaned unreferenced tag in header</p>
<hr />
<div>{{cleanup}}<br />
{{wikify}}<br />
{{npov}}<br />
{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
Yiffy.Net was an adult [[furry]] online community featuring forums, live chat and an image gallery. It merged with [[Yiffy.Tk]] in August of 2008 to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Technical Administrator''': [[Karma]]<br />
* '''Moderators''': Currently None<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' Jan 2002 - present<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
====2002 – Inception====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net – or Yiffy.info as it was then known - was founded in the summer of 2002 by Sniper Fox, with the aim of being a:<br />
{{q|100% user-maintained portal site for everything in the yiffy part of the furry fandom}}<br />
And was the first all-furry forum in existence. The site was run on phpBB 2RC-4 software off of Sniper Fox’s home PC and by February of the following year the site membership had risen to fifty registered users and things were starting to take off. <br />
<br />
====2003 – Take Off! ====<br />
<br />
In April 2003, Sniper Fox switched the site over to Chatterbox Forum, a much more visually appealing software than its predecessor that also had guestbooks on the user profiles, and within a couple of months site membership quickly hit double figures. From that point onwards, growth was exponential and the site started to thrive. With over 50 links to furry and furry-related websites, including furry artists and fur-suiters amongst others, Yiffy.info / Yiffy.net was succeeding in its founders goal of making it not only a good furry portal site but also a popular and oft-visited forum for role-playing and Sniper Fox was continually looking to further and improve the site, making it bigger and better.<br />
<br />
In October of that year, Sniper Fox opened up a Yiffy.net store that sold site-branded merchandise, with all profits being put right back into the site. In that same month, membership also hit 500 users, a huge number for a site in what was still very much a developing fandom, and by the end of the year there were over 900 members – Yiffy.net was growing fast.<br />
<br />
====2004 – Hitting the Big Time====<br />
<br />
Then, in January 2004, the site changed software again, moving to the much more advanced and moddable phpBB and breaking the 1,000 user mark, with over 200 visiting every single day and up to 50 members online at any given time. The site now had a live chat programme to go with its forums (or “furums” as they were called), user-selectable themes, polls, a “shout-box” and a gallery for user-submitted pictures. Also on the site were “Yiffy dollars” that were earned by posting and could be used to purchase profile effects such as having one’s username highlighted in a colour of the users choice, changing usernames, expanding forum signatures and so on; related to this there was also an on-site lottery where members could buy tickets, using their Yiffy dollars, in the hope of winning the jackpot.<br />
<br />
By the summer of 2004 had double its number of users since the beginning of the year and had a staggering 80,000 posts in around 1,700 topics and there was also a new addition to the site’s moderation team – Micah Coon, now one of the three site administrators. However, not everything was going well – the site had always been user-supported but a combination of a lack of donations or store purchases and a lack of income through the site’s single banner advert meant that the site was struggling to keep going financially. This, coupled with the fact that the site’s Paypal account had been frozen due to Paypal finally realising that Yiffy.net was an adult site (something that the site’s administrators did not realise was an issue) meant that things were tough for Yiffy.net. In September, Magdalena and Tatyana joined the moderator team to help with the running of the site and later, in December, both Sinergy and Arundel joined them as well. Five new moderators in a year showed just how fast Yiffy.net was growing.<br />
<br />
====2005 – Peak Before a Fall====<br />
<br />
Half a year later and the site had fully recovered and now had 3,700 users and 150,000 posts in nearly 4,000 threads. After also upgrading to version 2.0.11 of phpBB, which introduced various new features, Sniper Fox also added Flash games to the site – over 100 simple arcade games with high scores, announcements of scoreboard leaders and medals to the highest scorers; something that proved to be a strain on the server’s resources but very popular with a lot of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Over the course of 2005 things continued to move onwards and upwards for Yiffy.net, new games were added and unpopular ones removed, the site changed servers twice to accommodate the continuing growth, Silver Griffin joined the moderator team in August and in November of that year Yiffy.net climbed to the top of Google’s search results for “Yiffy”. In three years Sniper Fox and his hard-working moderators had helped to turn Yiffy.net from a small board with just a handful of members to the largest and most well-known all-yiffy community on the web, with close to 5,000 members and 200,000 posts.<br />
<br />
====2006 – The Beginning of the End? ====<br />
<br />
The beginning of 2006 saw yet another server move as the site continued to grow and prove to be too big a strain on the previous server, and also the addition of a voice-chat to Yiffy.net. The site’s moderator team also continued to grow, with two further members – Martin and Lunara Copperhair - being promoted to help with the running of the thousands strong website that now had up to 827 users accessing it every day. By June, Martin had to step down from his post due to a lack of available time to spend working on the site and was replaced by Talija and Jinn, the former something of a surprise promotion to many – she was a long-standing member but not one known for her calm temperament.<br />
<br />
In July ’06, the biggest and most significant event in Yiffy.net’s six year history occurred – Sniper Fox stood down as head administrator and owner of the site, for personal reasons. The reins were handed over to Micah Coon, back with the moderator team after a while out, and Taryn. The news was received by the site’s members with very mixed feelings – a lot of people felt that Yiffy.net had been stagnating of late and that a new leader was what the place needed to take it forward; but on the other hand, Micah Coon had a fairly colourful history with the site to say the least and there were a number of users who left the site as soon as the news broke. Micah quickly stamped his authority on the site, removing a few bans that he felt had been given by the previous site owner for personal reasons rather than any breach of the rules, and also sacked two moderators – Chazz Wolf and Zantari – who had been largely inactive for some time. This new appointment did, however, bring an end to the fighting between members of Yiffy.net and the only other site able to be called a rival – Furgasmic.com, run until its recent closure by Rhianna Ravenclaw, herself an active member of Yiffy.net. A few days later, another moderator joined the team, someone else who would a few months later go on to become a site admin – LadyDarkSphynx. Not long after this change in ownership, Talija stepped down as a moderator and left the site, due to personal differences with Micah Coon and the way the site was now being run. <br />
<br />
By the end of the year, Yiffy.net switched from phpBB to SMF and replaced the resource-intensive Flash Chat with the much more streamlined and simpler x7 Chat, moved to a new server, installed TigerPaw as the site’s Technical Administrator, and one of the greatest sources of contention and conflict the site’s had came into place – the ban on leetspeak and netspeak. Under the new rules, using such acronyms as lol, rofl, bbs or wtf could earn users a warning at first, then a day-long ban and then gradually longer bans with each offense. The move to SMF was another source of disquiet amongst the members of Yiffy.net – it may have been cheaper to run, less of a drain on resources, easier to use and a lot more stable and bug-free than its predecessor software but many on the site felt that it was a step backwards for such a famous site and that Yiffy.net had lost some of its individuality by adopting a format that was so prevalent throughout the web, especially on first-timer forums.<br />
<br />
On the whole, 2006 was not a good year for Yiffy.net – activity levels were dropping to lower than any in the previous two years, post rates were also low and there was a growing sense of discontent amongst the members of the site, something that would continue into 2007...<br />
<br />
====2007 - Under New Management====<br />
<br />
2007 for Yiffy.net started with several changes in staff – Taryn had earlier stepped down from his position and left the site entirely due to time constraints, with LadyDarkSphynx being promoted in his wake in what was initially an interim position but later became permanent; and Alex Cross and Vulpes Proeliator were promoted to the moderator team to replace the three moderators who had left in the latter half of the preceding year. <br />
<br />
At the end of February and partially on the insistence of outward-bound moderator Sinergy/Cynergi, Micah Coon asked Talija back to the site, promoting her to the position of administrator. Within days and after considerable discussion between Micah and Talija, indeed it had been something she had demanded as a condition of her coming back to the site, the unpopular Netspeak Rule was relaxed considerably. The use of such acronyms and abbreviations in excess was still discouraged but members would no longer be in trouble for a simple “lol” or “brb”, though the stress was very much that such terms were fine in out-of-character areas of the forums and chat but still had no place in role-plays and in-character discussion. The site’s rules were also re-posted, having been absent from the boards for some time, and extensively re-written by the new addition to the admin team, along with a separate set of rules for the x7 Chat.<br />
<br />
The summer of 2007 saw the start of the staff of Yiffy.net opening up to their members – in a bid to dispel the inevitable rumours that surrounded anyone’s suspension, all suspensions and bans were publicly posted by the admin, detailing who, why and how long. There was also a crack-down on underage users, initiated by Alex Cross and heavily supported by the whole team. Now, anyone with even a whiff of suspicion could be asked to provide proof of age to the staff, with a reasonable notice period, and a thread was set-up to detail what was accepted, the easiest way to submit it and, importantly, which parts needed to be obscured so as to protect the submitter’s identity. Furthermore, anyone serving a suspension of greater than a week was also required to prove their age before they would be allowed back. During the same period, there was also much cause for concern after Yiffy.net was one of several large furry sites targeted by Anonymous raiders of 4chan (among others). Quick thinking and keen observation by the site’s staff prevented any issues and successfully avoided the attack. Later in that year, and after a number of clashes with the rest of the Yiffy.net staff, Alex Cross would step down from his position and leave the site to spend more time on his own, budding website.<br />
<br />
====2008 – On The Mend====<br />
<br />
So far 2008 has seen considerable change at Yiffy.net. Both Jinn and Silver Griffin have left the moderator team and site as a whole to spend more time on real life concerns, while Ranix, Azhtek and Steph Ravenblood were promoted to moderator to replace the three recent leavers. This influx of new blood and a determination amongst the existing staff to drag the site out of its stagnation has resulted in almost constant work on the site in terms of improvements. <br />
<br />
Firstly, Yiffy.net switched from the somewhat unpopular SMF to adopt vBulletin in late January, which was a move that caused some confusion and concern at the time but has since smoothed out for the most part. <br />
And, after months of discussion and hard work, the staff unveiled a new section on the site – Yiffy.net Social. This new area was to be centred around more social, out of character aspects of furry life, such as meets and conventions, as well as more diverse non-RP discussion and sections for artists of every variety to post and talk about their works. There was also the less significant but still popular introduction of a much wider variety of visual themes for the site. <br />
<br />
The site's administrators have also continued their work to open the site up more to the members and created a forum purely for members to give their feedback and suggestions on what they'd like done with the site or what they don't like about existing features. <br />
<br />
Further changes currently in progress include RP nights in the site's chat, whereby users can play tabletop role-playing games online with other furs on the site. Numerous other changes are in the pipeline, with the site's staff working hard to help restore the once proud site to its former glory and re-establish it as the first name in furry communities.<br />
<br />
There have thus far been no gigantic reversal in the site’s fortunes but membership and activity are steadily on the rise and the feedback that the staff have received on their recent changes has been promising. It’s slow-going for now but things are definitely on the up at Yiffy.net.<br />
<br />
====Now - Yiffy International - Three sites become one====<br />
<br />
In late Spring of 2008, two staff members left their posts - Ranix left the site and fandom altogether for personal reasons and Talija stepped down as administrator and left the site, citing "Failure to fulfil goals and failure to breathe new life into the site" as her reasons for doing so.<br />
<br />
Shortly afterwards, it was announced by one of the site's two remaining admin - Micah - that Yiffy.net would be undergoing a merger with the portal site Yiffy.tk. The new, combined site was planned to have all the features of its two component parts - forums, chat, art and reviewed links - as well as the advantage that the owner of Yiffy.tk would also own the dedicated server that the new site would be running on, meaning free, dedicated hosting and almost 24/7 tech support. It was also announced at this time that Micah would not hold a staff position at the new site, at least not when it went live. Shortly after this, furrum.com was also announced to be joining the new Yiffy International site.<br />
<br />
The plan was for Sniper Fox and Karma to run the non-forum side of the new combined site - dubbed "Yiffy International" by the pair - and for an admin team comprising Ikari, Azhtek and Talija. This plan was first communicated just to the staff, then later to the general user population after more details were solidified.<br />
<br />
In early August, things came to a head when Sniper Fox publicly announced on Yiffy.net that the merger would be going ahead within the next few days. A snag was hit shortly before the merger went live, however, when it was discovered and announced that the threads on the current Yiffy.net forum would not be transferred across but that the old site would be left in a read-only format so that furs could save any threads they wanted to keep. This announcement was met with a large amount of complaint but the site's staff did what they could to assure users and to make saving of old threads as easily as possible.<br />
<br />
Soon after the announcement that the site would debut with Flash Chat (for testing purposes only, it was later removed and replaced with AJAX chat), and that it wasn't feasible to port the threads over there was a falling out between the proposed new admins. Three proposed administrators of the merged site's forums and chats all announced that they would not be returning to the site after the merger due to a breakdown in the working relationship between themselves and the two site owners, the exact details of which were not revealed. No moderators were brought over from Yiffy.Net or Furrum.com, but prior staff was encouraged to re-apply after the merge was completed.<br />
<br />
Over the course of 12th August / 13th August, Yiffy International went fully live, with yiffy.info, yiffy.net as well as furrum.com are now pointing to yiffy.tk. The start has certainly been rocky but both Sniper Fox and Karma have numerous years of website management experience and plenty of technical capability.<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net is currently home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally has a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
==== Drugs ====<br />
<br />
While drugs had cropped up in various roleplays and discussions on previous versions of the site, with the merger there was a new forum called "420", that focused purely on recreational drug use, particularly cannabis. There was some objection to this, with some members stating in the site discussion threads that they felt this was encouraging illegal drug use. However, the site's owner, Karma, has moved to assure members that this is very much not the case and that the 420 forum's intent is to educate people about drugs in a responsible way - both the good and bad effects - and that it promoted legalisation of cannabis rather than its actual use.<br />
<br />
==== Banned Content ====<br />
<br />
Previously, Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered tabboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
After the site's August merger to become Yiffy International, the rules as a whole were taken down and re-written from scratch, apparently on an on-going basis. Pursuant to Canadian law, it was announced on the site's rule page that Cub (under age) and Bestiality roleplaying and images would not be allowed on the site.<br />
<br />
The site allows furry-human role play and artwork.<br />
<br />
==== New Management and the Merger ====<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. As several existing staff also resigned, it became clear that something was very wrong behind the scenes. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
Within the first day of the merger going live and even before that, Karma also showed that he was not someone who appreciated whining or criticism, reacting strongly to both in site discussion threads.<br />
<br />
==== Underage users ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net has always operated a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users face when registering, members are age-checked if there is any suspicion of them being too young to be there, and the moderation team will also often request proof of age from any member who causes trouble and receives a suspension.<br />
<br />
If they are unable to provide such, then their IPs are banned from the site until they can show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This was seen in some quarters as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content, Yiffy.net has both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site. On a few occasions, users banned under this rule have even went on to create their own site, knowingly allowing underage users.<br />
<br />
With the move from Yiffy.net to Yiffy International, the site's hosting also changed from the United States to Canada. Governed by a different set of laws, this position changed slightly. While underage users are still not allowed on the site by policy, they are no longer "checked at the door" with a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act COPA]-compliant "I agree to this be an adult" statement upon account creation. Instead, users are only challenged to prove their age when a dispute arises or the staff otherwise has cause to believe the users to be underage.<br />
<br />
==== Leetspeak/Netspeak ====<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This has since been relaxed further and the current ruling on leet/netspeak then stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
However, when the site merged in to Yiffy International in August 2008, and with Sniper Fox back at the helm and all the previous admin and moderation staff either forced out or resigned, the rule was abolished entirely, with both Sniper Fox and Karma of the opinion that users should be able to type whatever they like. Under the new policies, as long as they weren't being disruptive to the site or to others, users have the freedom to express themselves in any way they like. This new stance has been met with a slightly mixed reaction but the general consensus seems to be one of acceptance, or at least no strong protest.<br />
<br />
==== The Cull of ’08 ====<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a purge of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. As a result, a number of members were somewhat irritated to find out that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk.<br />
<br />
====Donations====<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net is sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations have been very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net has faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it’s narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto Sniper Fox’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This has been less of an issue, more recently – the site’s technical admin is also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understands of the problems with obtaining funds and is hence more forgiving than previous hosts if the site is late in paying their server rent. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, a recent donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The recent move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only Talija and TigerPaw contributing to the cost of the licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Some references are from the site's own discussion boards and postings of rules and regulations.<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=123 A Word on Underage Users]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome to Yiffy International!]<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2008-08-20T14:08:10Z<p>Sniper Fox: /* Underage users */ Removed "Citation Needed". Cleaned past/present tense conflicts.</p>
<hr />
<div>{{cleanup}}<br />
{{wikify}}<br />
{{unreferenced}}<br />
{{npov}}<br />
{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
Yiffy.Net was an adult [[furry]] online community featuring forums, live chat and an image gallery. It merged with [[Yiffy.Tk]] in August of 2008 to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Technical Administrator''': [[Karma]]<br />
* '''Moderators''': Currently None<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' Jan 2002 - present<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
====2002 – Inception====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net – or Yiffy.info as it was then known - was founded in the summer of 2002 by Sniper Fox, with the aim of being a:<br />
{{q|100% user-maintained portal site for everything in the yiffy part of the furry fandom}}<br />
And was the first all-furry forum in existence. The site was run on phpBB 2RC-4 software off of Sniper Fox’s home PC and by February of the following year the site membership had risen to fifty registered users and things were starting to take off. <br />
<br />
====2003 – Take Off! ====<br />
<br />
In April 2003, Sniper Fox switched the site over to Chatterbox Forum, a much more visually appealing software than its predecessor that also had guestbooks on the user profiles, and within a couple of months site membership quickly hit double figures. From that point onwards, growth was exponential and the site started to thrive. With over 50 links to furry and furry-related websites, including furry artists and fur-suiters amongst others, Yiffy.info / Yiffy.net was succeeding in its founders goal of making it not only a good furry portal site but also a popular and oft-visited forum for role-playing and Sniper Fox was continually looking to further and improve the site, making it bigger and better.<br />
<br />
In October of that year, Sniper Fox opened up a Yiffy.net store that sold site-branded merchandise, with all profits being put right back into the site. In that same month, membership also hit 500 users, a huge number for a site in what was still very much a developing fandom, and by the end of the year there were over 900 members – Yiffy.net was growing fast.<br />
<br />
====2004 – Hitting the Big Time====<br />
<br />
Then, in January 2004, the site changed software again, moving to the much more advanced and moddable phpBB and breaking the 1,000 user mark, with over 200 visiting every single day and up to 50 members online at any given time. The site now had a live chat programme to go with its forums (or “furums” as they were called), user-selectable themes, polls, a “shout-box” and a gallery for user-submitted pictures. Also on the site were “Yiffy dollars” that were earned by posting and could be used to purchase profile effects such as having one’s username highlighted in a colour of the users choice, changing usernames, expanding forum signatures and so on; related to this there was also an on-site lottery where members could buy tickets, using their Yiffy dollars, in the hope of winning the jackpot.<br />
<br />
By the summer of 2004 had double its number of users since the beginning of the year and had a staggering 80,000 posts in around 1,700 topics and there was also a new addition to the site’s moderation team – Micah Coon, now one of the three site administrators. However, not everything was going well – the site had always been user-supported but a combination of a lack of donations or store purchases and a lack of income through the site’s single banner advert meant that the site was struggling to keep going financially. This, coupled with the fact that the site’s Paypal account had been frozen due to Paypal finally realising that Yiffy.net was an adult site (something that the site’s administrators did not realise was an issue) meant that things were tough for Yiffy.net. In September, Magdalena and Tatyana joined the moderator team to help with the running of the site and later, in December, both Sinergy and Arundel joined them as well. Five new moderators in a year showed just how fast Yiffy.net was growing.<br />
<br />
====2005 – Peak Before a Fall====<br />
<br />
Half a year later and the site had fully recovered and now had 3,700 users and 150,000 posts in nearly 4,000 threads. After also upgrading to version 2.0.11 of phpBB, which introduced various new features, Sniper Fox also added Flash games to the site – over 100 simple arcade games with high scores, announcements of scoreboard leaders and medals to the highest scorers; something that proved to be a strain on the server’s resources but very popular with a lot of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Over the course of 2005 things continued to move onwards and upwards for Yiffy.net, new games were added and unpopular ones removed, the site changed servers twice to accommodate the continuing growth, Silver Griffin joined the moderator team in August and in November of that year Yiffy.net climbed to the top of Google’s search results for “Yiffy”. In three years Sniper Fox and his hard-working moderators had helped to turn Yiffy.net from a small board with just a handful of members to the largest and most well-known all-yiffy community on the web, with close to 5,000 members and 200,000 posts.<br />
<br />
====2006 – The Beginning of the End? ====<br />
<br />
The beginning of 2006 saw yet another server move as the site continued to grow and prove to be too big a strain on the previous server, and also the addition of a voice-chat to Yiffy.net. The site’s moderator team also continued to grow, with two further members – Martin and Lunara Copperhair - being promoted to help with the running of the thousands strong website that now had up to 827 users accessing it every day. By June, Martin had to step down from his post due to a lack of available time to spend working on the site and was replaced by Talija and Jinn, the former something of a surprise promotion to many – she was a long-standing member but not one known for her calm temperament.<br />
<br />
In July ’06, the biggest and most significant event in Yiffy.net’s six year history occurred – Sniper Fox stood down as head administrator and owner of the site, for personal reasons. The reins were handed over to Micah Coon, back with the moderator team after a while out, and Taryn. The news was received by the site’s members with very mixed feelings – a lot of people felt that Yiffy.net had been stagnating of late and that a new leader was what the place needed to take it forward; but on the other hand, Micah Coon had a fairly colourful history with the site to say the least and there were a number of users who left the site as soon as the news broke. Micah quickly stamped his authority on the site, removing a few bans that he felt had been given by the previous site owner for personal reasons rather than any breach of the rules, and also sacked two moderators – Chazz Wolf and Zantari – who had been largely inactive for some time. This new appointment did, however, bring an end to the fighting between members of Yiffy.net and the only other site able to be called a rival – Furgasmic.com, run until its recent closure by Rhianna Ravenclaw, herself an active member of Yiffy.net. A few days later, another moderator joined the team, someone else who would a few months later go on to become a site admin – LadyDarkSphynx. Not long after this change in ownership, Talija stepped down as a moderator and left the site, due to personal differences with Micah Coon and the way the site was now being run. <br />
<br />
By the end of the year, Yiffy.net switched from phpBB to SMF and replaced the resource-intensive Flash Chat with the much more streamlined and simpler x7 Chat, moved to a new server, installed TigerPaw as the site’s Technical Administrator, and one of the greatest sources of contention and conflict the site’s had came into place – the ban on leetspeak and netspeak. Under the new rules, using such acronyms as lol, rofl, bbs or wtf could earn users a warning at first, then a day-long ban and then gradually longer bans with each offense. The move to SMF was another source of disquiet amongst the members of Yiffy.net – it may have been cheaper to run, less of a drain on resources, easier to use and a lot more stable and bug-free than its predecessor software but many on the site felt that it was a step backwards for such a famous site and that Yiffy.net had lost some of its individuality by adopting a format that was so prevalent throughout the web, especially on first-timer forums.<br />
<br />
On the whole, 2006 was not a good year for Yiffy.net – activity levels were dropping to lower than any in the previous two years, post rates were also low and there was a growing sense of discontent amongst the members of the site, something that would continue into 2007...<br />
<br />
====2007 - Under New Management====<br />
<br />
2007 for Yiffy.net started with several changes in staff – Taryn had earlier stepped down from his position and left the site entirely due to time constraints, with LadyDarkSphynx being promoted in his wake in what was initially an interim position but later became permanent; and Alex Cross and Vulpes Proeliator were promoted to the moderator team to replace the three moderators who had left in the latter half of the preceding year. <br />
<br />
At the end of February and partially on the insistence of outward-bound moderator Sinergy/Cynergi, Micah Coon asked Talija back to the site, promoting her to the position of administrator. Within days and after considerable discussion between Micah and Talija, indeed it had been something she had demanded as a condition of her coming back to the site, the unpopular Netspeak Rule was relaxed considerably. The use of such acronyms and abbreviations in excess was still discouraged but members would no longer be in trouble for a simple “lol” or “brb”, though the stress was very much that such terms were fine in out-of-character areas of the forums and chat but still had no place in role-plays and in-character discussion. The site’s rules were also re-posted, having been absent from the boards for some time, and extensively re-written by the new addition to the admin team, along with a separate set of rules for the x7 Chat.<br />
<br />
The summer of 2007 saw the start of the staff of Yiffy.net opening up to their members – in a bid to dispel the inevitable rumours that surrounded anyone’s suspension, all suspensions and bans were publicly posted by the admin, detailing who, why and how long. There was also a crack-down on underage users, initiated by Alex Cross and heavily supported by the whole team. Now, anyone with even a whiff of suspicion could be asked to provide proof of age to the staff, with a reasonable notice period, and a thread was set-up to detail what was accepted, the easiest way to submit it and, importantly, which parts needed to be obscured so as to protect the submitter’s identity. Furthermore, anyone serving a suspension of greater than a week was also required to prove their age before they would be allowed back. During the same period, there was also much cause for concern after Yiffy.net was one of several large furry sites targeted by Anonymous raiders of 4chan (among others). Quick thinking and keen observation by the site’s staff prevented any issues and successfully avoided the attack. Later in that year, and after a number of clashes with the rest of the Yiffy.net staff, Alex Cross would step down from his position and leave the site to spend more time on his own, budding website.<br />
<br />
====2008 – On The Mend====<br />
<br />
So far 2008 has seen considerable change at Yiffy.net. Both Jinn and Silver Griffin have left the moderator team and site as a whole to spend more time on real life concerns, while Ranix, Azhtek and Steph Ravenblood were promoted to moderator to replace the three recent leavers. This influx of new blood and a determination amongst the existing staff to drag the site out of its stagnation has resulted in almost constant work on the site in terms of improvements. <br />
<br />
Firstly, Yiffy.net switched from the somewhat unpopular SMF to adopt vBulletin in late January, which was a move that caused some confusion and concern at the time but has since smoothed out for the most part. <br />
And, after months of discussion and hard work, the staff unveiled a new section on the site – Yiffy.net Social. This new area was to be centred around more social, out of character aspects of furry life, such as meets and conventions, as well as more diverse non-RP discussion and sections for artists of every variety to post and talk about their works. There was also the less significant but still popular introduction of a much wider variety of visual themes for the site. <br />
<br />
The site's administrators have also continued their work to open the site up more to the members and created a forum purely for members to give their feedback and suggestions on what they'd like done with the site or what they don't like about existing features. <br />
<br />
Further changes currently in progress include RP nights in the site's chat, whereby users can play tabletop role-playing games online with other furs on the site. Numerous other changes are in the pipeline, with the site's staff working hard to help restore the once proud site to its former glory and re-establish it as the first name in furry communities.<br />
<br />
There have thus far been no gigantic reversal in the site’s fortunes but membership and activity are steadily on the rise and the feedback that the staff have received on their recent changes has been promising. It’s slow-going for now but things are definitely on the up at Yiffy.net.<br />
<br />
====Now - Yiffy International - Three sites become one====<br />
<br />
In late Spring of 2008, two staff members left their posts - Ranix left the site and fandom altogether for personal reasons and Talija stepped down as administrator and left the site, citing "Failure to fulfil goals and failure to breathe new life into the site" as her reasons for doing so.<br />
<br />
Shortly afterwards, it was announced by one of the site's two remaining admin - Micah - that Yiffy.net would be undergoing a merger with the portal site Yiffy.tk. The new, combined site was planned to have all the features of its two component parts - forums, chat, art and reviewed links - as well as the advantage that the owner of Yiffy.tk would also own the dedicated server that the new site would be running on, meaning free, dedicated hosting and almost 24/7 tech support. It was also announced at this time that Micah would not hold a staff position at the new site, at least not when it went live. Shortly after this, furrum.com was also announced to be joining the new Yiffy International site.<br />
<br />
The plan was for Sniper Fox and Karma to run the non-forum side of the new combined site - dubbed "Yiffy International" by the pair - and for an admin team comprising Ikari, Azhtek and Talija. This plan was first communicated just to the staff, then later to the general user population after more details were solidified.<br />
<br />
In early August, things came to a head when Sniper Fox publicly announced on Yiffy.net that the merger would be going ahead within the next few days. A snag was hit shortly before the merger went live, however, when it was discovered and announced that the threads on the current Yiffy.net forum would not be transferred across but that the old site would be left in a read-only format so that furs could save any threads they wanted to keep. This announcement was met with a large amount of complaint but the site's staff did what they could to assure users and to make saving of old threads as easily as possible.<br />
<br />
Soon after the announcement that the site would debut with Flash Chat (for testing purposes only, it was later removed and replaced with AJAX chat), and that it wasn't feasible to port the threads over there was a falling out between the proposed new admins. Three proposed administrators of the merged site's forums and chats all announced that they would not be returning to the site after the merger due to a breakdown in the working relationship between themselves and the two site owners, the exact details of which were not revealed. No moderators were brought over from Yiffy.Net or Furrum.com, but prior staff was encouraged to re-apply after the merge was completed.<br />
<br />
Over the course of 12th August / 13th August, Yiffy International went fully live, with yiffy.info, yiffy.net as well as furrum.com are now pointing to yiffy.tk. The start has certainly been rocky but both Sniper Fox and Karma have numerous years of website management experience and plenty of technical capability.<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net is currently home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally has a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
==== Drugs ====<br />
<br />
While drugs had cropped up in various roleplays and discussions on previous versions of the site, with the merger there was a new forum called "420", that focused purely on recreational drug use, particularly cannabis. There was some objection to this, with some members stating in the site discussion threads that they felt this was encouraging illegal drug use. However, the site's owner, Karma, has moved to assure members that this is very much not the case and that the 420 forum's intent is to educate people about drugs in a responsible way - both the good and bad effects - and that it promoted legalisation of cannabis rather than its actual use.<br />
<br />
==== Banned Content ====<br />
<br />
Previously, Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered tabboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
After the site's August merger to become Yiffy International, the rules as a whole were taken down and re-written from scratch, apparently on an on-going basis. Pursuant to Canadian law, it was announced on the site's rule page that Cub (under age) and Bestiality roleplaying and images would not be allowed on the site.<br />
<br />
The site allows furry-human role play and artwork.<br />
<br />
==== New Management and the Merger ====<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. As several existing staff also resigned, it became clear that something was very wrong behind the scenes. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
Within the first day of the merger going live and even before that, Karma also showed that he was not someone who appreciated whining or criticism, reacting strongly to both in site discussion threads.<br />
<br />
==== Underage users ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net has always operated a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users face when registering, members are age-checked if there is any suspicion of them being too young to be there, and the moderation team will also often request proof of age from any member who causes trouble and receives a suspension.<br />
<br />
If they are unable to provide such, then their IPs are banned from the site until they can show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This was seen in some quarters as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content, Yiffy.net has both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site. On a few occasions, users banned under this rule have even went on to create their own site, knowingly allowing underage users.<br />
<br />
With the move from Yiffy.net to Yiffy International, the site's hosting also changed from the United States to Canada. Governed by a different set of laws, this position changed slightly. While underage users are still not allowed on the site by policy, they are no longer "checked at the door" with a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act COPA]-compliant "I agree to this be an adult" statement upon account creation. Instead, users are only challenged to prove their age when a dispute arises or the staff otherwise has cause to believe the users to be underage.<br />
<br />
==== Leetspeak/Netspeak ====<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This has since been relaxed further and the current ruling on leet/netspeak then stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
However, when the site merged in to Yiffy International in August 2008, and with Sniper Fox back at the helm and all the previous admin and moderation staff either forced out or resigned, the rule was abolished entirely, with both Sniper Fox and Karma of the opinion that users should be able to type whatever they like. Under the new policies, as long as they weren't being disruptive to the site or to others, users have the freedom to express themselves in any way they like. This new stance has been met with a slightly mixed reaction but the general consensus seems to be one of acceptance, or at least no strong protest.<br />
<br />
==== The Cull of ’08 ====<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a purge of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. As a result, a number of members were somewhat irritated to find out that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk.<br />
<br />
====Donations====<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net is sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations have been very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net has faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it’s narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto Sniper Fox’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This has been less of an issue, more recently – the site’s technical admin is also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understands of the problems with obtaining funds and is hence more forgiving than previous hosts if the site is late in paying their server rent. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, a recent donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The recent move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only Talija and TigerPaw contributing to the cost of the licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Some references are from the site's own discussion boards and postings of rules and regulations.<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=123 A Word on Underage Users]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome to Yiffy International!]<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2008-08-20T14:03:28Z<p>Sniper Fox: /* Banned Content */ Changed merger verbage from "Yiffy.tk" to "Yiffy International"</p>
<hr />
<div>{{cleanup}}<br />
{{wikify}}<br />
{{unreferenced}}<br />
{{npov}}<br />
{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
Yiffy.Net was an adult [[furry]] online community featuring forums, live chat and an image gallery. It merged with [[Yiffy.Tk]] in August of 2008 to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Technical Administrator''': [[Karma]]<br />
* '''Moderators''': Currently None<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' Jan 2002 - present<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
====2002 – Inception====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net – or Yiffy.info as it was then known - was founded in the summer of 2002 by Sniper Fox, with the aim of being a:<br />
{{q|100% user-maintained portal site for everything in the yiffy part of the furry fandom}}<br />
And was the first all-furry forum in existence. The site was run on phpBB 2RC-4 software off of Sniper Fox’s home PC and by February of the following year the site membership had risen to fifty registered users and things were starting to take off. <br />
<br />
====2003 – Take Off! ====<br />
<br />
In April 2003, Sniper Fox switched the site over to Chatterbox Forum, a much more visually appealing software than its predecessor that also had guestbooks on the user profiles, and within a couple of months site membership quickly hit double figures. From that point onwards, growth was exponential and the site started to thrive. With over 50 links to furry and furry-related websites, including furry artists and fur-suiters amongst others, Yiffy.info / Yiffy.net was succeeding in its founders goal of making it not only a good furry portal site but also a popular and oft-visited forum for role-playing and Sniper Fox was continually looking to further and improve the site, making it bigger and better.<br />
<br />
In October of that year, Sniper Fox opened up a Yiffy.net store that sold site-branded merchandise, with all profits being put right back into the site. In that same month, membership also hit 500 users, a huge number for a site in what was still very much a developing fandom, and by the end of the year there were over 900 members – Yiffy.net was growing fast.<br />
<br />
====2004 – Hitting the Big Time====<br />
<br />
Then, in January 2004, the site changed software again, moving to the much more advanced and moddable phpBB and breaking the 1,000 user mark, with over 200 visiting every single day and up to 50 members online at any given time. The site now had a live chat programme to go with its forums (or “furums” as they were called), user-selectable themes, polls, a “shout-box” and a gallery for user-submitted pictures. Also on the site were “Yiffy dollars” that were earned by posting and could be used to purchase profile effects such as having one’s username highlighted in a colour of the users choice, changing usernames, expanding forum signatures and so on; related to this there was also an on-site lottery where members could buy tickets, using their Yiffy dollars, in the hope of winning the jackpot.<br />
<br />
By the summer of 2004 had double its number of users since the beginning of the year and had a staggering 80,000 posts in around 1,700 topics and there was also a new addition to the site’s moderation team – Micah Coon, now one of the three site administrators. However, not everything was going well – the site had always been user-supported but a combination of a lack of donations or store purchases and a lack of income through the site’s single banner advert meant that the site was struggling to keep going financially. This, coupled with the fact that the site’s Paypal account had been frozen due to Paypal finally realising that Yiffy.net was an adult site (something that the site’s administrators did not realise was an issue) meant that things were tough for Yiffy.net. In September, Magdalena and Tatyana joined the moderator team to help with the running of the site and later, in December, both Sinergy and Arundel joined them as well. Five new moderators in a year showed just how fast Yiffy.net was growing.<br />
<br />
====2005 – Peak Before a Fall====<br />
<br />
Half a year later and the site had fully recovered and now had 3,700 users and 150,000 posts in nearly 4,000 threads. After also upgrading to version 2.0.11 of phpBB, which introduced various new features, Sniper Fox also added Flash games to the site – over 100 simple arcade games with high scores, announcements of scoreboard leaders and medals to the highest scorers; something that proved to be a strain on the server’s resources but very popular with a lot of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Over the course of 2005 things continued to move onwards and upwards for Yiffy.net, new games were added and unpopular ones removed, the site changed servers twice to accommodate the continuing growth, Silver Griffin joined the moderator team in August and in November of that year Yiffy.net climbed to the top of Google’s search results for “Yiffy”. In three years Sniper Fox and his hard-working moderators had helped to turn Yiffy.net from a small board with just a handful of members to the largest and most well-known all-yiffy community on the web, with close to 5,000 members and 200,000 posts.<br />
<br />
====2006 – The Beginning of the End? ====<br />
<br />
The beginning of 2006 saw yet another server move as the site continued to grow and prove to be too big a strain on the previous server, and also the addition of a voice-chat to Yiffy.net. The site’s moderator team also continued to grow, with two further members – Martin and Lunara Copperhair - being promoted to help with the running of the thousands strong website that now had up to 827 users accessing it every day. By June, Martin had to step down from his post due to a lack of available time to spend working on the site and was replaced by Talija and Jinn, the former something of a surprise promotion to many – she was a long-standing member but not one known for her calm temperament.<br />
<br />
In July ’06, the biggest and most significant event in Yiffy.net’s six year history occurred – Sniper Fox stood down as head administrator and owner of the site, for personal reasons. The reins were handed over to Micah Coon, back with the moderator team after a while out, and Taryn. The news was received by the site’s members with very mixed feelings – a lot of people felt that Yiffy.net had been stagnating of late and that a new leader was what the place needed to take it forward; but on the other hand, Micah Coon had a fairly colourful history with the site to say the least and there were a number of users who left the site as soon as the news broke. Micah quickly stamped his authority on the site, removing a few bans that he felt had been given by the previous site owner for personal reasons rather than any breach of the rules, and also sacked two moderators – Chazz Wolf and Zantari – who had been largely inactive for some time. This new appointment did, however, bring an end to the fighting between members of Yiffy.net and the only other site able to be called a rival – Furgasmic.com, run until its recent closure by Rhianna Ravenclaw, herself an active member of Yiffy.net. A few days later, another moderator joined the team, someone else who would a few months later go on to become a site admin – LadyDarkSphynx. Not long after this change in ownership, Talija stepped down as a moderator and left the site, due to personal differences with Micah Coon and the way the site was now being run. <br />
<br />
By the end of the year, Yiffy.net switched from phpBB to SMF and replaced the resource-intensive Flash Chat with the much more streamlined and simpler x7 Chat, moved to a new server, installed TigerPaw as the site’s Technical Administrator, and one of the greatest sources of contention and conflict the site’s had came into place – the ban on leetspeak and netspeak. Under the new rules, using such acronyms as lol, rofl, bbs or wtf could earn users a warning at first, then a day-long ban and then gradually longer bans with each offense. The move to SMF was another source of disquiet amongst the members of Yiffy.net – it may have been cheaper to run, less of a drain on resources, easier to use and a lot more stable and bug-free than its predecessor software but many on the site felt that it was a step backwards for such a famous site and that Yiffy.net had lost some of its individuality by adopting a format that was so prevalent throughout the web, especially on first-timer forums.<br />
<br />
On the whole, 2006 was not a good year for Yiffy.net – activity levels were dropping to lower than any in the previous two years, post rates were also low and there was a growing sense of discontent amongst the members of the site, something that would continue into 2007...<br />
<br />
====2007 - Under New Management====<br />
<br />
2007 for Yiffy.net started with several changes in staff – Taryn had earlier stepped down from his position and left the site entirely due to time constraints, with LadyDarkSphynx being promoted in his wake in what was initially an interim position but later became permanent; and Alex Cross and Vulpes Proeliator were promoted to the moderator team to replace the three moderators who had left in the latter half of the preceding year. <br />
<br />
At the end of February and partially on the insistence of outward-bound moderator Sinergy/Cynergi, Micah Coon asked Talija back to the site, promoting her to the position of administrator. Within days and after considerable discussion between Micah and Talija, indeed it had been something she had demanded as a condition of her coming back to the site, the unpopular Netspeak Rule was relaxed considerably. The use of such acronyms and abbreviations in excess was still discouraged but members would no longer be in trouble for a simple “lol” or “brb”, though the stress was very much that such terms were fine in out-of-character areas of the forums and chat but still had no place in role-plays and in-character discussion. The site’s rules were also re-posted, having been absent from the boards for some time, and extensively re-written by the new addition to the admin team, along with a separate set of rules for the x7 Chat.<br />
<br />
The summer of 2007 saw the start of the staff of Yiffy.net opening up to their members – in a bid to dispel the inevitable rumours that surrounded anyone’s suspension, all suspensions and bans were publicly posted by the admin, detailing who, why and how long. There was also a crack-down on underage users, initiated by Alex Cross and heavily supported by the whole team. Now, anyone with even a whiff of suspicion could be asked to provide proof of age to the staff, with a reasonable notice period, and a thread was set-up to detail what was accepted, the easiest way to submit it and, importantly, which parts needed to be obscured so as to protect the submitter’s identity. Furthermore, anyone serving a suspension of greater than a week was also required to prove their age before they would be allowed back. During the same period, there was also much cause for concern after Yiffy.net was one of several large furry sites targeted by Anonymous raiders of 4chan (among others). Quick thinking and keen observation by the site’s staff prevented any issues and successfully avoided the attack. Later in that year, and after a number of clashes with the rest of the Yiffy.net staff, Alex Cross would step down from his position and leave the site to spend more time on his own, budding website.<br />
<br />
====2008 – On The Mend====<br />
<br />
So far 2008 has seen considerable change at Yiffy.net. Both Jinn and Silver Griffin have left the moderator team and site as a whole to spend more time on real life concerns, while Ranix, Azhtek and Steph Ravenblood were promoted to moderator to replace the three recent leavers. This influx of new blood and a determination amongst the existing staff to drag the site out of its stagnation has resulted in almost constant work on the site in terms of improvements. <br />
<br />
Firstly, Yiffy.net switched from the somewhat unpopular SMF to adopt vBulletin in late January, which was a move that caused some confusion and concern at the time but has since smoothed out for the most part. <br />
And, after months of discussion and hard work, the staff unveiled a new section on the site – Yiffy.net Social. This new area was to be centred around more social, out of character aspects of furry life, such as meets and conventions, as well as more diverse non-RP discussion and sections for artists of every variety to post and talk about their works. There was also the less significant but still popular introduction of a much wider variety of visual themes for the site. <br />
<br />
The site's administrators have also continued their work to open the site up more to the members and created a forum purely for members to give their feedback and suggestions on what they'd like done with the site or what they don't like about existing features. <br />
<br />
Further changes currently in progress include RP nights in the site's chat, whereby users can play tabletop role-playing games online with other furs on the site. Numerous other changes are in the pipeline, with the site's staff working hard to help restore the once proud site to its former glory and re-establish it as the first name in furry communities.<br />
<br />
There have thus far been no gigantic reversal in the site’s fortunes but membership and activity are steadily on the rise and the feedback that the staff have received on their recent changes has been promising. It’s slow-going for now but things are definitely on the up at Yiffy.net.<br />
<br />
====Now - Yiffy International - Three sites become one====<br />
<br />
In late Spring of 2008, two staff members left their posts - Ranix left the site and fandom altogether for personal reasons and Talija stepped down as administrator and left the site, citing "Failure to fulfil goals and failure to breathe new life into the site" as her reasons for doing so.<br />
<br />
Shortly afterwards, it was announced by one of the site's two remaining admin - Micah - that Yiffy.net would be undergoing a merger with the portal site Yiffy.tk. The new, combined site was planned to have all the features of its two component parts - forums, chat, art and reviewed links - as well as the advantage that the owner of Yiffy.tk would also own the dedicated server that the new site would be running on, meaning free, dedicated hosting and almost 24/7 tech support. It was also announced at this time that Micah would not hold a staff position at the new site, at least not when it went live. Shortly after this, furrum.com was also announced to be joining the new Yiffy International site.<br />
<br />
The plan was for Sniper Fox and Karma to run the non-forum side of the new combined site - dubbed "Yiffy International" by the pair - and for an admin team comprising Ikari, Azhtek and Talija. This plan was first communicated just to the staff, then later to the general user population after more details were solidified.<br />
<br />
In early August, things came to a head when Sniper Fox publicly announced on Yiffy.net that the merger would be going ahead within the next few days. A snag was hit shortly before the merger went live, however, when it was discovered and announced that the threads on the current Yiffy.net forum would not be transferred across but that the old site would be left in a read-only format so that furs could save any threads they wanted to keep. This announcement was met with a large amount of complaint but the site's staff did what they could to assure users and to make saving of old threads as easily as possible.<br />
<br />
Soon after the announcement that the site would debut with Flash Chat (for testing purposes only, it was later removed and replaced with AJAX chat), and that it wasn't feasible to port the threads over there was a falling out between the proposed new admins. Three proposed administrators of the merged site's forums and chats all announced that they would not be returning to the site after the merger due to a breakdown in the working relationship between themselves and the two site owners, the exact details of which were not revealed. No moderators were brought over from Yiffy.Net or Furrum.com, but prior staff was encouraged to re-apply after the merge was completed.<br />
<br />
Over the course of 12th August / 13th August, Yiffy International went fully live, with yiffy.info, yiffy.net as well as furrum.com are now pointing to yiffy.tk. The start has certainly been rocky but both Sniper Fox and Karma have numerous years of website management experience and plenty of technical capability.<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net is currently home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally has a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
==== Drugs ====<br />
<br />
While drugs had cropped up in various roleplays and discussions on previous versions of the site, with the merger there was a new forum called "420", that focused purely on recreational drug use, particularly cannabis. There was some objection to this, with some members stating in the site discussion threads that they felt this was encouraging illegal drug use. However, the site's owner, Karma, has moved to assure members that this is very much not the case and that the 420 forum's intent is to educate people about drugs in a responsible way - both the good and bad effects - and that it promoted legalisation of cannabis rather than its actual use.<br />
<br />
==== Banned Content ====<br />
<br />
Previously, Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered tabboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
After the site's August merger to become Yiffy International, the rules as a whole were taken down and re-written from scratch, apparently on an on-going basis. Pursuant to Canadian law, it was announced on the site's rule page that Cub (under age) and Bestiality roleplaying and images would not be allowed on the site.<br />
<br />
The site allows furry-human role play and artwork.<br />
<br />
==== New Management and the Merger ====<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. As several existing staff also resigned, it became clear that something was very wrong behind the scenes. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
Within the first day of the merger going live and even before that, Karma also showed that he was not someone who appreciated whining or criticism, reacting strongly to both in site discussion threads.<br />
<br />
==== Underage users ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net operates a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users face when registering, members are age-checked if there is any suspicion of them being too young to be there, and the moderation team will also often request proof of age from any member who causes trouble and receives a suspension.{{fact}} <br />
<br />
If they are unable to provide such, then their IPs are banned from the site until they can show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This is seen in some quarters{{fact}} as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content, Yiffy.net has both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site.<br />
<br />
With the move from Yiffy.net to Yiffy International, the site's hosting also changed from the United States to Canada. Governed by a different set of laws, this position changed slightly. While underage users are still not allowed on the site by policy, they are no longer "checked at the door" with a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act COPA]-compliant "I agree to this be an adult" statement upon account creation. Instead, users are only challenged to prove their age when a dispute arises or the staff otherwise has cause to believe the users to be underage.<br />
<br />
==== Leetspeak/Netspeak ====<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This has since been relaxed further and the current ruling on leet/netspeak then stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
However, when the site merged in to Yiffy International in August 2008, and with Sniper Fox back at the helm and all the previous admin and moderation staff either forced out or resigned, the rule was abolished entirely, with both Sniper Fox and Karma of the opinion that users should be able to type whatever they like. Under the new policies, as long as they weren't being disruptive to the site or to others, users have the freedom to express themselves in any way they like. This new stance has been met with a slightly mixed reaction but the general consensus seems to be one of acceptance, or at least no strong protest.<br />
<br />
==== The Cull of ’08 ====<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a purge of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. As a result, a number of members were somewhat irritated to find out that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk.<br />
<br />
====Donations====<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net is sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations have been very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net has faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it’s narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto Sniper Fox’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This has been less of an issue, more recently – the site’s technical admin is also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understands of the problems with obtaining funds and is hence more forgiving than previous hosts if the site is late in paying their server rent. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, a recent donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The recent move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only Talija and TigerPaw contributing to the cost of the licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Some references are from the site's own discussion boards and postings of rules and regulations.<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=123 A Word on Underage Users]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome to Yiffy International!]<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2008-08-20T13:59:16Z<p>Sniper Fox: /* Leetspeak/Netspeak */ Slight wording change, removal of statements showing bias. Change instances of "Sniper" to "Sniper Fox".</p>
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[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
Yiffy.Net was an adult [[furry]] online community featuring forums, live chat and an image gallery. It merged with [[Yiffy.Tk]] in August of 2008 to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Technical Administrator''': [[Karma]]<br />
* '''Moderators''': Currently None<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' Jan 2002 - present<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
====2002 – Inception====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net – or Yiffy.info as it was then known - was founded in the summer of 2002 by Sniper Fox, with the aim of being a:<br />
{{q|100% user-maintained portal site for everything in the yiffy part of the furry fandom}}<br />
And was the first all-furry forum in existence. The site was run on phpBB 2RC-4 software off of Sniper Fox’s home PC and by February of the following year the site membership had risen to fifty registered users and things were starting to take off. <br />
<br />
====2003 – Take Off! ====<br />
<br />
In April 2003, Sniper Fox switched the site over to Chatterbox Forum, a much more visually appealing software than its predecessor that also had guestbooks on the user profiles, and within a couple of months site membership quickly hit double figures. From that point onwards, growth was exponential and the site started to thrive. With over 50 links to furry and furry-related websites, including furry artists and fur-suiters amongst others, Yiffy.info / Yiffy.net was succeeding in its founders goal of making it not only a good furry portal site but also a popular and oft-visited forum for role-playing and Sniper Fox was continually looking to further and improve the site, making it bigger and better.<br />
<br />
In October of that year, Sniper Fox opened up a Yiffy.net store that sold site-branded merchandise, with all profits being put right back into the site. In that same month, membership also hit 500 users, a huge number for a site in what was still very much a developing fandom, and by the end of the year there were over 900 members – Yiffy.net was growing fast.<br />
<br />
====2004 – Hitting the Big Time====<br />
<br />
Then, in January 2004, the site changed software again, moving to the much more advanced and moddable phpBB and breaking the 1,000 user mark, with over 200 visiting every single day and up to 50 members online at any given time. The site now had a live chat programme to go with its forums (or “furums” as they were called), user-selectable themes, polls, a “shout-box” and a gallery for user-submitted pictures. Also on the site were “Yiffy dollars” that were earned by posting and could be used to purchase profile effects such as having one’s username highlighted in a colour of the users choice, changing usernames, expanding forum signatures and so on; related to this there was also an on-site lottery where members could buy tickets, using their Yiffy dollars, in the hope of winning the jackpot.<br />
<br />
By the summer of 2004 had double its number of users since the beginning of the year and had a staggering 80,000 posts in around 1,700 topics and there was also a new addition to the site’s moderation team – Micah Coon, now one of the three site administrators. However, not everything was going well – the site had always been user-supported but a combination of a lack of donations or store purchases and a lack of income through the site’s single banner advert meant that the site was struggling to keep going financially. This, coupled with the fact that the site’s Paypal account had been frozen due to Paypal finally realising that Yiffy.net was an adult site (something that the site’s administrators did not realise was an issue) meant that things were tough for Yiffy.net. In September, Magdalena and Tatyana joined the moderator team to help with the running of the site and later, in December, both Sinergy and Arundel joined them as well. Five new moderators in a year showed just how fast Yiffy.net was growing.<br />
<br />
====2005 – Peak Before a Fall====<br />
<br />
Half a year later and the site had fully recovered and now had 3,700 users and 150,000 posts in nearly 4,000 threads. After also upgrading to version 2.0.11 of phpBB, which introduced various new features, Sniper Fox also added Flash games to the site – over 100 simple arcade games with high scores, announcements of scoreboard leaders and medals to the highest scorers; something that proved to be a strain on the server’s resources but very popular with a lot of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Over the course of 2005 things continued to move onwards and upwards for Yiffy.net, new games were added and unpopular ones removed, the site changed servers twice to accommodate the continuing growth, Silver Griffin joined the moderator team in August and in November of that year Yiffy.net climbed to the top of Google’s search results for “Yiffy”. In three years Sniper Fox and his hard-working moderators had helped to turn Yiffy.net from a small board with just a handful of members to the largest and most well-known all-yiffy community on the web, with close to 5,000 members and 200,000 posts.<br />
<br />
====2006 – The Beginning of the End? ====<br />
<br />
The beginning of 2006 saw yet another server move as the site continued to grow and prove to be too big a strain on the previous server, and also the addition of a voice-chat to Yiffy.net. The site’s moderator team also continued to grow, with two further members – Martin and Lunara Copperhair - being promoted to help with the running of the thousands strong website that now had up to 827 users accessing it every day. By June, Martin had to step down from his post due to a lack of available time to spend working on the site and was replaced by Talija and Jinn, the former something of a surprise promotion to many – she was a long-standing member but not one known for her calm temperament.<br />
<br />
In July ’06, the biggest and most significant event in Yiffy.net’s six year history occurred – Sniper Fox stood down as head administrator and owner of the site, for personal reasons. The reins were handed over to Micah Coon, back with the moderator team after a while out, and Taryn. The news was received by the site’s members with very mixed feelings – a lot of people felt that Yiffy.net had been stagnating of late and that a new leader was what the place needed to take it forward; but on the other hand, Micah Coon had a fairly colourful history with the site to say the least and there were a number of users who left the site as soon as the news broke. Micah quickly stamped his authority on the site, removing a few bans that he felt had been given by the previous site owner for personal reasons rather than any breach of the rules, and also sacked two moderators – Chazz Wolf and Zantari – who had been largely inactive for some time. This new appointment did, however, bring an end to the fighting between members of Yiffy.net and the only other site able to be called a rival – Furgasmic.com, run until its recent closure by Rhianna Ravenclaw, herself an active member of Yiffy.net. A few days later, another moderator joined the team, someone else who would a few months later go on to become a site admin – LadyDarkSphynx. Not long after this change in ownership, Talija stepped down as a moderator and left the site, due to personal differences with Micah Coon and the way the site was now being run. <br />
<br />
By the end of the year, Yiffy.net switched from phpBB to SMF and replaced the resource-intensive Flash Chat with the much more streamlined and simpler x7 Chat, moved to a new server, installed TigerPaw as the site’s Technical Administrator, and one of the greatest sources of contention and conflict the site’s had came into place – the ban on leetspeak and netspeak. Under the new rules, using such acronyms as lol, rofl, bbs or wtf could earn users a warning at first, then a day-long ban and then gradually longer bans with each offense. The move to SMF was another source of disquiet amongst the members of Yiffy.net – it may have been cheaper to run, less of a drain on resources, easier to use and a lot more stable and bug-free than its predecessor software but many on the site felt that it was a step backwards for such a famous site and that Yiffy.net had lost some of its individuality by adopting a format that was so prevalent throughout the web, especially on first-timer forums.<br />
<br />
On the whole, 2006 was not a good year for Yiffy.net – activity levels were dropping to lower than any in the previous two years, post rates were also low and there was a growing sense of discontent amongst the members of the site, something that would continue into 2007...<br />
<br />
====2007 - Under New Management====<br />
<br />
2007 for Yiffy.net started with several changes in staff – Taryn had earlier stepped down from his position and left the site entirely due to time constraints, with LadyDarkSphynx being promoted in his wake in what was initially an interim position but later became permanent; and Alex Cross and Vulpes Proeliator were promoted to the moderator team to replace the three moderators who had left in the latter half of the preceding year. <br />
<br />
At the end of February and partially on the insistence of outward-bound moderator Sinergy/Cynergi, Micah Coon asked Talija back to the site, promoting her to the position of administrator. Within days and after considerable discussion between Micah and Talija, indeed it had been something she had demanded as a condition of her coming back to the site, the unpopular Netspeak Rule was relaxed considerably. The use of such acronyms and abbreviations in excess was still discouraged but members would no longer be in trouble for a simple “lol” or “brb”, though the stress was very much that such terms were fine in out-of-character areas of the forums and chat but still had no place in role-plays and in-character discussion. The site’s rules were also re-posted, having been absent from the boards for some time, and extensively re-written by the new addition to the admin team, along with a separate set of rules for the x7 Chat.<br />
<br />
The summer of 2007 saw the start of the staff of Yiffy.net opening up to their members – in a bid to dispel the inevitable rumours that surrounded anyone’s suspension, all suspensions and bans were publicly posted by the admin, detailing who, why and how long. There was also a crack-down on underage users, initiated by Alex Cross and heavily supported by the whole team. Now, anyone with even a whiff of suspicion could be asked to provide proof of age to the staff, with a reasonable notice period, and a thread was set-up to detail what was accepted, the easiest way to submit it and, importantly, which parts needed to be obscured so as to protect the submitter’s identity. Furthermore, anyone serving a suspension of greater than a week was also required to prove their age before they would be allowed back. During the same period, there was also much cause for concern after Yiffy.net was one of several large furry sites targeted by Anonymous raiders of 4chan (among others). Quick thinking and keen observation by the site’s staff prevented any issues and successfully avoided the attack. Later in that year, and after a number of clashes with the rest of the Yiffy.net staff, Alex Cross would step down from his position and leave the site to spend more time on his own, budding website.<br />
<br />
====2008 – On The Mend====<br />
<br />
So far 2008 has seen considerable change at Yiffy.net. Both Jinn and Silver Griffin have left the moderator team and site as a whole to spend more time on real life concerns, while Ranix, Azhtek and Steph Ravenblood were promoted to moderator to replace the three recent leavers. This influx of new blood and a determination amongst the existing staff to drag the site out of its stagnation has resulted in almost constant work on the site in terms of improvements. <br />
<br />
Firstly, Yiffy.net switched from the somewhat unpopular SMF to adopt vBulletin in late January, which was a move that caused some confusion and concern at the time but has since smoothed out for the most part. <br />
And, after months of discussion and hard work, the staff unveiled a new section on the site – Yiffy.net Social. This new area was to be centred around more social, out of character aspects of furry life, such as meets and conventions, as well as more diverse non-RP discussion and sections for artists of every variety to post and talk about their works. There was also the less significant but still popular introduction of a much wider variety of visual themes for the site. <br />
<br />
The site's administrators have also continued their work to open the site up more to the members and created a forum purely for members to give their feedback and suggestions on what they'd like done with the site or what they don't like about existing features. <br />
<br />
Further changes currently in progress include RP nights in the site's chat, whereby users can play tabletop role-playing games online with other furs on the site. Numerous other changes are in the pipeline, with the site's staff working hard to help restore the once proud site to its former glory and re-establish it as the first name in furry communities.<br />
<br />
There have thus far been no gigantic reversal in the site’s fortunes but membership and activity are steadily on the rise and the feedback that the staff have received on their recent changes has been promising. It’s slow-going for now but things are definitely on the up at Yiffy.net.<br />
<br />
====Now - Yiffy International - Three sites become one====<br />
<br />
In late Spring of 2008, two staff members left their posts - Ranix left the site and fandom altogether for personal reasons and Talija stepped down as administrator and left the site, citing "Failure to fulfil goals and failure to breathe new life into the site" as her reasons for doing so.<br />
<br />
Shortly afterwards, it was announced by one of the site's two remaining admin - Micah - that Yiffy.net would be undergoing a merger with the portal site Yiffy.tk. The new, combined site was planned to have all the features of its two component parts - forums, chat, art and reviewed links - as well as the advantage that the owner of Yiffy.tk would also own the dedicated server that the new site would be running on, meaning free, dedicated hosting and almost 24/7 tech support. It was also announced at this time that Micah would not hold a staff position at the new site, at least not when it went live. Shortly after this, furrum.com was also announced to be joining the new Yiffy International site.<br />
<br />
The plan was for Sniper Fox and Karma to run the non-forum side of the new combined site - dubbed "Yiffy International" by the pair - and for an admin team comprising Ikari, Azhtek and Talija. This plan was first communicated just to the staff, then later to the general user population after more details were solidified.<br />
<br />
In early August, things came to a head when Sniper Fox publicly announced on Yiffy.net that the merger would be going ahead within the next few days. A snag was hit shortly before the merger went live, however, when it was discovered and announced that the threads on the current Yiffy.net forum would not be transferred across but that the old site would be left in a read-only format so that furs could save any threads they wanted to keep. This announcement was met with a large amount of complaint but the site's staff did what they could to assure users and to make saving of old threads as easily as possible.<br />
<br />
Soon after the announcement that the site would debut with Flash Chat (for testing purposes only, it was later removed and replaced with AJAX chat), and that it wasn't feasible to port the threads over there was a falling out between the proposed new admins. Three proposed administrators of the merged site's forums and chats all announced that they would not be returning to the site after the merger due to a breakdown in the working relationship between themselves and the two site owners, the exact details of which were not revealed. No moderators were brought over from Yiffy.Net or Furrum.com, but prior staff was encouraged to re-apply after the merge was completed.<br />
<br />
Over the course of 12th August / 13th August, Yiffy International went fully live, with yiffy.info, yiffy.net as well as furrum.com are now pointing to yiffy.tk. The start has certainly been rocky but both Sniper Fox and Karma have numerous years of website management experience and plenty of technical capability.<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net is currently home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally has a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
==== Drugs ====<br />
<br />
While drugs had cropped up in various roleplays and discussions on previous versions of the site, with the merger there was a new forum called "420", that focused purely on recreational drug use, particularly cannabis. There was some objection to this, with some members stating in the site discussion threads that they felt this was encouraging illegal drug use. However, the site's owner, Karma, has moved to assure members that this is very much not the case and that the 420 forum's intent is to educate people about drugs in a responsible way - both the good and bad effects - and that it promoted legalisation of cannabis rather than its actual use.<br />
<br />
==== Banned Content ====<br />
<br />
Previously, Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered tabboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
After the site's August merger with Yiffy.tk, the rules as a whole were taken down and re-written from scratch, apparently on an on-going basis, and it was announced on the site's rule page that Cubby and Bestiality roleplaying and images would not be allowed on the site.<br />
<br />
The site allows furry-human role play and artwork.<br />
<br />
==== New Management and the Merger ====<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. As several existing staff also resigned, it became clear that something was very wrong behind the scenes. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
Within the first day of the merger going live and even before that, Karma also showed that he was not someone who appreciated whining or criticism, reacting strongly to both in site discussion threads.<br />
<br />
==== Underage users ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net operates a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users face when registering, members are age-checked if there is any suspicion of them being too young to be there, and the moderation team will also often request proof of age from any member who causes trouble and receives a suspension.{{fact}} <br />
<br />
If they are unable to provide such, then their IPs are banned from the site until they can show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This is seen in some quarters{{fact}} as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content, Yiffy.net has both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site.<br />
<br />
With the move from Yiffy.net to Yiffy International, the site's hosting also changed from the United States to Canada. Governed by a different set of laws, this position changed slightly. While underage users are still not allowed on the site by policy, they are no longer "checked at the door" with a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act COPA]-compliant "I agree to this be an adult" statement upon account creation. Instead, users are only challenged to prove their age when a dispute arises or the staff otherwise has cause to believe the users to be underage.<br />
<br />
==== Leetspeak/Netspeak ====<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This has since been relaxed further and the current ruling on leet/netspeak then stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
However, when the site merged in to Yiffy International in August 2008, and with Sniper Fox back at the helm and all the previous admin and moderation staff either forced out or resigned, the rule was abolished entirely, with both Sniper Fox and Karma of the opinion that users should be able to type whatever they like. Under the new policies, as long as they weren't being disruptive to the site or to others, users have the freedom to express themselves in any way they like. This new stance has been met with a slightly mixed reaction but the general consensus seems to be one of acceptance, or at least no strong protest.<br />
<br />
==== The Cull of ’08 ====<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a purge of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. As a result, a number of members were somewhat irritated to find out that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk.<br />
<br />
====Donations====<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net is sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations have been very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net has faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it’s narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto Sniper Fox’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This has been less of an issue, more recently – the site’s technical admin is also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understands of the problems with obtaining funds and is hence more forgiving than previous hosts if the site is late in paying their server rent. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, a recent donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The recent move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only Talija and TigerPaw contributing to the cost of the licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Some references are from the site's own discussion boards and postings of rules and regulations.<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=123 A Word on Underage Users]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome to Yiffy International!]<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2008-08-20T13:56:03Z<p>Sniper Fox: /* Underage users */</p>
<hr />
<div>{{cleanup}}<br />
{{wikify}}<br />
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{{npov}}<br />
{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
Yiffy.Net was an adult [[furry]] online community featuring forums, live chat and an image gallery. It merged with [[Yiffy.Tk]] in August of 2008 to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Technical Administrator''': [[Karma]]<br />
* '''Moderators''': Currently None<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' Jan 2002 - present<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
====2002 – Inception====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net – or Yiffy.info as it was then known - was founded in the summer of 2002 by Sniper Fox, with the aim of being a:<br />
{{q|100% user-maintained portal site for everything in the yiffy part of the furry fandom}}<br />
And was the first all-furry forum in existence. The site was run on phpBB 2RC-4 software off of Sniper Fox’s home PC and by February of the following year the site membership had risen to fifty registered users and things were starting to take off. <br />
<br />
====2003 – Take Off! ====<br />
<br />
In April 2003, Sniper Fox switched the site over to Chatterbox Forum, a much more visually appealing software than its predecessor that also had guestbooks on the user profiles, and within a couple of months site membership quickly hit double figures. From that point onwards, growth was exponential and the site started to thrive. With over 50 links to furry and furry-related websites, including furry artists and fur-suiters amongst others, Yiffy.info / Yiffy.net was succeeding in its founders goal of making it not only a good furry portal site but also a popular and oft-visited forum for role-playing and Sniper Fox was continually looking to further and improve the site, making it bigger and better.<br />
<br />
In October of that year, Sniper Fox opened up a Yiffy.net store that sold site-branded merchandise, with all profits being put right back into the site. In that same month, membership also hit 500 users, a huge number for a site in what was still very much a developing fandom, and by the end of the year there were over 900 members – Yiffy.net was growing fast.<br />
<br />
====2004 – Hitting the Big Time====<br />
<br />
Then, in January 2004, the site changed software again, moving to the much more advanced and moddable phpBB and breaking the 1,000 user mark, with over 200 visiting every single day and up to 50 members online at any given time. The site now had a live chat programme to go with its forums (or “furums” as they were called), user-selectable themes, polls, a “shout-box” and a gallery for user-submitted pictures. Also on the site were “Yiffy dollars” that were earned by posting and could be used to purchase profile effects such as having one’s username highlighted in a colour of the users choice, changing usernames, expanding forum signatures and so on; related to this there was also an on-site lottery where members could buy tickets, using their Yiffy dollars, in the hope of winning the jackpot.<br />
<br />
By the summer of 2004 had double its number of users since the beginning of the year and had a staggering 80,000 posts in around 1,700 topics and there was also a new addition to the site’s moderation team – Micah Coon, now one of the three site administrators. However, not everything was going well – the site had always been user-supported but a combination of a lack of donations or store purchases and a lack of income through the site’s single banner advert meant that the site was struggling to keep going financially. This, coupled with the fact that the site’s Paypal account had been frozen due to Paypal finally realising that Yiffy.net was an adult site (something that the site’s administrators did not realise was an issue) meant that things were tough for Yiffy.net. In September, Magdalena and Tatyana joined the moderator team to help with the running of the site and later, in December, both Sinergy and Arundel joined them as well. Five new moderators in a year showed just how fast Yiffy.net was growing.<br />
<br />
====2005 – Peak Before a Fall====<br />
<br />
Half a year later and the site had fully recovered and now had 3,700 users and 150,000 posts in nearly 4,000 threads. After also upgrading to version 2.0.11 of phpBB, which introduced various new features, Sniper Fox also added Flash games to the site – over 100 simple arcade games with high scores, announcements of scoreboard leaders and medals to the highest scorers; something that proved to be a strain on the server’s resources but very popular with a lot of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Over the course of 2005 things continued to move onwards and upwards for Yiffy.net, new games were added and unpopular ones removed, the site changed servers twice to accommodate the continuing growth, Silver Griffin joined the moderator team in August and in November of that year Yiffy.net climbed to the top of Google’s search results for “Yiffy”. In three years Sniper Fox and his hard-working moderators had helped to turn Yiffy.net from a small board with just a handful of members to the largest and most well-known all-yiffy community on the web, with close to 5,000 members and 200,000 posts.<br />
<br />
====2006 – The Beginning of the End? ====<br />
<br />
The beginning of 2006 saw yet another server move as the site continued to grow and prove to be too big a strain on the previous server, and also the addition of a voice-chat to Yiffy.net. The site’s moderator team also continued to grow, with two further members – Martin and Lunara Copperhair - being promoted to help with the running of the thousands strong website that now had up to 827 users accessing it every day. By June, Martin had to step down from his post due to a lack of available time to spend working on the site and was replaced by Talija and Jinn, the former something of a surprise promotion to many – she was a long-standing member but not one known for her calm temperament.<br />
<br />
In July ’06, the biggest and most significant event in Yiffy.net’s six year history occurred – Sniper Fox stood down as head administrator and owner of the site, for personal reasons. The reins were handed over to Micah Coon, back with the moderator team after a while out, and Taryn. The news was received by the site’s members with very mixed feelings – a lot of people felt that Yiffy.net had been stagnating of late and that a new leader was what the place needed to take it forward; but on the other hand, Micah Coon had a fairly colourful history with the site to say the least and there were a number of users who left the site as soon as the news broke. Micah quickly stamped his authority on the site, removing a few bans that he felt had been given by the previous site owner for personal reasons rather than any breach of the rules, and also sacked two moderators – Chazz Wolf and Zantari – who had been largely inactive for some time. This new appointment did, however, bring an end to the fighting between members of Yiffy.net and the only other site able to be called a rival – Furgasmic.com, run until its recent closure by Rhianna Ravenclaw, herself an active member of Yiffy.net. A few days later, another moderator joined the team, someone else who would a few months later go on to become a site admin – LadyDarkSphynx. Not long after this change in ownership, Talija stepped down as a moderator and left the site, due to personal differences with Micah Coon and the way the site was now being run. <br />
<br />
By the end of the year, Yiffy.net switched from phpBB to SMF and replaced the resource-intensive Flash Chat with the much more streamlined and simpler x7 Chat, moved to a new server, installed TigerPaw as the site’s Technical Administrator, and one of the greatest sources of contention and conflict the site’s had came into place – the ban on leetspeak and netspeak. Under the new rules, using such acronyms as lol, rofl, bbs or wtf could earn users a warning at first, then a day-long ban and then gradually longer bans with each offense. The move to SMF was another source of disquiet amongst the members of Yiffy.net – it may have been cheaper to run, less of a drain on resources, easier to use and a lot more stable and bug-free than its predecessor software but many on the site felt that it was a step backwards for such a famous site and that Yiffy.net had lost some of its individuality by adopting a format that was so prevalent throughout the web, especially on first-timer forums.<br />
<br />
On the whole, 2006 was not a good year for Yiffy.net – activity levels were dropping to lower than any in the previous two years, post rates were also low and there was a growing sense of discontent amongst the members of the site, something that would continue into 2007...<br />
<br />
====2007 - Under New Management====<br />
<br />
2007 for Yiffy.net started with several changes in staff – Taryn had earlier stepped down from his position and left the site entirely due to time constraints, with LadyDarkSphynx being promoted in his wake in what was initially an interim position but later became permanent; and Alex Cross and Vulpes Proeliator were promoted to the moderator team to replace the three moderators who had left in the latter half of the preceding year. <br />
<br />
At the end of February and partially on the insistence of outward-bound moderator Sinergy/Cynergi, Micah Coon asked Talija back to the site, promoting her to the position of administrator. Within days and after considerable discussion between Micah and Talija, indeed it had been something she had demanded as a condition of her coming back to the site, the unpopular Netspeak Rule was relaxed considerably. The use of such acronyms and abbreviations in excess was still discouraged but members would no longer be in trouble for a simple “lol” or “brb”, though the stress was very much that such terms were fine in out-of-character areas of the forums and chat but still had no place in role-plays and in-character discussion. The site’s rules were also re-posted, having been absent from the boards for some time, and extensively re-written by the new addition to the admin team, along with a separate set of rules for the x7 Chat.<br />
<br />
The summer of 2007 saw the start of the staff of Yiffy.net opening up to their members – in a bid to dispel the inevitable rumours that surrounded anyone’s suspension, all suspensions and bans were publicly posted by the admin, detailing who, why and how long. There was also a crack-down on underage users, initiated by Alex Cross and heavily supported by the whole team. Now, anyone with even a whiff of suspicion could be asked to provide proof of age to the staff, with a reasonable notice period, and a thread was set-up to detail what was accepted, the easiest way to submit it and, importantly, which parts needed to be obscured so as to protect the submitter’s identity. Furthermore, anyone serving a suspension of greater than a week was also required to prove their age before they would be allowed back. During the same period, there was also much cause for concern after Yiffy.net was one of several large furry sites targeted by Anonymous raiders of 4chan (among others). Quick thinking and keen observation by the site’s staff prevented any issues and successfully avoided the attack. Later in that year, and after a number of clashes with the rest of the Yiffy.net staff, Alex Cross would step down from his position and leave the site to spend more time on his own, budding website.<br />
<br />
====2008 – On The Mend====<br />
<br />
So far 2008 has seen considerable change at Yiffy.net. Both Jinn and Silver Griffin have left the moderator team and site as a whole to spend more time on real life concerns, while Ranix, Azhtek and Steph Ravenblood were promoted to moderator to replace the three recent leavers. This influx of new blood and a determination amongst the existing staff to drag the site out of its stagnation has resulted in almost constant work on the site in terms of improvements. <br />
<br />
Firstly, Yiffy.net switched from the somewhat unpopular SMF to adopt vBulletin in late January, which was a move that caused some confusion and concern at the time but has since smoothed out for the most part. <br />
And, after months of discussion and hard work, the staff unveiled a new section on the site – Yiffy.net Social. This new area was to be centred around more social, out of character aspects of furry life, such as meets and conventions, as well as more diverse non-RP discussion and sections for artists of every variety to post and talk about their works. There was also the less significant but still popular introduction of a much wider variety of visual themes for the site. <br />
<br />
The site's administrators have also continued their work to open the site up more to the members and created a forum purely for members to give their feedback and suggestions on what they'd like done with the site or what they don't like about existing features. <br />
<br />
Further changes currently in progress include RP nights in the site's chat, whereby users can play tabletop role-playing games online with other furs on the site. Numerous other changes are in the pipeline, with the site's staff working hard to help restore the once proud site to its former glory and re-establish it as the first name in furry communities.<br />
<br />
There have thus far been no gigantic reversal in the site’s fortunes but membership and activity are steadily on the rise and the feedback that the staff have received on their recent changes has been promising. It’s slow-going for now but things are definitely on the up at Yiffy.net.<br />
<br />
====Now - Yiffy International - Three sites become one====<br />
<br />
In late Spring of 2008, two staff members left their posts - Ranix left the site and fandom altogether for personal reasons and Talija stepped down as administrator and left the site, citing "Failure to fulfil goals and failure to breathe new life into the site" as her reasons for doing so.<br />
<br />
Shortly afterwards, it was announced by one of the site's two remaining admin - Micah - that Yiffy.net would be undergoing a merger with the portal site Yiffy.tk. The new, combined site was planned to have all the features of its two component parts - forums, chat, art and reviewed links - as well as the advantage that the owner of Yiffy.tk would also own the dedicated server that the new site would be running on, meaning free, dedicated hosting and almost 24/7 tech support. It was also announced at this time that Micah would not hold a staff position at the new site, at least not when it went live. Shortly after this, furrum.com was also announced to be joining the new Yiffy International site.<br />
<br />
The plan was for Sniper Fox and Karma to run the non-forum side of the new combined site - dubbed "Yiffy International" by the pair - and for an admin team comprising Ikari, Azhtek and Talija. This plan was first communicated just to the staff, then later to the general user population after more details were solidified.<br />
<br />
In early August, things came to a head when Sniper Fox publicly announced on Yiffy.net that the merger would be going ahead within the next few days. A snag was hit shortly before the merger went live, however, when it was discovered and announced that the threads on the current Yiffy.net forum would not be transferred across but that the old site would be left in a read-only format so that furs could save any threads they wanted to keep. This announcement was met with a large amount of complaint but the site's staff did what they could to assure users and to make saving of old threads as easily as possible.<br />
<br />
Soon after the announcement that the site would debut with Flash Chat (for testing purposes only, it was later removed and replaced with AJAX chat), and that it wasn't feasible to port the threads over there was a falling out between the proposed new admins. Three proposed administrators of the merged site's forums and chats all announced that they would not be returning to the site after the merger due to a breakdown in the working relationship between themselves and the two site owners, the exact details of which were not revealed. No moderators were brought over from Yiffy.Net or Furrum.com, but prior staff was encouraged to re-apply after the merge was completed.<br />
<br />
Over the course of 12th August / 13th August, Yiffy International went fully live, with yiffy.info, yiffy.net as well as furrum.com are now pointing to yiffy.tk. The start has certainly been rocky but both Sniper Fox and Karma have numerous years of website management experience and plenty of technical capability.<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net is currently home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally has a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
==== Drugs ====<br />
<br />
While drugs had cropped up in various roleplays and discussions on previous versions of the site, with the merger there was a new forum called "420", that focused purely on recreational drug use, particularly cannabis. There was some objection to this, with some members stating in the site discussion threads that they felt this was encouraging illegal drug use. However, the site's owner, Karma, has moved to assure members that this is very much not the case and that the 420 forum's intent is to educate people about drugs in a responsible way - both the good and bad effects - and that it promoted legalisation of cannabis rather than its actual use.<br />
<br />
==== Banned Content ====<br />
<br />
Previously, Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered tabboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
After the site's August merger with Yiffy.tk, the rules as a whole were taken down and re-written from scratch, apparently on an on-going basis, and it was announced on the site's rule page that Cubby and Bestiality roleplaying and images would not be allowed on the site.<br />
<br />
The site allows furry-human role play and artwork.<br />
<br />
==== New Management and the Merger ====<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. As several existing staff also resigned, it became clear that something was very wrong behind the scenes. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
Within the first day of the merger going live and even before that, Karma also showed that he was not someone who appreciated whining or criticism, reacting strongly to both in site discussion threads.<br />
<br />
==== Underage users ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net operates a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users face when registering, members are age-checked if there is any suspicion of them being too young to be there, and the moderation team will also often request proof of age from any member who causes trouble and receives a suspension.{{fact}} <br />
<br />
If they are unable to provide such, then their IPs are banned from the site until they can show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This is seen in some quarters{{fact}} as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content, Yiffy.net has both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site.<br />
<br />
With the move from Yiffy.net to Yiffy International, the site's hosting also changed from the United States to Canada. Governed by a different set of laws, this position changed slightly. While underage users are still not allowed on the site by policy, they are no longer "checked at the door" with a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act COPA]-compliant "I agree to this be an adult" statement upon account creation. Instead, users are only challenged to prove their age when a dispute arises or the staff otherwise has cause to believe the users to be underage.<br />
<br />
==== Leetspeak/Netspeak ====<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This has since been relaxed further and the current ruling on leet/netspeak then stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
However, when the site merged with Yiffy.tk in August 2008, and with Sniper back at the helm and all the previous admin and moderation staff either forced out or resigned, the rule was abolished entirely, with both Sniper and Karma of the opinion that users should be able to type whatever they like - if they wanted to look like idiots and talk in netspeak then they could do that and while they might be criticised by other members, they would not get in any official trouble for it. This new stance has been met with a slightly mixed reaction but the general consensus seems to be one of acceptance, or at least no strong protest.<br />
<br />
==== The Cull of ’08 ====<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a purge of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. As a result, a number of members were somewhat irritated to find out that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk.<br />
<br />
====Donations====<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net is sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations have been very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net has faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it’s narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto Sniper Fox’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This has been less of an issue, more recently – the site’s technical admin is also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understands of the problems with obtaining funds and is hence more forgiving than previous hosts if the site is late in paying their server rent. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, a recent donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The recent move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only Talija and TigerPaw contributing to the cost of the licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Some references are from the site's own discussion boards and postings of rules and regulations.<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=123 A Word on Underage Users]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome to Yiffy International!]<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2008-08-20T13:50:26Z<p>Sniper Fox: /* Now - Yiffy International - The Final Nail in the Coffin? */ <-- obvious bias just in the name of the section</p>
<hr />
<div>{{cleanup}}<br />
{{wikify}}<br />
{{unreferenced}}<br />
{{npov}}<br />
{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
Yiffy.Net was an adult [[furry]] online community featuring forums, live chat and an image gallery. It merged with [[Yiffy.Tk]] in August of 2008 to form [[Yiffy International]].<br />
<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
* '''Addresses''': http://yiffy.net<br />
* '''Founder''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Administrators''': [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Technical Administrator''': [[Karma]]<br />
* '''Moderators''': Currently None<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' Jan 2002 - present<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
====2002 – Inception====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net – or Yiffy.info as it was then known - was founded in the summer of 2002 by Sniper Fox, with the aim of being a:<br />
{{q|100% user-maintained portal site for everything in the yiffy part of the furry fandom}}<br />
And was the first all-furry forum in existence. The site was run on phpBB 2RC-4 software off of Sniper Fox’s home PC and by February of the following year the site membership had risen to fifty registered users and things were starting to take off. <br />
<br />
====2003 – Take Off! ====<br />
<br />
In April 2003, Sniper Fox switched the site over to Chatterbox Forum, a much more visually appealing software than its predecessor that also had guestbooks on the user profiles, and within a couple of months site membership quickly hit double figures. From that point onwards, growth was exponential and the site started to thrive. With over 50 links to furry and furry-related websites, including furry artists and fur-suiters amongst others, Yiffy.info / Yiffy.net was succeeding in its founders goal of making it not only a good furry portal site but also a popular and oft-visited forum for role-playing and Sniper Fox was continually looking to further and improve the site, making it bigger and better.<br />
<br />
In October of that year, Sniper Fox opened up a Yiffy.net store that sold site-branded merchandise, with all profits being put right back into the site. In that same month, membership also hit 500 users, a huge number for a site in what was still very much a developing fandom, and by the end of the year there were over 900 members – Yiffy.net was growing fast.<br />
<br />
====2004 – Hitting the Big Time====<br />
<br />
Then, in January 2004, the site changed software again, moving to the much more advanced and moddable phpBB and breaking the 1,000 user mark, with over 200 visiting every single day and up to 50 members online at any given time. The site now had a live chat programme to go with its forums (or “furums” as they were called), user-selectable themes, polls, a “shout-box” and a gallery for user-submitted pictures. Also on the site were “Yiffy dollars” that were earned by posting and could be used to purchase profile effects such as having one’s username highlighted in a colour of the users choice, changing usernames, expanding forum signatures and so on; related to this there was also an on-site lottery where members could buy tickets, using their Yiffy dollars, in the hope of winning the jackpot.<br />
<br />
By the summer of 2004 had double its number of users since the beginning of the year and had a staggering 80,000 posts in around 1,700 topics and there was also a new addition to the site’s moderation team – Micah Coon, now one of the three site administrators. However, not everything was going well – the site had always been user-supported but a combination of a lack of donations or store purchases and a lack of income through the site’s single banner advert meant that the site was struggling to keep going financially. This, coupled with the fact that the site’s Paypal account had been frozen due to Paypal finally realising that Yiffy.net was an adult site (something that the site’s administrators did not realise was an issue) meant that things were tough for Yiffy.net. In September, Magdalena and Tatyana joined the moderator team to help with the running of the site and later, in December, both Sinergy and Arundel joined them as well. Five new moderators in a year showed just how fast Yiffy.net was growing.<br />
<br />
====2005 – Peak Before a Fall====<br />
<br />
Half a year later and the site had fully recovered and now had 3,700 users and 150,000 posts in nearly 4,000 threads. After also upgrading to version 2.0.11 of phpBB, which introduced various new features, Sniper Fox also added Flash games to the site – over 100 simple arcade games with high scores, announcements of scoreboard leaders and medals to the highest scorers; something that proved to be a strain on the server’s resources but very popular with a lot of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Over the course of 2005 things continued to move onwards and upwards for Yiffy.net, new games were added and unpopular ones removed, the site changed servers twice to accommodate the continuing growth, Silver Griffin joined the moderator team in August and in November of that year Yiffy.net climbed to the top of Google’s search results for “Yiffy”. In three years Sniper Fox and his hard-working moderators had helped to turn Yiffy.net from a small board with just a handful of members to the largest and most well-known all-yiffy community on the web, with close to 5,000 members and 200,000 posts.<br />
<br />
====2006 – The Beginning of the End? ====<br />
<br />
The beginning of 2006 saw yet another server move as the site continued to grow and prove to be too big a strain on the previous server, and also the addition of a voice-chat to Yiffy.net. The site’s moderator team also continued to grow, with two further members – Martin and Lunara Copperhair - being promoted to help with the running of the thousands strong website that now had up to 827 users accessing it every day. By June, Martin had to step down from his post due to a lack of available time to spend working on the site and was replaced by Talija and Jinn, the former something of a surprise promotion to many – she was a long-standing member but not one known for her calm temperament.<br />
<br />
In July ’06, the biggest and most significant event in Yiffy.net’s six year history occurred – Sniper Fox stood down as head administrator and owner of the site, for personal reasons. The reins were handed over to Micah Coon, back with the moderator team after a while out, and Taryn. The news was received by the site’s members with very mixed feelings – a lot of people felt that Yiffy.net had been stagnating of late and that a new leader was what the place needed to take it forward; but on the other hand, Micah Coon had a fairly colourful history with the site to say the least and there were a number of users who left the site as soon as the news broke. Micah quickly stamped his authority on the site, removing a few bans that he felt had been given by the previous site owner for personal reasons rather than any breach of the rules, and also sacked two moderators – Chazz Wolf and Zantari – who had been largely inactive for some time. This new appointment did, however, bring an end to the fighting between members of Yiffy.net and the only other site able to be called a rival – Furgasmic.com, run until its recent closure by Rhianna Ravenclaw, herself an active member of Yiffy.net. A few days later, another moderator joined the team, someone else who would a few months later go on to become a site admin – LadyDarkSphynx. Not long after this change in ownership, Talija stepped down as a moderator and left the site, due to personal differences with Micah Coon and the way the site was now being run. <br />
<br />
By the end of the year, Yiffy.net switched from phpBB to SMF and replaced the resource-intensive Flash Chat with the much more streamlined and simpler x7 Chat, moved to a new server, installed TigerPaw as the site’s Technical Administrator, and one of the greatest sources of contention and conflict the site’s had came into place – the ban on leetspeak and netspeak. Under the new rules, using such acronyms as lol, rofl, bbs or wtf could earn users a warning at first, then a day-long ban and then gradually longer bans with each offense. The move to SMF was another source of disquiet amongst the members of Yiffy.net – it may have been cheaper to run, less of a drain on resources, easier to use and a lot more stable and bug-free than its predecessor software but many on the site felt that it was a step backwards for such a famous site and that Yiffy.net had lost some of its individuality by adopting a format that was so prevalent throughout the web, especially on first-timer forums.<br />
<br />
On the whole, 2006 was not a good year for Yiffy.net – activity levels were dropping to lower than any in the previous two years, post rates were also low and there was a growing sense of discontent amongst the members of the site, something that would continue into 2007...<br />
<br />
====2007 - Under New Management====<br />
<br />
2007 for Yiffy.net started with several changes in staff – Taryn had earlier stepped down from his position and left the site entirely due to time constraints, with LadyDarkSphynx being promoted in his wake in what was initially an interim position but later became permanent; and Alex Cross and Vulpes Proeliator were promoted to the moderator team to replace the three moderators who had left in the latter half of the preceding year. <br />
<br />
At the end of February and partially on the insistence of outward-bound moderator Sinergy/Cynergi, Micah Coon asked Talija back to the site, promoting her to the position of administrator. Within days and after considerable discussion between Micah and Talija, indeed it had been something she had demanded as a condition of her coming back to the site, the unpopular Netspeak Rule was relaxed considerably. The use of such acronyms and abbreviations in excess was still discouraged but members would no longer be in trouble for a simple “lol” or “brb”, though the stress was very much that such terms were fine in out-of-character areas of the forums and chat but still had no place in role-plays and in-character discussion. The site’s rules were also re-posted, having been absent from the boards for some time, and extensively re-written by the new addition to the admin team, along with a separate set of rules for the x7 Chat.<br />
<br />
The summer of 2007 saw the start of the staff of Yiffy.net opening up to their members – in a bid to dispel the inevitable rumours that surrounded anyone’s suspension, all suspensions and bans were publicly posted by the admin, detailing who, why and how long. There was also a crack-down on underage users, initiated by Alex Cross and heavily supported by the whole team. Now, anyone with even a whiff of suspicion could be asked to provide proof of age to the staff, with a reasonable notice period, and a thread was set-up to detail what was accepted, the easiest way to submit it and, importantly, which parts needed to be obscured so as to protect the submitter’s identity. Furthermore, anyone serving a suspension of greater than a week was also required to prove their age before they would be allowed back. During the same period, there was also much cause for concern after Yiffy.net was one of several large furry sites targeted by Anonymous raiders of 4chan (among others). Quick thinking and keen observation by the site’s staff prevented any issues and successfully avoided the attack. Later in that year, and after a number of clashes with the rest of the Yiffy.net staff, Alex Cross would step down from his position and leave the site to spend more time on his own, budding website.<br />
<br />
====2008 – On The Mend====<br />
<br />
So far 2008 has seen considerable change at Yiffy.net. Both Jinn and Silver Griffin have left the moderator team and site as a whole to spend more time on real life concerns, while Ranix, Azhtek and Steph Ravenblood were promoted to moderator to replace the three recent leavers. This influx of new blood and a determination amongst the existing staff to drag the site out of its stagnation has resulted in almost constant work on the site in terms of improvements. <br />
<br />
Firstly, Yiffy.net switched from the somewhat unpopular SMF to adopt vBulletin in late January, which was a move that caused some confusion and concern at the time but has since smoothed out for the most part. <br />
And, after months of discussion and hard work, the staff unveiled a new section on the site – Yiffy.net Social. This new area was to be centred around more social, out of character aspects of furry life, such as meets and conventions, as well as more diverse non-RP discussion and sections for artists of every variety to post and talk about their works. There was also the less significant but still popular introduction of a much wider variety of visual themes for the site. <br />
<br />
The site's administrators have also continued their work to open the site up more to the members and created a forum purely for members to give their feedback and suggestions on what they'd like done with the site or what they don't like about existing features. <br />
<br />
Further changes currently in progress include RP nights in the site's chat, whereby users can play tabletop role-playing games online with other furs on the site. Numerous other changes are in the pipeline, with the site's staff working hard to help restore the once proud site to its former glory and re-establish it as the first name in furry communities.<br />
<br />
There have thus far been no gigantic reversal in the site’s fortunes but membership and activity are steadily on the rise and the feedback that the staff have received on their recent changes has been promising. It’s slow-going for now but things are definitely on the up at Yiffy.net.<br />
<br />
====Now - Yiffy International - Three sites become one====<br />
<br />
In late Spring of 2008, two staff members left their posts - Ranix left the site and fandom altogether for personal reasons and Talija stepped down as administrator and left the site, citing "Failure to fulfil goals and failure to breathe new life into the site" as her reasons for doing so.<br />
<br />
Shortly afterwards, it was announced by one of the site's two remaining admin - Micah - that Yiffy.net would be undergoing a merger with the portal site Yiffy.tk. The new, combined site was planned to have all the features of its two component parts - forums, chat, art and reviewed links - as well as the advantage that the owner of Yiffy.tk would also own the dedicated server that the new site would be running on, meaning free, dedicated hosting and almost 24/7 tech support. It was also announced at this time that Micah would not hold a staff position at the new site, at least not when it went live. Shortly after this, furrum.com was also announced to be joining the new Yiffy International site.<br />
<br />
The plan was for Sniper Fox and Karma to run the non-forum side of the new combined site - dubbed "Yiffy International" by the pair - and for an admin team comprising Ikari, Azhtek and Talija. This plan was first communicated just to the staff, then later to the general user population after more details were solidified.<br />
<br />
In early August, things came to a head when Sniper Fox publicly announced on Yiffy.net that the merger would be going ahead within the next few days. A snag was hit shortly before the merger went live, however, when it was discovered and announced that the threads on the current Yiffy.net forum would not be transferred across but that the old site would be left in a read-only format so that furs could save any threads they wanted to keep. This announcement was met with a large amount of complaint but the site's staff did what they could to assure users and to make saving of old threads as easily as possible.<br />
<br />
Soon after the announcement that the site would debut with Flash Chat (for testing purposes only, it was later removed and replaced with AJAX chat), and that it wasn't feasible to port the threads over there was a falling out between the proposed new admins. Three proposed administrators of the merged site's forums and chats all announced that they would not be returning to the site after the merger due to a breakdown in the working relationship between themselves and the two site owners, the exact details of which were not revealed. No moderators were brought over from Yiffy.Net or Furrum.com, but prior staff was encouraged to re-apply after the merge was completed.<br />
<br />
Over the course of 12th August / 13th August, Yiffy International went fully live, with yiffy.info, yiffy.net as well as furrum.com are now pointing to yiffy.tk. The start has certainly been rocky but both Sniper Fox and Karma have numerous years of website management experience and plenty of technical capability.<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net is currently home to approximately 1,888 furs (including alternate accounts,) with around 500 regularly active accounts and up to 50 users logged on at any one time but at its peak of activity had over 5,000 accounts registered well in excess of 200,000 posts. The site generally has a ratio of around 4 [[male]] furs to every 1 [[female]] fur.<br />
<br />
== Controversy ==<br />
<br />
==== Drugs ====<br />
<br />
While drugs had cropped up in various roleplays and discussions on previous versions of the site, with the merger there was a new forum called "420", that focused purely on recreational drug use, particularly cannabis. There was some objection to this, with some members stating in the site discussion threads that they felt this was encouraging illegal drug use. However, the site's owner, Karma, has moved to assure members that this is very much not the case and that the 420 forum's intent is to educate people about drugs in a responsible way - both the good and bad effects - and that it promoted legalisation of cannabis rather than its actual use.<br />
<br />
==== Banned Content ====<br />
<br />
Previously, Yiffy.net's content monitor had simply been thus - "Keep it furry". No subject was considered tabboo, though anything of a stronger nature - such as roleplaying rape, snuff, watersports and other strong fetishes - was required to warn readers of its content in the first post, that way furs could avoid accidentally reading anything that they found unpleasant.<br />
<br />
After the site's August merger with Yiffy.tk, the rules as a whole were taken down and re-written from scratch, apparently on an on-going basis, and it was announced on the site's rule page that Cubby and Bestiality roleplaying and images would not be allowed on the site.<br />
<br />
The site allows furry-human role play and artwork.<br />
<br />
==== New Management and the Merger ====<br />
<br />
When it was originally announced that Micah would be stepping down as administrator, to be replaced by Sniper Fox, and that Yiffy.net was to merge with Yiffy.tk, the news was greeted with equal parts scepticism and enthusiasm. Just as some were hopeful of a new lease of life in the site so too were others dubious about the idea of merging with a links portal site and being handed back into the paws of the site's founder and previous head admin.<br />
<br />
Many new shinies were promised - better forums, better chat, image galleries, links, more users to play with. Gradually, more and more members seemed to come round to the notion. However, things started to go spectacularly wrong in the middle of August when the three members of staff who would have been the admins of the new, merged site all resigned and announced that they would not be coming back. As several existing staff also resigned, it became clear that something was very wrong behind the scenes. <br />
<br />
All of this came immediately on the back of the announcement by the site's new tech admin - Karma - that the currently existing threads on Yiffy.net would not be transferred as it was too much work. While this was understandable, the reaction was far from sympathetic.<br />
<br />
Within the first day of the merger going live and even before that, Karma also showed that he was not someone who appreciated whining or criticism, reacting strongly to both in site discussion threads.<br />
<br />
==== Underage users ====<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net operates a fairly aggressive policy towards keeping minors out of the site. As well as the Terms of Agreement users face when registering, members are age-checked if there is any suspicion of them being too young to be there, and the moderation team will also often request proof of age from any member who causes trouble and receives a suspension.{{fact}} <br />
<br />
If they are unable to provide such, then their IPs are banned from the site until they can show themselves to be of the necessary age to view adult material in their locale, a fairly effective way of preventing them from re-registering with a different account. <br />
<br />
This is seen in some quarters{{fact}} as being unfair but the fact remains that, as a site with adult content, Yiffy.net has both a moral and legal obligation to prevent underage persons from accessing their site.<br />
<br />
However, after the site merged with Yiffy.tk to form Yiffy International in August 2008, it was announced by the site's owners that they would no longer be checking furs were of age to be on the site and that they feel the onus is up to parents to monitor their children and filter content.<br />
<br />
==== Leetspeak/Netspeak ====<br />
<br />
After Micah Coon took over the site from Sniper Fox in summer of 2006, he introduced a fairly hard-line policy on any and all usage of netspeak and leetspeak. Under that ruling, any use of it whatsoever would result in a warning for a first offence, a one-day suspension for the second and then incrementally increasing lengths of suspension thereafter. This practice was hugely unpopular and saw a number of long-serving members in trouble for the seemingly minor offence of saying “BRB” in the site’s chat rooms.<br />
<br />
While discussing the issue with the soon to be returning Talija, Micah agreed to relent on his stance and the ruling was relaxed so that certain, more common terms would be allowed. This has since been relaxed further and the current ruling on leet/netspeak then stood as below - <br />
<br />
*Abbreviating small words (i.e. "you" becomes "u", "your" and "you're" become "ur", "to" and "too" become "2", etc) were still outright banned. Users, however, will be warned once before facing suspension.<br />
<br />
*Use of terms such as "LOL", "BRB", and "WB" were allowed in moderation. Casual use did not result in any disciplinary action. Flagrant and excessive abuse of it (e.g. using "LOL" twice every sentence), could.<br />
<br />
In summation, the emphasis was on moderation in its usage and since the relaxing of the rule there were no incidents of users being suspended for using net/leetspeak. Over time, the rule stopped being enforced in any disciplinary manner, with a simple, polite request to decist being made of anyone who did use excessive netspeak.<br />
<br />
However, when the site merged with Yiffy.tk in August 2008, and with Sniper back at the helm and all the previous admin and moderation staff either forced out or resigned, the rule was abolished entirely, with both Sniper and Karma of the opinion that users should be able to type whatever they like - if they wanted to look like idiots and talk in netspeak then they could do that and while they might be criticised by other members, they would not get in any official trouble for it. This new stance has been met with a slightly mixed reaction but the general consensus seems to be one of acceptance, or at least no strong protest.<br />
<br />
==== The Cull of ’08 ====<br />
<br />
In February of 2008 Yiffy.net’s main administrator, Micah Coon, conducted a purge of the thousands of inactive accounts on the site, removing all the profiles of users who had left but not deleted their profiles, registered accounts but never activated them, and forgotten or abandoned alt character accounts. <br />
<br />
To assist those members who had inactive alt accounts that they wished to keep, and also members who had registered primarily for the chat and had not posted in the forums recently enough for their account to be marked as active, a thread was set up by one of the site’s admin with the specific intention of giving users a place to post and hence mark their accounts as active.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, however, the whole process was rushed and in hindsight the period of notice was simply insufficient for something of this magnitude and many users who had been away on vacation or just taking a short break from the site did not see the announcement or “Don’t Delete Me!” thread. As a result, a number of members were somewhat irritated to find out that their accounts had been amongst those deleted in the purge.<br />
<br />
The sites administrators have since apologised for this mistake and will be making sure that the site’s members are in future given considerably more notice of anything of this ilk.<br />
<br />
====Donations====<br />
<br />
As a non-profit site, Yiffy.net is sustained purely by donations and out of the pockets of its staff. In the past, donations have been very few and very far between and even the introduction of a shop with Yiffy.net merchandise failed to prise badly needed cash from the wallets of the site’s members. <br />
<br />
Hence, despite the site having spent most of its years with a membership large enough to make it so that a few cents from every member would be enough to keep the site running for a whole year, Yiffy.net has faced closure numerous times over its history. <br />
<br />
Each time it’s narrowly avoided this, once by being moved onto Sniper Fox’s own computer as a temporary server but most other times by a considerable act of generosity from a very few members or staff. <br />
<br />
This has been less of an issue, more recently – the site’s technical admin is also the operator of its host server and as a site member he understands of the problems with obtaining funds and is hence more forgiving than previous hosts if the site is late in paying their server rent. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, a recent donation drive saw staggering generosity on the part of a couple of staff and a few members; between less than ten people, enough money was raised to support the site for half a year. The recent move to vBulletin was also funded by the minority, with only Talija and TigerPaw contributing to the cost of the licence.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
Some references are from the site's own discussion boards and postings of rules and regulations.<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=123 A Word on Underage Users]<br />
* [http://yiffy.tk/news/Welcome+to+Yiffy+International%21 Welcome to Yiffy International!]<br />
<br />
{{net-stub}}<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Talk:Yiffy.netTalk:Yiffy.net2008-08-20T13:40:15Z<p>Sniper Fox: Created page with 'If you don't agree with the more lax rules on netspeak and only verifying age when it's disputed, please don't post your OPINION on this article. Wikifur articles are for encycl...'</p>
<hr />
<div>If you don't agree with the more lax rules on netspeak and only verifying age when it's disputed, please don't post your OPINION on this article. Wikifur articles are for encyclopedic content only. K thx bye. [[User:Sniper Fox|Sniper Fox]] 13:40, 20 August 2008 (UTC)</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Sniper_FoxSniper Fox2006-09-26T15:17:23Z<p>Sniper Fox: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Sniper Fox''' is the creator and former administrator of [[Yiffy.net]].<br />
<br />
{{person-stub}}<br />
<br />
{{Contributor}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:People]][[Category:Ohio]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.netYiffy.net2006-09-26T15:15:25Z<p>Sniper Fox: New admin names</p>
<hr />
<div>{{LinkingSupporter}}<br />
[[Image:Yiffynet.gif|right]]<br />
<br />
'''Yiffy.net''' is an adult [[furry]] website featuring forums, live chat, private and world-viewable image galleries, Flash-based games, voice chat, and an index of yiffy links.<br />
<br />
*'''Addresses''': http://www.yiffy.net<br />
*'''Administrators''': Currently: [[Micah Coon]] & [[Taryn]] Formerly: [[Sniper Fox]]<br />
* '''Ran from/to:''' Jan 2002 - present<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
[[Image:Censor_NC17.png|right]]<br />
Since its creation in 2002, Yiffy.net has undergone several incarnations and feature adds. The latest incarnation (started shortly after the original site's 2 year anniversary in Jan 2004) is based on a heavily modified PHPBB2 code base, and featured modifications not found in stock off-the-shelf PHPBB sites, including a Flash-based multi-room chat system and a Gallery based on Coppermine photo gallery software.<br />
<br />
Recently, [[Sniper Fox]] stepped down as site administrator, appointing [[Micah Coon]] and [[Taryn]] in his place. There is much speculation as to why, but nobody has come up with a concrete reason why.<br />
<br />
Shortly after, it was discovered that the Flash-based, multi-room chat system was causing heavy strain on the server, which was resulting in constant system errors and slowdowns. It was removed at the request of the server owner.<br />
<br />
== Users ==<br />
Yiffy.net is currently home to over 4,500 furs (including alternate accounts) with 500 to 600 users logging on during an average day. While Yiffy.net is growing every day, the site generally has a ratio of around 3.5 times as many male furs as female furs. Yiffy.net users are tracked by join date, with a star awarded under their avatar images for each year they've been a member.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.net strictly enforces a policy of not allowing underage users to visit the site. Any time a user is suspected of being under their legal age to view adult material in their locality, they are immediately suspended until providing proof of age. This is a very unpopular practice, but this hard line stance on preventing children from accessing the site is what seperates Yiffy.net from several newer mature forum sites.<br />
<br />
[[Category:Mature websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:2002 births]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.NetYiffy.Net2006-07-11T20:02:30Z<p>Sniper Fox: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Overview'''<br />
----<br />
[http://Yiffy.NET Yiffy.NET (Warning: Adults-only Link)] is an adult furry website featuring forums, live Flash-based chat, private and world-viewable image galleries, Flash-based games with high score tracking, Voice chat (3rd party software required), and an index of yiffy links.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''History'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET was created by [[User:Sniper_Fox]] in January of 2002. It became the first all-yiffy forum (there were other multi-interest furry forums) on the internet at that time. It was this void, a lack of a 100% yiffy portal site, that Sniper Fox sought to fill with the creation of the site.<br />
<br />
Since it's creation in 2002, Yiffy.NET has undergone several incarnations and feature adds. The latest incarnation (started shortly after the original site's 2 year anniversary in Jan 2004) is based on a heavily modified PHPBB2 code base, with many features not found in stock off-the-shelf PHPBB sites, including a Flash-based multi-room chat system and a Gallery based on Coppermine photo gallery software.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Users'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET is currently home to over 4,500 furs (including alternate accounts) with 500 to 600 users logging on during an average day. While Yiffy.NET is growing every day, the site generally has a ratio of around 3.5 times as many male furs as female furs. During prime hours on the weekends, between 20 and 30 furs can be found on the live chat, with another dozen or two visiting the forums and gallery.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET strictly enforces a policy of not allowing underage users to visit the site. Any time a user is suspected of being under their legal age to view adult material in their locality, they are immediately suspended until providing proof of age. This is a very unpopular practice, but this hard line stance on preventing children from accessing the site is what seperates Yiffy.NET from several newer yiffy forum sites that have popped up recently.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET users are tracked by join date, with a star awarded under their avatar images for each year they've been a member (of the current incarnation of the site). A user list is available [http://yiffy.net/memberlist.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Staff'''<br />
----<br />
The site is currently being administrated by Sniper Fox (the original author of this wikifur entry) with a team of moderators handling nearly all of the day-to-day user complaints and issues. A current staff list is available [http://yiffy.net/staff.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Rules'''<br />
----<br />
The rules of the site are designed to be as forgiving as possible while still maintaining the site's friendly, non-abusive, 100% furry, and 100% yiffy environment. A current list of rules is available [http://yiffy.net/viewtopic.php?t=3557 here (login required)]. Users are encouraged to occassionally read over the rules, as ignorance of a rule is never accepted as an excuse for breaking that rule.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Websites]]<br />
[[Category:Mature_Websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:Yiffy]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.NetYiffy.Net2006-07-11T19:49:34Z<p>Sniper Fox: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Yiffy.NET'''<br />
----<br />
[http://Yiffy.NET Yiffy.NET (Warning: Adults-only Link)] is an adult furry website featuring forums, live Flash-based chat, private and world-viewable image galleries, Flash-based games with high score tracking, Voice chat (3rd party software required), and an index of yiffy links.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''History'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET was created by [[User:Sniper_Fox]] in January of 2002. It became the first all-yiffy forum (there were other multi-interest furry forums) on the internet at that time. It was this void, a lack of a 100% yiffy portal site, that Sniper Fox sought to fill with the creation of the site.<br />
<br />
Since it's creation in 2002, Yiffy.NET has undergone several incarnations and feature adds. The latest incarnation (started shortly after the original site's 2 year anniversary in Jan 2004) is based on a heavily modified PHPBB2 code base, with many features not found in stock off-the-shelf PHPBB sites, including a Flash-based multi-room chat system and a Gallery based on Coppermine photo gallery software.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Users'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET is currently home to over 4,500 furs (including alternate accounts) with 500 to 600 users logging on during an average day. While Yiffy.NET is growing every day, the site generally has a ratio of around 3.5 times as many male furs as female furs. During prime hours on the weekends, between 20 and 30 furs can be found on the live chat, with another dozen or two visiting the forums and gallery.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET strictly enforces a policy of not allowing underage users to visit the site. Any time a user is suspected of being under their legal age to view adult material in their locality, they are immediately suspended until providing proof of age. This is a very unpopular practice, but this hard line stance on preventing children from accessing the site is what seperates Yiffy.NET from several newer yiffy forum sites that have popped up recently.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET users are tracked by join date, with a star awarded under their avatar images for each year they've been a member (of the current incarnation of the site). A user list is available [http://yiffy.net/memberlist.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Staff'''<br />
----<br />
The site is currently being administrated by Sniper Fox (the original author of this wikifur entry) with a team of moderators handling nearly all of the day-to-day user complaints and issues. A current staff list is available [http://yiffy.net/staff.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Rules'''<br />
----<br />
The rules of the site are designed to be as forgiving as possible while still maintaining the site's friendly, non-abusive, 100% furry, and 100% yiffy environment. A current list of rules is available [http://yiffy.net/viewtopic.php?t=3557 here (login required)]. Users are encouraged to occassionally read over the rules, as ignorance of a rule is never accepted as an excuse for breaking that rule.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Websites]]<br />
[[Category:Mature_Websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:Yiffy]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.NetYiffy.Net2006-07-11T19:29:48Z<p>Sniper Fox: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Yiffy.NET'''<br />
----<br />
[http://Yiffy.NET Yiffy.NET (Warning: Adults-only Link)] is an adult furry website featuring forums, live Flash-based chat, private and world-viewable image galleries, Flash-based games with high score tracking, Voice chat (3rd party software required), and an index of yiffy links.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''History'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET was created by [[User:Sniper_Fox]] in January of 2002. It became first all-yiffy forum (there were other multi-interest furry forums) on the internet at that time. It was this void, a lack of a 100% yiffy portal site, that Sniper Fox sought to fill with the creation of the site.<br />
<br />
Since it's creation in 2002, Yiffy.NET has undergone several interations and feature adds. The latest iteration (started shortly after the original site's 2 year anniversary in Jan 2004) is based on a heavily modified PHPBB2 code base, with many features not found in stock off-the-shelf PHPBB sites, including a Flash-based multi-room chat system and a Gallery based on Coppermine photo gallery software.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Users'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET is currently home to over 4,500 furs (including alternate accounts) with 500 to 600 users logging on during an average day. While Yiffy.NET is growing every day, the site generally has a ratio of around 3.5 times as many male furs as female furs. During prime hours on the weekends, between 20 and 30 furs can be found on the live chat, with another dozen or two visiting the forums and gallery.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET strictly enforces a policy of not allowing underage users to visit the site. Any time a user is suspected of being under their legal age of adulthood in their locality, they are immediately suspended until providing proof of age. This is a very unpopular practice, but this hard line stance on preventing children from accessing the site is what seperates Yiffy.NET from several newer yiffy forum sites that have popped up recently.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET users are tracked by join date, with star awarded under their avatar images for each year they've been a member (of the current iteration of the site). A user list is available [http://yiffy.net/memberlist.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Staff'''<br />
----<br />
The site is currently being administered by Sniper Fox (the original author of this wikifur entry) with a team of moderators handling nearly all of the day-to-day user complaints and issues. A current staff list is available [http://yiffy.net/staff.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Rules'''<br />
----<br />
The rules of the site are designed to be as forgiving as possible while still maintaining the site's friendly, non-abusive, 100% furry, and 100% yiffy environment. A current list of rules is available [http://yiffy.net/viewtopic.php?t=3557 here (login required)]. Users are encouraged to occassionally read over the rules, as ignorance of a rule is never accepted as an excuse for breaking that rule.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Websites]]<br />
[[Category:Mature_Websites]]<br />
[[Category:Forums]]<br />
[[Category:Yiffy]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.NetYiffy.Net2006-07-11T19:28:20Z<p>Sniper Fox: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Yiffy.NET'''<br />
----<br />
[http://Yiffy.NET Yiffy.NET (Warning: Adults-only Link)] is an adult furry website featuring forums, live Flash-based chat, private and world-viewable image galleries, Flash-based games with high score tracking, Voice chat (3rd party software required), and an index of yiffy links.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''History'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET was created by [[User:Sniper_Fox]] in January of 2002. It became first all-yiffy forum (there were other multi-interest furry forums) on the internet at that time. It was this void, a lack of a 100% yiffy portal site, that Sniper Fox sought to fill with the creation of the site.<br />
<br />
Since it's creation in 2002, Yiffy.NET has undergone several interations and feature adds. The latest iteration (started shortly after the original site's 2 year anniversary in Jan 2004) is based on a heavily modified PHPBB2 code base, with many features not found in stock off-the-shelf PHPBB sites, including a Flash-based multi-room chat system and a Gallery based on Coppermine photo gallery software.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Users'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET is currently home to over 4,500 furs (including alternate accounts) with 500 to 600 users logging on during an average day. While Yiffy.NET is growing every day, the site generally has a ratio of around 3.5 times as many male furs as female furs. During prime hours on the weekends, between 20 and 30 furs can be found on the live chat, with another dozen or two visiting the forums and gallery.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET strictly enforces a policy of not allowing underage users to visit the site. Any time a user is suspected of being under their legal age of adulthood in their locality, they are immediately suspended until providing proof of age. This is a very unpopular practice, but this hard line stance on preventing children from accessing the site is what seperates Yiffy.NET from several newer yiffy forum sites that have popped up recently.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET users are tracked by join date, with star awarded under their avatar images for each year they've been a member (of the current iteration of the site). A user list is available [http://yiffy.net/memberlist.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Staff'''<br />
----<br />
The site is currently being administered by Sniper Fox (the original author of this wikifur entry) with a team of moderators handling nearly all of the day-to-day user complaints and issues. A current staff list is available [http://yiffy.net/staff.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Rules'''<br />
----<br />
The rules of the site are designed to be as forgiving as possible while still maintaining the site's friendly, non-abusive, 100% furry, and 100% yiffy environment. A current list of rules is available [http://yiffy.net/viewtopic.php?t=3557 here (login required)]. Users are encouraged to occassionally read over the rules, as ignorance of a rule is never accepted as an excuse for breaking that rule.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Websites]]<br />
[[Category:Mature_Websites]]<br />
[[Category:Yiffy]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.NetYiffy.Net2006-07-11T19:24:21Z<p>Sniper Fox: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Yiffy.NET'''<br />
----<br />
[http://Yiffy.NET Yiffy.NET (Warning: Adults-only Link)] is an adult furry website featuring forums, live Flash-based chat, private and world-viewable image galleries, Flash-based games with high score tracking, Voice chat (3rd party software required), and an index of yiffy links.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''History'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET was created by [[User:Sniper_Fox]] in January of 2002. It became first all-yiffy forum (there were other multi-interest furry forums) on the internet at that time. It was this void, a lack of a 100% yiffy portal site, that Sniper Fox sought to fill with the creation of the site.<br />
<br />
Since it's creation in 2002, Yiffy.NET has undergone several interations and feature adds. The latest iteration (started shortly after the original site's 2 year anniversary in Jan 2004) is based on a heavily modified PHPBB2 code base, with many features not found in stock off-the-shelf PHPBB sites, including a Flash-based multi-room chat system and a Gallery based on Coppermine photo gallery software.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Users'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET is currently home to over 4,500 furs (including alternate accounts) with 500 to 600 users logging on during an average day. While Yiffy.NET is growing every day, the site generally has a ratio of around 3.5 times as many male furs as female furs. During prime hours on the weekends, between 20 and 30 furs can be found on the live chat, with another dozen or two visiting the forums and gallery.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET strictly enforces a policy of not allowing underage users to visit the site. Any time a user is suspected of being under their legal age of adulthood in their locality, they are immediately suspended until providing proof of age. This is a very unpopular practice, but this hard line stance on preventing children from accessing the site is what seperates Yiffy.NET from several newer yiffy forum sites that have popped up recently.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET users are tracked by join date, with star awarded under their avatar images for each year they've been a member (of the current iteration of the site). A user list is available [http://yiffy.net/memberlist.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Staff'''<br />
----<br />
The site is currently being administered by Sniper Fox (the original author of this wikifur entry) with a team of moderators handling nearly all of the day-to-day user complaints and issues. A current staff list is available [http://yiffy.net/staff.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Rules'''<br />
----<br />
The rules of the site are designed to be as forgiving as possible while still maintaining the site's friendly, non-abusive, 100% furry, and 100% yiffy environment. A current list of rules is available [http://yiffy.net/viewtopic.php?t=3557 here (login required)]. Users are encouraged to occassionally read over the rules, as ignorance of a rule is never accepted as an excuse for breaking that rule.<br />
[[Category:Adult]]<br />
[[Category:Yiffy]]<br />
[[Category:Website]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.NetYiffy.Net2006-07-11T19:22:58Z<p>Sniper Fox: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Yiffy.NET'''<br />
----<br />
[http://Yiffy.NET Yiffy.NET (Warning: Adults-only Link)] is an adult furry website featuring forums, live Flash-based chat, private and world-viewable image galleries, Flash-based games with high score tracking, Voice chat (3rd party software required), and an index of yiffy links.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''History'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET was created by [[User:Sniper_Fox]] in January of 2002. It became first all-yiffy forum (there were other multi-interest furry forums) on the internet at that time. It was this void, a lack of a 100% yiffy portal site, that Sniper Fox sought to fill with the creation of the site.<br />
<br />
Since it's creation in 2002, Yiffy.NET has undergone several interations and feature adds. The latest iteration (started shortly after the original site's 2 year anniversary in Jan 2004) is based on a heavily modified PHPBB2 code base, with many features not found in stock off-the-shelf PHPBB sites, including a Flash-based multi-room chat system and a Gallery based on Coppermine photo gallery software.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Users'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET is currently home to over 4,500 furs (including alternate accounts) with 500 to 600 users logging on during an average day. While Yiffy.NET is growing every day, the site generally has a ratio of around 3.5 times as many male furs as female furs. During prime hours on the weekends, between 20 and 30 furs can be found on the live chat, with another dozen or two visiting the forums and gallery.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET strictly enforces a policy of not allowing underage users to visit the site. Any time a user is suspected of being under their legal age of adulthood in their locality, they are immediately suspended until providing proof of age. This is a very unpopular practice, but this hard line stance on preventing children from accessing the site is what seperates Yiffy.NET from several newer yiffy forum sites that have popped up recently.<br />
<br />
Yiffy.NET users are tracked by join date, with star awarded under their avatar images for each year they've been a member (of the current iteration of the site). A user list is available [http://yiffy.net/memberlist.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Staff'''<br />
----<br />
The site is currently being adminstered by Sniper Fox (the original author of this wikifur entry) with a team of moderators handling nearly all of the day-to-day user complaints and issues. A current staff list is available [http://yiffy.net/staff.php here (login required)].<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Rules'''<br />
----<br />
The rules of the site are designed to be as forgiving as possible while still maintaining the site's friendly, non-abusive, 100% furry, and 100% yiffy environment. A current list of rules is available [http://yiffy.net/viewtopic.php?t=3557 here (login required)]. Users are encouraged to occassionally read over the rules, as ignorance of a rule is never accepted as an excuse for breaking that rule.<br />
[[Category:Adult]]<br />
[[Category:Yiffy]]<br />
[[Category:Website]]</div>Sniper Fox//en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiffy.NetYiffy.Net2006-07-11T18:48:51Z<p>Sniper Fox: Yiffy.NET - Adult furry website portal</p>
<hr />
<div>'''Yiffy.NET'''<br />
[http://Yiffy.NET] (Warning: Adults-only Link) is adult furry website featuring forums, live Flash-based chat, private and world-viewable image galleries, Flash-based games with high score tracking, Voice chat (3rd party software required), and an index of links.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''History'''<br />
----<br />
Yiffy.NET was created by [[User:Sniper_Fox]] in January of 2002. This website was the first all-yiffy forum (there were other multi-interest furry forums) on the internet. It was this void that Sniper Fox sought to fill with the creation of the site.<br />
<br />
Since it's creation in 2002, Yiffy.NET has undergone several interations and feature adds. The latest iteration (started shortly after the original sites 2 year anniversary in Jan 2004) is based on a heavily modified PHPBB2 code base, with several features added by [[User:Sniper_Fox]] including a Flash-based chat room and a Gallery based on Coppermine photo gallery software.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Users'''<br />
----<br />
[http://Yiffy.NET] is currently home to over 4,500 users (including alternate accounts) with 500 to 600 users logging in on an average day. While Yiffy.NET is growing every day, there are usually around 3.5 times as many male users as females. Yiffy.NET users are tracked by join date, with star awarded under their avatar images for each year they've been a member (of the current iteration of the site). A user list is available at [http://yiffy.net/memberlist.php] (login required).<br />
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'''Staff'''<br />
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The site is currently being adminstered by Sniper Fox (the original author of this wikifur entry) with a team of moderators handling nearly all of the day-to-day user complaints and issues. A current staff list is available at [http://yiffy.net/staff.php] (login required).</div>Sniper Fox