Difference between revisions of "Comparison of furry art sites"

Revision as of 01:26, 27 March 2013

A furry art website is any major community archive of graphic artwork, literature and/or audio files which is either entirely focused on furry content or contains a section(s) for indexed furry/anthropomorphic submissions. This is an evaluation of the major art sites that furries use today. It compares them to a list of common and ideal features.

This is not done as a way to glorify or insult any site in particular. It is created to answer two potential questions:

• "If I had to choose just one site to use, which one has the features that are important to me?" And
• "How can this one site be improved to better compete - or share success with - the other sites?"

This chart omits certain features common to all sites (private messages, watchlists, etc.) and certain esoteric features (SoFurry's random avatar feature, DeviantArt's "collections", etc.)

Comparison of user-to-user interaction and other features

Comparison of submission management features

Features in detail

Submission folders

Submission folders allow for users to index content from within their own galleries (and, on certain websites, other users' galleries), be it for purposes of segregating the content based upon topic or sequential events. For certain sites, folders might be indexable in the internal search engine. Only SoFurry 2.0, however, allows for watching folders for updates (i.e., comics, story series, audio dramas).

Steps to upload

The more pages are involved to upload art, the longer it takes, and the generally less easy-to-use experience it creates. This number is derived from the number of pages it takes when navigating from the index.

DeviantArt's process has been simplified to just one page over the years, two if you submit your art as a print. Inkbunny's upload process has been lowered from 8 to 5 recently.

Uploads to VCL have a delay of up to 30 minutes.

Comment management

It's debatable whether or not users should be able to delete comments on their work or profiles, as some view it as a way to create drama or silence out critics. On the contrary, comment deletion seems necessary when trolls or spam gets involved.

Customizable profile

This applies to the ability to add, subtract, or re-arrange elements of the profile page.

Social networking

To get a "Full", a site would need to have built in (or customizable) fields that link to the user's other sites (SF, DA, LJ, etc.) AND to have "Share on Facebook/Twitter etc." on the Submission pages.

Blocking

InkBunny allows you to block a user's submissions but still receive comments from them, or visa versa.

Integrated ads

DeviantArt's AdCast does not allow ads to be bought by any website that runs ads or otherwise takes in income - such sites are thus forced to use the more expensive AdPro service.

Complex watching system

All art sites allow you to follow artists, but only DA allows you to follow their art but ignore their journals, or follow/ignore their scraps.

Native commission support

FurAffinity previously had the "Commission Information" page, but was disabled due to security bugs.

Cross-Site linking

This allows you to link to user's profiles on other art sites with the same ease as someone on the same site. For example, simple BBCode allows an InkBunny user to link to someone's FurAffinity page.

References

See also