South Australian Furry Community

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For the defunct Something Awful IRC channel see #safurs.

The South Australian Furry Community, more commonly referred to as SAFurs or SA Furries, is a decentralized group of communities for South Australian furries. While the SAFurs community exists in its current form across many platforms, almost all of these different spaces share userbases and administrators. The term SAFur is also used to denote an individual who is a part of the South Australian Furry community, and the plural term SAFurs can refer to select community members or the community as a whole.

History[edit]

An older logo to represent the South Australian Furry Community (SAFC)

In 2006, Tech Wolfox opened the #Safurs IRC channel on Furnet, which attracted furs from Australia and the around the world. This is the first recorded use of the longstanding SAFurs name. SAFurs frequently meet for coffee nights and often help organize events for regional furmeets such as MiDFur. SAFurs.org went offline in October 2007, due to failure of the server hardware and consequent loss of data. This, coupled with internal conflicts within the group, a lack of administrative support, and the availability of the Furstralia forums, led to a meeting of senior group members where the decision was made to not re-establish safurs.org.

A new SAFurs site at the address safurs.ausfa.org was formed by CynWolfe in February 2008 as part of the infrastructure built by the recently formed Australian Furry Association. The site took off after an awkward start resulting from some bad promotion by some SAFurs who started arguments on the Furstralia forums. SAFurs was moved from safurs.ausfa.org to the safurs.net domain in February 2010. From this point, the site no longer ran as a subsidiary of the Australian Furry Association. However, SAFurs remains linked to RADFur. The contents of the old site were lost in the move.

The SAFurs Facebook group was created in July 2012. This group is still active as of December 2023.

In December 2013, SAFurs was moved from safurs.net to the safurs.forumotion.com forum after the safurs.net domain expired and Firey moved away from the group. The contents of the old forum were lost in the move. The forums reached their peak activity in August 2017 with 58 active users, though the authenticity of this peak is debatable since most posts were made during 2014 and 2015. Posts detailing upcoming events on the forum contained links to the SAFurs Facebook group, suggesting a large amount of overlap in users as well as events occurring on the SAFurs Facebook around 2015[1]. The forums are no-longer in use but still viewable. New users are unable to register new accounts without admin approval, and the forums reached a total of 126 registered users.

A Discord server was created in March of 2020 that included a userbase of mostly South Australian furries. At its inception, this group served as a Discord offshoot of the active SAFurs Facebook - primarily to encourage those who do not use Facebook to engage with the local community. The group began coordinating small events two months after its creation and eventually grew to focus on its primarily South Australian identity.

A Twitter account was registered under the handle sa_furs by the Telegram and Facebook administrators in September 2021 and began primarily retweeting and sharing tweets from South Australian furries as well as pictures from Facebook SAFurs events.

Until December 2022, the Telegram and Facebook were administrated separately from the Discord. After a change of administration in December 2022, the Discord server was officially renamed to SA Furries.
Around this time, administration of the Telegram and Facebook also changed. Communication between both parties of administrators increased in June of 2023 and officially overlapped in August of that year when all platforms began sharing administrator permissions.

In December 2023, the Discord was renamed SAFurs to align with the other social media platforms.

Media Appearances[edit]

In November 2023, the Nikola Van de Wetering of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) interviewed attendees of an Adelaide furmeet after reaching out to Kusaki, a prominent South Australian furry. Van de Wetering was also present at the September FurBall and FurTrader! events to speak to participants. These interviews culminated in an episode on The Other Me, season four of the ABC's flagship documentary series Earshot. The episode is entitled The Animal Outside and was released in December 2023, it covered the fundemantal concepts of furry fandom, the individual stories and identities of some furries as well as the present discrimination furries face [2].

External Links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. http://web.archive.org/web/20230511114808/https://safurs.forumotion.com/t11-group-photo-at-the-malls-balls
  2. Van de Wetering, N., & Melville, K. (2023, December 18). The Animal Outside (T. Henry & Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Eds.; No. 8) [Radio broadcast The Animal Outside]. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/earshot/earshot-the-other-me-drag-king-furries-boy-michael-animal/103077604


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