History of Fur Affinity

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This article is about the history of Fur Affinity and its properties.

Furaffinity.net was launched on January 16, 2005, as an alternative to SheezyArt with the forum going live on that date and the main site being transferred a few days later from FurPaws.[1][2] During that time period, Sheezy abruptly changed policies to both remove adult art and take a stronger stance against users and their uploads. Warnings were supposedly issued from the site's service provider, advising SheezyArt that they were not permitted to host adult content on their site.

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

Server problems (2005)

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

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

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

April Fools Day (2007)

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

Fur Affinity: United!

Main article: FA: United

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

Dragoneer account breach (2007)

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

   
History of Fur Affinity
 Administrator notice: We're sorry, our vaginas are currently full of sand. We're makin' pearls here, folks! :D! FA:U rocks. We all got handjobs from Glaide and Damaratus. -- hacked by jheryn
   
History of Fur Affinity

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

Server problems (2008; Augustgate)

On 1 July 2008, Fur Affinity was taken offline again due to a "server hardware fault",[3] to be replaced by an image of Fender angrily stomping his computer followed by a notice about the failure and a link to that forum thread. By 7 July, Fur Affinity's members had donated $16,000-$18,000 to solve the issue,[4][5] and Dragoneer posted on the FA forums that a new server, an HP ProLiant quad-core Opteron code-named Trogdor had been ordered.

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

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

Fur Affinity resumed operation on August 5, 2008, at 11:30 pm (EST), in read-only mode. The site was stable again with all options and features prior to the outage by 9:20 am EST the next day. Since the prolonged outage, admins have gone out of their way to assure users that subsequent outages wouldn't be as bad or as lengthy as it, it came to be known, "the August incident". [6]

April Fools Day (2009)

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

Server problems and IRC bans (July 2009)

On 29 July 2009, Fur Affinity suffered a temporary service outage (later found to be due to a power failure caused by lightning[7]). During the confusion, FA forum moderator Carenath accused members of the FurNet IRC channel #hackfurs of causing the outage, resulting in multiple people residing in both #furaffinity and #hackfurs being banned.[8] FA admin Pinkuh is believed to have performed the bans, due to the request notice on Meredith's kick message. Despite an admission that the accusation was mere speculation, Pinkuh did not revoke the bans until the following day. Carenath reported apologized for his remarks later.

Some who questioned the decision were temporarily banned from FurNet by network administrator Snowpony,[9] who cited "trolling and previous conduct." These bans were initially made without a reason, a violation of the FurNet code of conduct; those questioning them also received threats of being banned.[10]

Server problems (November/December 2009)

Fur Affinity experienced an outage starting on 30 November 2009, when the site's ISP experienced technical difficulties due to broken fiber optic cables.[11] By 2 December, the ISP still hadn't responded to FA staff email. The site's Twitter channel noted that staff was to visit the co-location facility later that day to investigate the issue.

They also announced tentative plans to switch to a new facility, maybe even in Canada,[12] but eventually settled on a new host offering 25% more bandwidth that is still in Virginia.[13]

Fur Affinity came back online with the forums first on Tuesday, December 8 [14] and the rest of the site returned to full use at around 12:30 AM EST, Wednesday, December 9. [15][16]

Server enhancements (2010)

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

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

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

Server hack (2010)

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

The next day, an administrator's personal email account was compromised, allowing the hacker to request a password reset on Fur Affinity. This time, the site was not taken offline, instead, the administrators all had their admin permissions pulled, but not before the hacker was able to wipe a number of user's galleries and download the private notes of several high-profile users.

Simple Warren Bust by Warren Duster

The forums were also accessed during this time and had the private Admin boards exposed to the public. FurAffinity has reported a total of 41 accounts were accessed. Dragoneer has since then apologized to those whose accounts were accessed and has offered them a free sponsorship-level membership to FA: United.

It should be noted that former FA developer, Eevee, had mentioned[18] the possibility that a XSS exploit existed in the trouble ticket system a few months earlier, after Eevee had demonstrated that the hide comment feature was insecure and would allow anyone to hide any comment. Critics[who?] said that FurAffinity was well aware that the site code was vulnerable to attacks like the initial XSS exploits for years, but have been slow to fix it.[citation needed]

Furocity staff merge

In July 2011 Dragoneer announced that Furocity and FurAffinity would be "Joining forces"[19], with many members of Furocity's staff joining FurAffinity.

Over a month later, 7 members of Furocity's staff were officially brought on board without warning the existing staff[20], some of whom were removed from their administrator positions.[citation needed] New "departments" were created to better serve the users.

10.000.000 user posts

In February 24, 2013, Fur Affinity reached the milestone of 10,000,000 submitted media.[21] The file that made this possible was Simple Warren Bust, by artist Warren Duster.[22]

Zaush

On December 2013, furry artist Zaush joins the Fur Affinity staff as a volunteer developer/designer to help on the site's further development,[23] codenamed Project Phoenix.[24]

Ursa Major Awards

Fur Affinity won the 2012 and 2013 Ursa Major Awards for Best Anthropomorphic Website.[25][26]

DDoS Attack (2014)

On Tuesday, October 14th Fur Affinity suffered a major Distributed Denial of Service attack, which led to apparent copycat attacks on other furry sites.[27][28]

IMVU Acquisition

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

Server Hack/Source Code Leak (2016)

On May 17th, 2016 at approximately 11:44 AM Eastern Time, Fur Affinity went offline, displaying the temporarily offline message.[29][30] Using an exploit in FA's image processing software (ImageMagick), an unknown attacker gained a copy of Fur Affinity's source code. The exploit was patched earlier in May. This unknown attacker then distributed USB drives containing the source code at Biggest Little Fur Con 2016.[31] At least two of these USBs have been found at Biggest Little Fur Con Con Ops.[32] Anyone with information regarding the USBs has been asked to contact Dragoneer. While a USB that Dragoneer was given was being analyzed, someone launched a second attack against the site using the information from the source code. The attack targeted the site database, deleting user information, submissions and watches. The attack was stopped before any other damage could be done. [33] Journals, notes, passwords and personal information were not affected. Backups have been restored to the FA servers.[34] All submissions, favorites, watches, and profile updates made between the 11th of May and the time of the breach have been lost.[35]

Whilst Dragoneer initially posted that "we have no hard evidence to believe that user account data has been compromised",[36] on May 20 he admitted that "the attackers have access to personal user data, such as encrypted passwords and email addresses".[37] As a result, all users were forced to reset their passwords.

In late September, the hackers released the contents of Fur Affinity's trouble ticket and suspensions databases.[38]

Shock troll pictures (2017)

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

UI update (January 2020)

At the start of the new year in January, 2020. Fur Affinity received its first complete overhaul of the websites UI (User-Interface) since 2007. The update included; a major color change, extra template choices, modern styled graphics, the revival of the top-of-page banner, and many other aspects. In addition, the site announced Fur Affinity Plus (FA+), a 5$ paid tier for membership which allows users to opt out of third-party advertising and use an FA+-only icon next to their username to show support. This was announced as a means for the site to rely less on advertisements to sustain site management costs.[39] The paid tier was launched on February 11, 2020.[40]

DDoS (February 2020)

On February the 20th, 2020, Fur Affinity's host Cloudflare was hit by a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) that left the site offline for 2 days[41]. This attack spread throughout 100+ websites that were attached to Fur Affinity's host. The website came back online on February the 22nd, 2020.

Re-acquisition by Dragoneer

On Monday, January 25, 2021, Parent company IMVU announced that it had completed a round of funding bringing in $35 million and that it would re-organize under the name Together Labs[42]. That Friday, Dragoneer tweeted that he had something to announce on Monday[43].

On Monday, February 1, 2021, Dragoneer announced that he had regained sole ownership of the site[44] which was being divested by IMVU as a result of the reorganization announced a week prior. As a result of the reacquisition, Dragoneer's employment with IMVU was terminated, which caused him to lose his health insurance. Dragoneer tweeted that due to the loss of his insurance, he "had to drop [his] anti-depressants and bipolar medication cold turkey"[45] and that the purchase of the site put him in considerable financial distress, saying he "took out loans and spent every dime [he] had on FA"[46] and that it cost him more to buy it back than he sold it for[47]. Dragoneer offered no explanation for how he planned to repay the loans, only replying to a Twitter user that "FA's fundings and my own are completely separate entities."[48] and later claimed that he still had "some money", contradicting his earlier statements that he "spent every dime" on FA[49]. Dragoneer has made references to another party that was also interested in acquiring the site, though has not mentioned their identity, and that he did what he did because he felt the other option "wasn't as good"[50]


Community Response

The response to the news by the furry community was mixed. While many users of FurAffinity saw this as positive news, others expressed concern and alarm that Dragoneer was willing to take on debt and go off of important medications just to re-acquire the site[51]. Some compared his actions to those made by investors from Reddit participating in the GameStop Short Squeeze that was ongoing at the time[52]. Others suggested this is nothing more than a continuation of what critics like Vivisector have called a "death grip" on the site, in an attempt to remain a figurehead in the community[53] and that this is the latest link in a chain of events that stems from "The Olive Garden Incident" that took place in 2003.

2024 hijack

on August 20, 2024, the Fur Affinity website was compromised. The hacker redirected the domain name to other sites, including a fake Shopify storefront mimicking the official website, the then-officially-controlled X account, a 2017 Washington Post article, and then Kiwi Farms. In response to the sudden influx of traffic, Kiwi Farms temporarily closed new user registrations and added a banner to the site claiming that the site's administration were not involved in the attacker's actions.

During the attack, the official X account was also compromised and used to disseminate explicit content and post anti-furry messages. At one point, the hacker renamed the account's handle, and another user reportedly created a new X account with the original Fur Affinity handle to keep it safe while the situation was resolved. then later. 10 nsfw images were uploaded to the account. then were deleted.

In response to the takeover, Fur Affinity invalidated all user logins to its website to mitigate the impact of the hack.[14] Staff on the official Fur Affinity Discord server provided regular updates and warnings about the situation to the community, including warnings not to use or follow links to or from the website or X account.

On August 21. FurAffinity's tech team has regained control and temporarily locked down the site while they double-check everything and continue to move things forward. They also recovered their official Twitter account.

References

  1. ↑ Furaffinity.org information — launch of forum on Furaffinity.net. Posted on SheezyArt, 16 January 2005.
  2. ↑ FurAffinity - note re. Transfer of mainsite and 400+ users. Posted on SheezyArt, 21 January 2005.
  3. ↑ "Server Hardware Fault" (2008, July 1). Dragoneer, Fur Affinity Forum.
  4. ↑ FA Forums: Server Hardware Fault, page 120, post #1786 by Artie reads "$10,477.15 via Amazon, plus over $6,000 via PayPal. So, over $16,477.15 total so far." on July 6, 2008, 5:35PM EST
  5. ↑ FA Forums: Public Donation and Expenditures Log, Please., page 1, post #15 by Seppel (based on an official file published by Dragoneer here) reads "I checked the budget Dragoneer posted. $18,000 is more than twice FA has ever had. [...] $18,000 will go far. Very far. "(7 July 2008, 9:03 AM EST)
  6. ↑ Augustgate (Retrieved ?)
  7. ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/showpost.php?p=1105765&postcount=3
  8. ↑ 
    (Chat logs truncated to remove noise. More bans than shown were handed out, but not all shown to maintain readability.)
00:40:24   <Carenath> *points a finger at #hackfurs*
00:41:14   <Carenath> Well, put two and two together... people in that channel,
			have axes to grind against FA and if it was an outside cause..
			I'd blame them first.
00:41:39   <Carenath> Meredith: they did it before.
00:42:37   * Pi (~pi@fur-9F1E9EA1.tcct.nmt.edu) has joined #furaffinity
00:42:38   * ChanServ sets ban on *!*pi@fur-9F1E9EA1.tcct.nmt.edu
00:42:38   * ChanServ has kicked Pi from #furaffinity (User has been banned from the channel)
00:44:26   <Carenath> Meredith: Im not an FA Admin.
00:44:58   <Carenath> FAF forum mod.
00:46:00   * ChanServ has kicked Meredith from #furaffinity (Requested (Pinkatron))
00:46:02   * Meredith (~arcturus@fur-71797932.hsd1.pa.comcast.net) has joined #furaffinity
00:46:02   * ChanServ sets ban on *!*arcturus@fur-71797932.hsd1.pa.comcast.net
00:46:02   * ChanServ has kicked Meredith from #furaffinity (User has been banned from the channel)
  9. ↑ 
    23:52 -!- Snowpony [admin@alicorn.furnet.org] has joined #furaffinity
23:54 -!- Pi_ [~pi@u15354709.onlinehome-server.com] has quit [User has been banned from FurNet (Ban Evasion)]
23:56 -!- GHDA [~GHDA@pool-173-79-208-221.washdc.fios.verizon.net] has quit [User has been banned from FurNet (Trolling is bad m'kay?)]
  10. ↑ 
    01:38 < Snowpony> omiiko: for trolling and previous conduct.  That enough for you?
01:39 <+AFKobura> Snowpony apparently someone tried private message with the
      specific admin and they were turned away with a threat of being klined themselves
01:39 < Snowpony> AFKobura: and?
01:39 <+omiiko> Snowpony: I'd prefer if the Admins followed their own CoC and
      placed the ban reason in the actual *line
01:40 < Snowpony> omiiko: Sure - I'll go update the ban then.
01:44 < Snowpony> Bobbluejay: I've answered your questions - they can log back in 24 hours.
  11. ↑ Oh, and you thought your cable outages were annoying? - Net-Cat,   furaffinity (30 November 2009)
  12. ↑ 02/Dec - The Dragoneer,   furaffinity (2 December 2009)
  13. ↑ It looks like we're planning to bring the site up Monday night - The Dragoneer,   furaffinity (4 December 2009)
  14. ↑ 08/Dec - thevirtualcat,   furaffinity (8 December 2009)
  15. ↑ 09/Dec - The Dragoneer,   furaffinity (9 December 2009)
  16. ↑ Furaffinity Tweet Announcing the Site is Back - The Dragoneer - Furaffinity Twitter Page (9 December 2009)
  17. ↑ http://community.livejournal.com/furaffinity/213163.html FA Livejournal
  18. ↑ Eevee (Retrieved ?)
  19. ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/103573-Fur-Affinity-Furocity-Merger-Announcement?p=2618095#post2618095
  20. ↑ http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/105754-New-Staff-Structure-and-Admins?p=2656512&viewfull=1#post2656512
  21. ↑ 10,000,000 post by Fender on his Fur Affinity account (Retrieved February 26, 2013)
  22. ↑ "Simple Warren Bust" submission by Warren Duster on his Fur Affinity account (Retrieved February 26, 2013)
  23. ↑ Zaush announcement about joining Fur Affinity post on Twitter. Posted December 23, 2013. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  24. ↑ Banner Update + Project Phoenix post by Fender on Fur Affinity. Posted January 15, 2014. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  25. ↑ Ursa Major Awards - 2012 on the UMA website. Retrieved June 2, 2014.
  26. ↑ Ursa Major Awards - 2013 on the UMA website. Retrieved June 2, 2014.
  27. ↑ "Let's Talk DDOS" - posting by Dragoneer on Reddit. Dated October 17, 2014. Retrieved October 19, 2014.
  28. ↑ Furry websites face broad denial-of-service attacks - GreenReaper, Flayrah (16 October 2014)
  29. ↑ [1] - Image of FA offline message.
  30. ↑ Fur Affinity on Twitter - posting by Fur Affinity on Twitter. Posted May 17, 2016. Retrieved May 17, 2016.
  31. ↑ [2] - Photo of one of the USB drives distributed with FA's source code. Posted May 17, 2016. Retrieved May 17, 2016.
  32. ↑ BLFCannon on Twitter - Posted by BLFCannon on Twitter. Posted May 17, 2016. Retrieved May 17, 2016.
  33. ↑ 5/17 Site Attack - posted by Dragoneer on Fur Affinity Forums
  34. ↑ 5/17 Site Attack Update - posted by Dragoneer on Fur Affinity Forums
  35. ↑ Sciggles on Twitter - posted by Sciggles on Twitter. Posted May 18, 2016. Retrieved May 18, 2016.
  36. ↑ Fur Affinity Back Online - posted by Dragoneer on Reddit.
  37. ↑ Announcement on Fur Affinity. Dated May 20, 2016. Retrieved May 21, 2016.
  38. ↑ "Re: Oops, FA Got Hacked (Again)" - message by Conan on Vivisector. Dated October 1, 2016. Retrieved October 1, 2016.
  39. ↑ [3]
  40. ↑ [4]
  41. ↑ [5]. Retrieve ?.
  42. ↑ Virtual social network IMVU raises $35M from China's NetEase and others - article on TechCrunch. Dated 25 January 25, 2021. Retrieved February 5, 2021.
  43. ↑ Today marks a big change in my life, and a return to my roots. I can't wait to share it with you all on Monday. - Post by Dragoneer on Twitter, Dated January 28, 2021. Retrieved February 5, 2021.
  44. ↑ In today's news: I bought back Fur Affinity. It's mine once again. *plops the "site owner" placard back on his desk* I missed you. - Post by Dragoneer on Twitter, Dated February 1, 2021. Retrieved February 5, 2021.
  45. ↑ My only regret is I no longer have health insurance and had to drop my anti-depressants and bipolar medication cold turkey. Trying to spin up my art game so I can afford them again, as it's gonna be rough without 'em. - @Dragoneer (1 February 2021)
  46. ↑ I have zero freakin' money. I literally took out loans and spent every dime I had on FA. XD - @Dragoneer (1 February 2021)
  47. ↑ I wish, but... no. - @Dragoneer (1 February 2021)
  48. ↑ [6] - @Dragoneer (1 February 2021)
  49. ↑ I've got money. Not a ton, but I do have some cash. - @Dragoneer (4 February 2021)
  50. ↑ Because the other choice wasn't as good. - Post by Dragoneer on Twitter. Dated February 1, 2021. Retrieved February 5, 2021.
  51. ↑ Genuinely alarming foreshadowing going on here. - @orinoxide (2 February 2021)
  52. ↑ People are saying investing in the Reddit stocks is a bad investment strategy, but let me tell you, throwing all your money into FurAffinity in 2021 is certainly up there in "bad investment strategies" - @Fawksnews (1 February 2021)
  53. ↑ His agreement with IMVU happened because he could keep being head of the site even though they owned it. A new owner might not want to make him that deal. If his position goes, so does any real relevance he has in the community. - @TechnicolorPie (4 February 2021)

External links


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