I SAW A DOG TODAY: Furryne.ws

[AshMCairo]

Too hot for Furry Digg, apparently, as Cairo keeps removing this story's entry from the public news listing.  The cited and documented tragedy of a teen mommy showing her precious off on an adult site is not a lesson the furries would have us learn.  Their tacit approval of throwing infants to pedophiles is as amusing as it is exaggerated.

Nope. I actually republished it yesterday morning after sleeping on it. It got buried again sometime during the day. I have a good idea which admin may have did it though, but no worries. My fault for not giving people a heads-up on the reversing of the decision.

[Kindrift]

Ah, sorry.  I saw it vanish twice and didn't know any others had permissions to remove it.  The staff of Furry Digg attempting to direct furry morals, same as we are, is there anything you could say about that?  Or are they afraid that actual community news will send the wrong message to readers?

[AshMCairo]

Ah, sorry.  I saw it vanish twice and didn't know any others had permissions to remove it.  The staff of Furry Digg attempting to direct furry morals, same as we are, is there anything you could say about that?  Or are they afraid that actual community news will send the wrong message to readers?

For a small site I actually have a decent amount of admins. There's Doodles, Cuprohastes, Solei, Leam, Grayscale, and myself.

The staff generally do not enforce their morals on the site because we can talk it over and come to some kind of solution. That being said compromises have been made in the past. At one point we had a regular stream of posts coming from here, CYD, Something Awful, etc. and it just don't look that good. Changes needed to be made to get more good stuff published so at that time the votes to publish where brought down to 3, I bumped a bunch of articles to the front page that met the lower vote count, and things eventually balanced themselves out for the better.

Now this time around, it was later in the day and I only had two admins readily available to consult. One was for publishing it and one was against it. I wasn't about to make the deciding vote so I took a quick poll of who I can gather online about it: Flain from Clawcast, GR from WikiFur, Pelga from DutchFurs... and it result was not to publish the article. Last person I asked was my wife, and she gave me her insights on the article and gave her support for whatever decision I'd make. So, I discarded the article.

Come the next day though I still felt uneasy about the decision. I saw a couple more people voted on the article, Google Analytics showed a fair amount of traffic viewing it, and things appeared civil, so I decided to publish it, and business went on as usual until that evening when I noticed the article disappeared. This morning I republished it with my reason why and apologized for reversing it without telling anyone.

Now it looks like we're coming to another time to improvement upon the site. I've done some digging as to what I can do with pligg currently and I think I can modify the formulas for reporting/burying and make it count for something. With the default formula you need 3 times the amount of buries/reports to votes to discard an article automatically. I think a 1 to 1 ratio would work better now since the site it still small.... not sure though. Again, I'll take this to the other admins first and test it out and come to something better than simply discarding or publishing an article.

[Pi]

For a small site I actually have a decent amount of admins. There's Doodles, Cuprohastes, Solei, Leam, Grayscale, and myself.

This usually indicates that a site is overadministrated.

[AshMCairo]

This usually indicates that a site is overadministrated.

Considering I'm not planning on any more admins in the near future, I think we're fine. Cupro is the artist and as a consultant (nice to get a foreign view.) Doodles serves as a consultant as well (cranky old fart point-of-view.) Grayscale helps a lot with coding and hasn't done much with creating policy or whatnot. Solei runs the server and does serve as a consultant too. Leam... well, I haven't heard much from Leam lately :T I might actually set it account as inactive one of these days.

We mostly agree on a lot of subjects. We've only had serious beefs with content twice so far. First time everything was fine. This time around though... well, we lost and admin, but we're tweaking the system.

[Kindrift]

So what were the arguments against the article?  Was it just too negative, was it that mystery feeling that Viv is too mean or (in Spirou's words) hedgy?  I should like to share the really very obvious and rational message that one has to consider what personal material they share with the Internet.  There are consequences for doing it, and the response to consquences is not usually to call the police when no crime has been committed.  If this was the case and the entire story wasn't a complete fabrication.

If that group of staff deliberates and decides to enforce a particular view or moral on the community, then they do just that.  Having a group doesn't render your site innocent.  Particularly with such a large and biased panel of judges.  Everyone who draws you a two minute sketch of a weasel in a hard hat doesn't deserve an administration position (you took my red scribble, can I be a mod now?  You don't have a sarcastic philosopher consultant yet.)

[AshMCairo]

So what were the arguments against the article?  Was it just too negative, was it that mystery feeling that Viv is too mean or (in Spirou's words) hedgy?  I should like to share the really very obvious and rational message that one has to consider what personal material they share with the Internet.  There are consequences for doing it, and the response to consquences is not usually to call the police when no crime has been committed.  If this was the case and the entire story wasn't a complete fabrication.

If that group of staff deliberates and decides to enforce a particular view or moral on the community, then they do just that.  Having a group doesn't render your site innocent.  Particularly with such a large and biased panel of judges.  Everyone who draws you a two minute sketch of a weasel in a hard hat doesn't deserve an administration position (you took my red scribble, can I be a mod now?  You don't have a sarcastic philosopher consultant yet.)

It's a ferret, not a weasel 

As for the arguments against the article... I do have chat logs I could share on my home computer, but you're not getting those. The gist of them is that this was considered bad news, they don't consider Vivisector a good source, and we shouldn't mess with babyfurs cause they're a vicious bunch.

Adminship isn't dole out that easily. I have been tempted to hand out rights to family and close friends, but nah... As for the current staff: Solei is the server admin, so s/he can do whatever the the hell s/he wants. Leam is/was my second in command, but as become increasingly hard to get a hold of as of late. Cupro is the resident artist for furryne.ws and other projects I'm poking at and works on a bartering system which is very nice and, again, his view does help as he's as much of a skeptic as I at times. Doodles is the resident old fart, and I need someone with experience with the fandom on the team to fill in the historical blanks for me and not jump on the "We're being fursecuted" bandwagon and rush to people's aid. Grayscale I picked up at random. We was an early and frequent user of the site so I asked him if he wanted to come on board as staff. He did, and to my surprise I got a damn good coder out of the deal and he's helped me out a great, great deal. Now if you wanted to be on staff, I need you to be a regular contributor to the site first. When I notice it, I'll make the offer and we'll see what you can do for us.

And I know we're not innocent, nor perfect, nor better than everyone, or whatever. I don't think we're that biased either (atleast I hope not.) We're just trying to run a good site.

[Kindrift]

Bad sources always fully document their claims with links to the original source material now.  It's the furry rule, proof means you have an agenda, the direct quotes of the people involved demand "a grain of salt."  Your people seriously thought mentioning a one-off babyfur who might not exist would be a serious issue?  Take this spear and heal thyself.  Seriously, Cairo.  You can tell the difference between factual explanations of the events and my own person opinions, they don't appear in the same paragraphs.

Doodles is the resident old fart, and I need someone with experience with the fandom

If you need someone with experience in the subculture you could do a lot better than an SAfur who claims on SA that furry is a fetish party... then screams and rants and insults people on FA who claim the same thing.  Someone with a little balance.  Consider replacing him with someone who knows of Guesz and Patten, yet is capable of admitting that Merlino exists.  I won't be trying out for the part, though.  I tend to only consider news being of furry-interest when it concerns conventions, furry resources, and furry projects/comics/games.  The usual I SAW A DOG TODAY flood of: "funny animal news," sheep with human livers, and non-furry comedy featuring non-furries in non-furry animal suits is not what I'd consider relevant to the culture, nor does it improve anything.  I can sympathize that negative news pervades the community yet I can't honestly say that the unrelated crapflood is a good solution.

[AshMCairo]

Hubbawha? Dude, you're taking this way too seriously. Hell, I think we all are. I'm suppose to be having fun with my site, not trying to out-bitch you here.

Now, I take all sources of media with a grain of salt... you know... don't believe everything that you read and all that. That includes Vivisector, CYD, my site, WikiFur, LiveJournal... everything down to Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, and the BBC. Everyone has an agenda and while you may stand behind your facts, you also have your spin on them, your friends who rally behind whatever you say, and your reputation that follows you... and for fuck's sake, your sources are a LiveJournal forum and Fur Affinity? Fuck you 

As for the position of resident old fart, if they want to come my way and help out, the more the merrier. I know Doodles ain't that well like by some people, but he is a good source of info once you get past all the crap.

As for posting anything and everything... well, I don't see a problem with that. I do see your problem with it, and you're entitled to it. Thanks for sharing

[Kindrift]

Re: Nothingkat

I've been talking to Flain about this offsite and I think this warrants some investigating because while this is ranty, well.. what is the "agenda" behind this award? If it's simply cut-and-dry fun then Nothingkat doesn't have anything to stand on. If there's some seriousness to this, then let's balance this out.

Would you mind not attempting to drive the furry subculture?  You aren't the furry Dan Rather, maybe you can be a Bill O'Reilly, seeing agendas and cautiously judging whether a story needs to be "balanced" or if it might make someone sad :/  Unfortunately instead of half-naked women, you defer back to one Sonic video game advert after another and 3-vote wonders like WE FOUND A DINOSAUR TODAY.

Specifically, Ursa Major is a joke pretending to be the Hugo Awards.  It throws worthless titles at game devs and movie studios who could frankly care less and rewards the only furry industry -- the animal cartoon porn industry.  That's it.  That's all.  I would so very much love to hear what "agenda" you could invent to explain someone not supporting them.

OK, I talked the Rhari and out of respect I can't go into the detail what was said, it was a good, honest conversation. So... instead of hiding in a forum among yourselves, do what I've done and TALK DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE INVOLVED.

That is a god damn lot of good you did there, huh, Bucky.  Guess what, we did talk directly to the people involved, this was mentioned in the LJ thread linked in the original post that apparently no one read because links to source material are biased.  Great that you've found exactly no new information.  Thanks so much for... you know, you aren't even doing no good, you're actually actively dragging everyone else backwards.  You did such a smashing job of heading Burned Furs Redux / Improved Anthropomorphics it's no wonder you're steering Furry Digg.

[AshMCairo]

Would you mind not attempting to drive the furry subculture?  You aren't the furry Dan Rather, maybe you can be a Bill O'Reilly, seeing agendas and cautiously judging whether a story needs to be "balanced" or if it might make someone sad :/  Unfortunately instead of half-naked women, you defer back to one Sonic video game advert after another and 3-vote wonders like WE FOUND A DINOSAUR TODAY.

Request denied  It's incredibly fun and easy to talk to people and to find out what is going on.

Specifically, Ursa Major is a joke pretending to be the Hugo Awards.  It throws worthless titles at game devs and movie studios who could frankly care less and rewards the only furry industry -- the animal cartoon porn industry.  That's it.  That's all.  I would so very much love to hear what "agenda" you could invent to explain someone not supporting them.

I'm not going to invent any agenda for them. I do agree that giving pornography an award is a very questionable, and per my quick chat with Flain, the main topic to hit is the Ursa Major Awards a fun little thing for just the fandom exclusively, or is it trying to reach out and mean more? If it's fun, great, if you don't have fun doing something then why bother doing it at all? If it's trying to do more, then, the scenario I posed is that if a sci-fi author gets a Hugo Award, that's something a publisher can slap on a dust cover of a book and something an author can use to get more money. If a furry author gets an Ursa Major Award... that's one of the blanks I wouldn't mind filling.

That is a god damn lot of good you did there, huh, Bucky.  Guess what, we did talk directly to the people involved, this was mentioned in the LJ thread linked in the original post that apparently no one read because links to source material are biased.  Great that you've found exactly no new information.  Thanks so much for... you know, you aren't even doing no good, you're actually actively dragging everyone else backwards.  You did such a smashing job of heading Burned Furs Redux / Improved Anthropomorphics it's no wonder you're steering Furry Digg.

It did me plenty of good. Rhari was very nice to talk to. Yes, your sources are biased. Yes, I did find additional information. You're welcome... sorry I can't find the stray thought to close that statement, so I'll play nice, smile, and nod while you continue perform a valuable service to furries everywhere by exposing all that is wrong and immoral until one of your forum members with an ego that matches yours breaks off and makes another forum to put their spin on all things wrong and immoral.

You have a Yahoo IM account? I'm going to be out and about today and most likely won't visit back here or furryne.ws until Monday, but I do want to keep this going and have a couple things I wouldn't mind asking you personally.

[LordNagetiere]

Although I admit in a lot of ways Kindi's obsession with getting you guys to say something accurate is about as pointless as our (my) long discussions (arguements) with GR about the shitbog that is his circlejerkapedia, I couldn't help but spot this...

and we shouldn't mess with babyfurs cause they're a vicious bunch.

Are you basically admitting here to being afraid of bullying by guys who go out in public with pacifiers and diapers?

[Kindrift]

My sources are biased?  Yes, my sources are Rhari.  I'm sorry.

Anyway, do we have a coherent explanation to why Vivisector is banned from your site?  We even set up a nice little link on our front page to you guys.  :'(

[Pi]

Warning: fopen(spamlog.log) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/furrynews/public_html/libs/link.php on line 957

Warning: fwrite(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/furrynews/public_html/libs/link.php on line 958

Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/furrynews/public_html/libs/link.php on line 959

good error checking, guys. You fail to log us as spam??? And then an error that should be fatal results in the script continuing to execute. Thanks, PHP. Truly, it's the language of discriminating professionals.

[Pi]

From some administrati over at Fn.ws, gsw:
fixed. my best guess is this was an accident. in the pligg administration pages there's a control "Ban this URL" that really means "Ban this domain". a couple weeks ago there were multiple duplicate submissions to a vivisector article. I'm guessing someone did "Ban this URL" thinking that only that URL would be blocked. I'm fixing that too.

[AshMCairo]

Hi guys. Back from the weekend. Now for a few replies:

My sources are biased?  Yes, my sources are Rhari.  I'm sorry.

Anyway, do we have a coherent explanation to why Vivisector is banned from your site?  We even set up a nice little link on our front page to you guys. 

Problem is not you being biased (and you're not and we think we cleared that up a few days ago.) The problem is this reputation you've built up.

As for the link, I did noticed that a few days ago and thank you for the link. I'm worried adding to the Link Supporter list though, but mainly because it's running a bit long. I want to see about shrinking down the size of the sibeboxes overall.

O and as for the spam checking stuff. If gsw/Grayscale (the lead coder) is right (and he usually is) it probably is from the Ban the URL/domain feature. We can probably sift through the logs and see who did it or what caused it if we have the time/patience for it. In the future though if experience any issues with the site we do have a Google Code thing up at http://code.google.com/p/furrynews/ so you can submit problems, feature requests, and look at the source code too if you want to see what's going on and lend a hand in development. You can also hit me up on IM or email in a pinch and I'll see what I can do. Keep in mind though that I tend to stay away from the internet when I'm away from work. I spend 8 or so hours in front of a computer each weekday and tend to get rather sick of it.

Now, who was trying to submit what thread to furryne.ws? I'd like to test it out.

Are you basically admitting here to being afraid of bullying by guys who go out in public with pacifiers and diapers?

Actually, when I saw that come across my screen I rolled my eyes. Unfortunately people can't see that over the internet.

[MetropolitanDonut]

Problem is not you being biased (and you're not and we think we cleared that up a few days ago.) The problem is this reputation you've built up.

So now you're just playing furry politics.

[Pi]

look at the source code too if you want to see what's going on and lend a hand in development

More like bust out some of that sweet 0-day against what's likely to be some very bad PHP. Not like I've looked at the code or anything, I just have this gut instinct. Furries are notorious for writing appalling PHP.

[AshMCairo]

So now you're just playing furry politics.

How so? I'm pretty sure Kindrift is aware of what he's done and how people perceive his actions. Now if more people took the opportunity to speak to him directly they might think differently (and it was nice talking to him so I'm not the one you should be directly concerned about,) but it's damn hard to change an average person's opinion. Hell, I've built a bad rep locally for the  things I've done and still have people who hate me despite not being as active in the past few years.

More like bust out some of that sweet 0-day against what's likely to be some very bad PHP. Not like I've looked at the code or anything, I just have this gut instinct. Furries are notorious for writing appalling PHP.

Furries didn't write the base code. It's pligg (www.pligg.com). If we get hit with a 0-day exploit most likely it would have hit every other site based off that code, and the pligg devs and community are quick with security fixes. Their PHP isn't perfect, but pligg is also still in beta, so there going to be room for improvement, and anything we can improve on gets tossed into our code repo and kicked over to the pligg folks too.

In the worst case that someone brings down the site completely, 1, we have regular backups both from the hosting provider and on our own end, 2, if we have to start from scratch again I won't loose any sleep over it. Heck, it'd might be a good opportunity to update the code or switch to a different code base like reddit, PHPDug, or that MediaWiki digg-like hack I saw awhile ago.

[Pi]

Furries didn't write the base code.

They modified it. QED. Your remaining argument is irrelevant.