FA Retrospectacle

[Kindrift]

Via a thread on Lulz.net, under the topic "Am I the only guy who can't stand [Dragoneer]?"

I was an administrator on Furaffinity for a year (Sept 07 to 08).

~I do not wish to cast personal insults around, make ad hom attacks. I do not "hate" Preyfar/Dragoneer~

From my first hand experience; Dragoneer/Preyfar does not have adequate management skills to run the site properly or make sure the site has the right staff who can run it properly. This is very important, because the buck stops with him. As you can see from the recent journal drama, he doesn't learn from his mistakes.

He often acts without thinking and can be easily swayed if enough people make a fuss. He can be two-faced, saying one thing in private or to some people and another in public or to other people. He will "re-write history" or selectively remember things in order to present himself in the most favourable light.

Up till the $16,000 in donations, which more or less forced his hand, he kept the finances to himself, occasional revealing some information to other staff but mostly everyone was in the dark. There were occasions when FA entirely depended on the generosity of a single donor. That is not sustainable, but Preyfar made no real effort to change the situation, until absolutely forced to by circumstances. Things like the adverts had been floated for years before he bothered to get them implemented.

He made arbitrary changes to the rules based on his own personal preferences, without telling any staff in advance and then left other people to clear up his mess while he played computer games. He would sometimes spend several hours handling minor infractions, yet would ignore the big picture and leave the site and staff drifting without guidance for weeks at a time.

When I was taken on board, my position was unclear, I did not receive any real guidance or mentoring (as was supposed to) or help. Preyfar/Dragoneer is extremely reluctant to take new member of staff on board in general. I think this might be because he fears losing control of things and because by surrounding himself with incompetents he looks better by comparison and they are no risk to him and less risk of losing control. But as I said, he is lacking in leadership skills, so it almost ended up with Wolfblade in de facto charge of the day to day running of the site and Preyfar was extremely reluctant to deal with Wolfblade himself, tried to palm it of onto others and let him do a lot of damage.

Because he prefers to avoid dealing with things unless absolutely forced too, the staff can behave badly and/or not actually bother doing any work as long as it's lowkey. Preyfar recognized that the staff were lazy and at one point asked me to oversee them for a week or so, while he was away at a convention. I would assign trouble tickets and forum posts for them to deal with, and they would do them. They all promised to deal with the tasks and then they didn't do them. Only a tiny proportion of them were done. Preyfar ended up doing most of them in one of his maniac phases.

He was content to let the project to replace Furaffinity's buggy software, have nothing done on it for ever 12 months, and then after the person nominally in charge departed under mysterious circumstances, to let a teenage boy whose only previous experience of programming was an interactive list of pokemon take over.

He seemed more interested in trying to get a Furaffinity Team Fortress 2 server set up, and to offer web-hosting using the FA server than fixing the broken software.

Many people have offered their help to Furaffinity, including professional programmers etc etc, however to most of them, Preyfar simply says: "I'll get back to you" and then he never does.

The key to understanding FA & Dragoneer/Preyfar is that FA is his big ticket to attention, popularity and his chance to lord it over the community. He wants to keep it that way and enjoys being able to do the same wherever he goes (that's why he wanted an official FA TF2 server, because he could admin it). If he ever had any greater vision or ultimate purpose for FA, he never revealed or shared it.

He mentioned in the admin forums, in a post from about Dec 2005 IIRC, that every time he feels down or depressed, he commissions some art, I say that not as a personal attack or gossipmongering, but simply because I think it explains a lot about how he functions as the site owner.

FA keeps going because as long as the hardware and software is kept patched up, and very major outbreaks contained by the staff, and the submissions keep rolling in, people are Okay with it. But Furaffinity will never fulfil it's potential or be run as good as It could be.

In the end, I don't think most people really care or look beyond the superficialities with him and the staff there as long as the submissions keep on coming in. However those who do or are more perceptive know him for what he is, as you can see from the other posts here.

I tried my best to fix the problems; to work with some other people more competent than I for such a task, but at the end of the day, the biggest problem is Preyfar/Dragoneer and he can't be budged; He owns the domain and the servers.

I remember an occasion (in 07 I think), prompted by some big-fuck up, when Preyfar, mightily depressed and despondent threatened to just give up on FA and just withdraw from it. If only he had.

If only he had.

-

re cub porn, I don't want to argue whether it's right or wrong or whatever, but for the record, both Preyfar and his second-in-command Damaratus (You probably won't have heard of him due to his constant fence-sitting and lack of leadership skills) do like cub porn, preyfar also likes babyfurs as well. Pinkuh has done colouring work (IIRC) for Soft Paw magazine.

In summary, Dragoneer/Preyfar runs FA for self-aggrandizement; he is incompetent. Nearly all the staff are incompetents likewise.

But you knew that.

[an hoopoe]

Well, I was making up a post to post here, but I will augment that quoted thing then. I will post some FA history/my experience of being an admin, then a post which is a run down on the staff &  then a conclusion. If you, the reader, know the history truer, correct me. History,  repeats, farce, tragedy etc. However, host of what you will see here is not even Farce,  it's just pathetic. The tragedy would be all the money the community and certain people  have donated, I think.

I can't always remember the exact dates, but this is all in chronological order.  Preyfar/Dragoneer/Sean Piche was/is extremely secretive and autocratic and it was often a  struggle for me while on staff to learn what was happening and things often only came to  light afterwards.

Furaffinity was founded by Jheryn Lightfoot (now goes by Alkora). It was set up around  January 2005. Jheryn operated FA with Arcturus. Neither of them was competent to run it and  it went down. When it came back up again in Dec. 2005, Preyfar/Dragoneer/Sean Piche (I will  call him Preyfar) had stepped in with money and would run it with Alkora, I think Arcturus  had gone off in a huff or been squeezed out. Jheryn owned the domain.

Furaffinity had a rocky ride from then on, with downtime, major drama and convulsions  aplenty. The software used to run the Furaffinity website was originally meant to run a  forum I believe, and it has been patched and hacked but it is like trying to build a grand  palace on foundations of sand. Likewise, the server itself was not reliable.

Because the Furaffinity software was bad, a replacement called "Ferrox" was mooted. Jheryn  worked on this, however as he was not competent as an admin, he was not competent as a  programmer either. A teenage boy who was about 18 at the time, called Crypto/CryptoDragon  who (almost certainly falsely) implied that he had experience as a professional IT project  team leader was brought on to try and do it right.

Furaffinity was in a stalemate with Jheryn and Preyfar as co-owners. Jheryn ran into some   financial difficulties and Preyfar offered to buy him out, however Preyfar pursued this  aggressively and Jherny feeling threatened re-directed the domain. Preyfar pilloried him  and largely got "public opinion" on his side. End result, Jheryn is bought out for about  $3000 and Preyfar is now King. Jheryn is retained to work on Ferrox I think, and as a sort  of ornament, being that he was the original founder.

Wolfblade had been ingratiating himself with Jheryn and Jheryn once proposed that Wolfblade  be taken on staff as his "assistant", this was rejected. Wolfblade also ingratiated himself  with another admin, DragonMyr and DragonMyr proposed a vote to bring Wolfblade on as an  admin. The Vote was 1 in favour, 13 against IIRC. It was certainly decisively against it.

An incident which occurred was CryptoDragon hijacking the administration. A trial admin  (prospective admin candidates were supposed to spend a period doing something to  prove their worthiness) called Wicht, who was lazy and incompetent whined to CryptoDragon  about how he was fed up and wanted to be a full admin or he would quit, someone who was  helping with the technical side of things, Blueroo, also felt that he should step up to be  a full administrator 7 deal with people using the site, drama and so on. There was no one  else about at the time on IRC, or chat, and Crypto completely freaked out and made a post  on the forums about how "the enemy was at the gates" and used his admin privileges to make  wicht and blueroo admins.

The other admins were not happy about this, however Preyfar was all mouth and no trousers  over it and ended up rubber-stamping what had happened.

Under circumstances which were never really made clear, Wolfblade was taken on staff as a  trial admin and then made a full admin, despite the originally vote against him. I think it  was Preyfar arbitrarily deciding to do it.

I had been fed up with the amount of submissions which were against the rules (compute  games screenshots etc) cropping up. I started reporting all these en masse. I was very  frustrated that the administrators were not dealing with them. I hoped I would be taken on  staff in order to be able to deal with them myself.

I didn't believe in putting myself forward or asking to be taken on staff, due to being  English, so I waited. I was asked to look over the terms of service/posting guidelines and  to edit the help-wiki for the site. I waited. Eventually I sent a note to Preyfar offering  to help hint hint. I was so annoyed at all the work I was doing (far more than the majority  of the admins) and being ignored, that when Wolfblade made overtures to me I was happy to  "work" with him, he had an agenda and wanted to impose that on Furaffinity, I was Okay with  helping him with that and thinking rather grandly about the whole thing, I suggested over  IM things like making sure to stack the staff with people who agreed with him and his  agenda. He said he would do everything he could to ensure that I got on staff as an  administrator.

Eventually I got a reply saying that I would be taken on staff as a trial admin. This was  around June 07. The thing which tipped the scales in the end was Yak (main technical  person) suggesting that I be taken on to oversee the help-wiki.

At the same time as me, LikeShine was taken on as a trial admin.

There was no guidance, no mentoring, no direction, no clear roles. The staff was in  disarray with most of the administrators doing nothing or just the absolute minimum.  Likeshine, probably due to all this never really found a place and eventually stopped  playing any part on staff and faded away.

I decided that I would start dealing with all the submission violations and I started  sending out notes asking people to remove submissions which were against the rules  (standard procedure at the time was to ask, then three days, then delete). I was going more  at that point, than all the rest of the admins put together. Naturally, I had my problems,  however I was not given any support, guidance or correction from the other staff to help  deal with them, except long after the fact and grudgingly.

Eventually after much wrangling and back and forth, I was made an actual administrator with  an admin account on the main site and forums.

During this time, BlueRoo came to believe that an Ex-Member of staff was inciting people to  disobey the administration and rebel. He used the admin tools to go through many peoples  private notes and posted them on the admin forum claiming that this was his proof. After  his claims falling on stony ground (Wolfblade believed him) he exploded and quit in a storm  of drama.

Preyfar was site owner, he appointed Damaratus as "Lead Admin". Preyfar never really  defined what "Lead Admin" was, or their powers or their role. Most accepted that they were  to do the day to day running of the site, have the final say on staff appointments,  discipline etc. However Damaratus was a fence-sitter and always preferred to put things off  as long as possible. he did enjoy the *position* (but not responsibilities) of being lead  admin and always clung onto it.

Wolfblade's agenda, which was that there was a more or less organized group of trolls and  anti-furries who wanted to take over the site and who had to be dealt with by merciless  bannings and him being in control, would, I believe have caused site-wide drama and damage,  since he was hell-bent on bannings and thumb-screwing up the rules. In the interests of  preventing this, I went to Preyfar and Damaratus and asked that he be removed. Damaratus  admitted that Wolfblade was having a corrosive effect on the staff and that his presence  was poisonous. Preyfar agreed likewise. They both agreed he needed to go. Preyfar palmed  the task of getting rid of him onto Damaratus. Damaratus sat on the fence for months.

During this time, I was doing more work than the rest of the administrators put together.  This caused me much stress, because no matter what I did, things kept on piling up, for I  was only one man and I was spending several hours most days of the week dealing with things  on FA. I asked Damaratus and Preyfar to get the rest of the admins actually doing some  work, or to cull them and recruit new ones. They alternated between agreeing with me &  promising to do something and then not following through or attacking me for rocking the  boat.

Because of Damaratus/Preyfar's inaction, Wolfblade waged a whispering campaign amongst the  staff to try and save himself and push me out. In the end, he himself quit after realizing  that his position was untenable, however despite Preyfar and Damaratus's acknowledgement  that Wolfblade had to go, they immediately tried to sweep the entire event under the  carpet.

Crypto/CryptoDragon had done literally no work on Ferrox for over a year. He eventually  departed under murky circumstances after trying to blackmail the staff, threatening that  "the people who keep this site running" will quit, using his romantic partner, KesKitsune, to rely these threats via a Journal.

I eventually quit after I realized that despite Preyfar and Damaratus's promises about  making the staff work, culling the lazy ones, they would never follow through and that  Preyfar will not change nor learn from his mistakes.

Re FAP, There was a *lot* of glee on the staff IRC channel after It went down. Preyfar said that the original source of his hate for Ekigyuu was that ekigyuu stole a sketchbook of his.

Something interesting is, Higgins Dragon (He of artspots) at one point offered to help with developing Ferrox and wanted to be taken on staff. Eevee was petrified I think, that he might lose control of Ferrox and the rest of the tech staff reacted negatively. I only found out about this afterwards.

[an hoopoe]

The people,

Technical staff:

Yak - He put vast amounts of time into Furaffinity and it would not be here today were it  not for him. He also had a more or less monopoly over keeping it working for a long time, I  wish he had used this to try and force the issue on things like useless lazy admins but he  preferred not to.

Crypto -

This is a quote from the Furaffinity staff IRC channel:

[18:01] davehyena: How come ferrox is 15 months late and literally no work was done at all  on it for several months earlier this year? I still can't get my head around that one
[18:02] thecrypto: ...
[18:02] thecrypto: Fuck you Dave
[18:02] *** thecrypto has left #FurAffinity-core.

He thought he was all that and was aiming at a lead-admin position. He was lazy and incompetent.

Eevee - Crypto was replaced by Eevee. Eevee was/is a teenage boy best known for his  infantile behavior on the forums which persistently attracted complaints. Dragoneer  promised that he would deal with him, but did not. His only previous experience of  programming, so I was told, was making an interactive pokedex. I have no idea how he came  to be appointed to head Ferrox. Something that I found genuinely disturbing was that eevee  was obsessed with making it easier for people aged under 18 to view adult content  on the site. when I pointed out that a measure he proposed would make that possible, he  said that this would be a good thing. He persistently pushed this kind of thing and would  sound off extensively about how injust it was that FA didn't allow people who said they  were under 18 to view mature/adult art. I was told after I quit that he has no secondary  education and lost a job at a pizza delivery place for backtalking. He once tried some ham-fisted blackmail, trying to bargain on IRC that if we were to have a certain feature on Ferrox, the staff would have to interfere less in drama.

NetCat - Again, unsure how he actually got on staff. He also hated the idea of Furaffinity not allowung people aged under 18 to view adult content.

Tsawolf - Again, unsure how he actually got on staff. He also hated the idea of Furaffinity not allowing people aged under 18 to view adult content. He was obsessed with Something Awful and thought FA should be run like Somethingawful. He was given an admin account to help with fixing things on the specific condition that he not carry out admin duties. He did start carrying out admin duties and did them incompetently. Preyfar had some lame excuses about how lack of staff blah blah, never mind that he could have taken more staff on board.

The admins:

Pinkuh - Longest serving admin. Bragged on the Furaffinity staff IRC channel about how she was a petty and vindictive bitch. Perma-banned TheGreatHamster basically because Pinkuh didn't like some of her submissions: No rules had been broken. She compounded this by not saving any evidence and doing the permaban improperly (there was supposed to be a vote) and not even bothering to tell TheGreatHamster that they had been banned! Another admin had to clear up Pinkuh's mess when she refused. She once mistakenly banned someone because someone else was using their art to spam the site with, and assumed the originall artist must be behind it without even bothering to check. She did the absolute minimum amount of work and often not even that, but absolutely refused to give up her admin position and clung onto it for dear life. She gave it up once, temporarily, after getting  some job, but kept admin position on forums/IRC then demanded to be made an admin again so she could vote against an ex-admin giving some help over Christmas, because she personally disliked them. Preyfar tore her a new one over that and indicated well his contempt for her, but in the end she was allowed to return because he was completely spineless. She was ugly where it counted: On the inside.

BijouxDeFoxxe - Never did anything, except mouth off occasionally about inane things. You could have replaced her with a little sign saying: "I agree with everything Pinkuh says" and no one would have ever noticed.

Kyoujin - Mostly appointed because he was a friend of Preyfar as far as I know. Did about 12 trouble tickets in 10 months I think. His excuse was that his girlfriend wouldn't let him use the computer. He whined when his favourite forum on the FA forums was up for the chop, due to it having no rules and generating vast amounts of spam posts, and demanded it be retained, but refused to step up to moderate it. (Dragoneer had created that forum, one night, without telling anyone first, it had "no rules" and so no one was sure how it fitted into the scheme of things and we twiddled our fingers while Dragoneer ignored it and it created problems, until eventually with some prompting from another member of staff I posted a poll about it and after much work, other had people cleared up Dragoneers mess).

Ankhana - A somewhat popufur artist. AFAIK, she was chosen with the idea in mind that by being an artist she would be a token of "look how caring about the art community we are etc", however she suffered from an illness and did virtually nothing and was still not familiar with the rules after a year. This didn't stop her from occasionaly sticking her oar in and trying to appoint herself chief admin in charge of dealing with drama (her technique was mostly to threaten to ban people a lot IIRC). I have sympathy for the illness, which was geniune, but she refused to give up that @.

FoxAmoore - He was in charge of Music submissions. He did his job I think, but rarely said much. I lost nearly all my respect for him when he pitched a fit over having his forums account being put into a different user-group, because he feared he was going to loose admin powers and threatened to GO TO PREYFAR over it. The idea was, there would be brought in separate admins for forums and main site, so they could focus solely on one thing, and being put into the different use-group was just a peperation for that and Fox was never interested in modding the forums anyway.

Glaide - Friend of Preyfar. Did absolutely nothing at all (even more so than everyone else) so astonishingly, preyfar let him go. However, Glaide had purchased Preyfar's old Laptop from him in an auction on Furbid and this had nothing to do with the fact that Glaide was, after giving his solemn word to do stuff, soon back in the saddle. He promptly broke his word and went back to doing nothing. Preyfar let him get away with it. Appeared to be only semi-literate.

Wolfblade - Pure poison. Manipulative two-faced liar. Paranoid. Believed that FA was under threat from anti-furries and organized bands of trolls who were trying to take over, drive people away etc. Imagined conspiracies. Planned to take De Facto control of FA. Nearly succeeded. Wrote absolutely enormous amounts of <words>. I put one post he made in the admin forums into a word count, and it was over 2200 words.

Damratus - A good Admin, but not a good LEAD admin. He had no leadership skills. Realized this as he confessed to me, but absolutely refused to give up his position. Tended to lash out to draw attention away from his own failures.

Preyfar - Vain. Control Freak. Autocratic. Would fuck things up and then hide and let other people clear up his mess. Extremely secretive about things like the finances and hardware. Arbitrarily changed rules based on his personal preferences. Rarely bothered to consult other staff, or even give them heads up on things like introducing the advertising system etc. He is ultimately the source of all problems with Furaffinity because the buck stops with him. Honestly, I don't mean this to insult him or being gossip, but I got the impression that he might have been Bipolar from his behaviour and activity patterns.

Myself - I wish I had had proper guidance at the start, I made my share of mistakes and more (since I was the single most active admin). I wish that I hadn't often tied myself up in knots trying to justify or work out the technicalities of Preyfar's inconsistent and confusing rules and just said screw it and went with common sense rulings. Sometimes focused too much on the smaller picture. I was too harsh with people mocking or making fun of me, I should have ignored it all or considered why they were doing it and questioned what I was doing/saying. I kept on giving things "one more chance"; one more chance for Preyfar/Damaratus to finally follow through and cull the lazy staff etc, but they never did. Eventually I cut my losses and walked. I was burnt out by the experience.

[an hoopoe]

Preyfar runs FA for self-aggrandizement; he does not have the skills to run it well. Most of the staff are incompetents and/or lazy likewise. Most of the community don't care about that as long as they get their daily porn and the site is usable (not run well or administrated well, just usable). 

I feel better for typing all this now, like I can finally close the chapter somewhat on this. I did put a huge amount of time and effort into the site, which is why it was/is such a heavy thing for me and I have typed so much here.

I expect that in time, when Preyfar steps down (as if) or FA goes the way of all flesh, the community/subculture will forget Preyfar soon enough. But there will never be any shortage of people desiring to lord it over others, to feed their ego, to push their agenda; no matter how pathetic it is in the end.

[LordNagetiere]

Glaide - Friend of Preyfar

The guy with the jester hat and pixie stick at cons?!

[Pi]

Wait, so you're davehyena?

[Kindrift]

Eevee -- All of this shit.  His Pokemon thing is here.

Pinkuh -- Like Sechs Fuckheaven, only she appears in photographs, and isn't intelligent enough to understand politics.  Ugly on the inside AND the outside.

Dave Hyena -- Reported everything that had a negative flavor to it.  Very little understanding of the rules, just shotgun reports with the idea that if he'd keep sucking up they'd make him full admin.  Massive cock, the sort of the person you'd expect to show up here.  8)

Wolfblade -- All that was said, AND he was rude me to at Further Confusion.  Hurf durf.

Princess Piche -- Runs FA like his own private Olive Garden.  Runs FA because he was kicked out of Olive Garden by the Pennsylvania furries.  Was kicked off Anthrocon staff due to personality conflicts, has ongoing fueds with Giza to this day.  Has dedicated his life since then to making negative attention into positive attention.

[Freehaven]

Even the ego-driven, thick-skulled, "fuck you unless you have a Daily Deviation" pieces of shit known as DeviantArt Admins look like holy saints compared to the massive pile of fail that is the FA administration "team".

When you can make DA's admins look good in comparison to you, you REALLY ought to take a step back and re-examine your shit.

(Before you start in on me: yes, I've probably got no room to talk, what with my horrible managing of Fchan and the way I run TGFB...but hey, at least I have enough of a spine to admit it when I fuck up, unlike 'Neer.)

[verix]

dang

[rodox_video]

Tsawolf - Again, unsure how he actually got on staff. He also hated the idea of Furaffinity not allowing people aged under 18 to view adult content. He was obsessed with Something Awful and thought FA should be run like Somethingawful.

    Oh, come on - if FA were to be run like SA it would be awesome.

[an hoopoe]

Glaide - Friend of Preyfar

The guy with the jester hat and pixie stick at cons?!

Yes. He also whined, after being de-admined, that not being an admin on FA was making him depressed. He would go months without bothering to post on (or even look at) the admin forums or turn up on IRC.

Wait, so you're davehyena?

Yes, but I am a (snow) pigeon now in furry-land due to their nobility, grace and beauty. I seem to remember that I deleted some of your submissions which were 'gainst the rules and deleted shouts you had made stretching your page. I think I threatened to ban you at one point. This was a complete waste of time and needless when I should been dealing with real issues and problems. The odd desktop screenshot/app screenshot & stretching your own page was *nothing* compared to the constant stream of second life screenshots. For what little it is worth, sorry.

Pinkuh -- Like Sechs Fuckheaven, only she appears in photographs, and isn't intelligent enough to understand politics.  Ugly on the inside AND the outside.

I also forgot to mention, that Pinkuh would threaten to resign and throw tantrums when things didn't go her way and also threatened to do something against the FA United convention, which set Preyfar all in a tizzy. Damaratus's opinion of her was that "she runs off her emotions". Preyfar & Damaratus acknowledged that she wasn't fit to be an admin and she was supposed to have been assigned to admining the #Furaffinity IRC channel only, because she could not be trusted with anything else. They never actually managed to do this and only recently she posted a journal insulting the people behind sexyfur IIRC and encouraging them to pirate their art. She is still an admin.

Dave Hyena -
...
the idea that if he'd keep sucking up they'd make him full admin.

Yes. That is true.

Some of what I reported was because the rules were vague about it and I hoped it would be clarified by simply reporting it and thus forcing the admins to decide. The rules which replaced the previous vague ones, in June 07, were dashed out by Preyfar in a night on the back of a napkin (replacing a better set of rules which had been written by the staff), and very definitely "his" rules. Strangely, for someone who commissions so much, Preyfar had a real thing against people who posted their commissions to the site. He hated people using BBcode to make their text rainbow and wanted to be able to have a button to stop certain accounts using BBcode because of this.

I remember with Kindrift that I banned him for three days under the Railfoxen name/account because he had been insulting towards some Nevadan furry (f-wording and petty insults I think(?) or were it both people at it, I can't remember fully. At the time, you were supposed to only warn people that they might be banned, by yourself and any bans needed a vote. However Wolfblade had told me via IM that it was OK to ban people for up to three days by yourself so I did, I was also very frustrated at how often most admins simply wouldn't bother to vote on bans due to laziness so you didn't get the majority needed to carry them out. I later realized that this "three day ban" had no basis in any rules or guidelines and Wolfblade simply thought it *ought* to be a rule. I made a post about this on the admin forums pointing this out and saying we needed to re-establish the correct guidelines and rules. They were clarified at that point, however amazingly, Damaratus thought admins should actually be able to hand out three day bans on their own and that should be made into a formal guideline. I (and Yak I think) argued against this and they were not allowed.

I don't think I ever apologized to anyone about the three day bans which were "illegal". But to you Kindrift, I will now say sorry, for what little that is worth. 

Massive cock, the sort of the person you'd expect to show up here.

Well thank you. Whatever else may be then, the size of my shall not be in question, and why, I wasn't aware that anyone did show up here, apart from the usual "crew". :)

Wolfblade -- All that was said, AND he was rude me to at Further Confusion.  Hurf durf.

I think it might have been that convention that he went around telling people that I had a "functional logic error". Judging from forum posts of his, he also believed there was more to 9/11 than the government told people and that there were hidden truths. He really really hated soundhound, KayeDarktail, Bridgeport Cat, Yak & others.

Princess Piche -- Runs FA like his own private Olive Garden.  Runs FA because he was kicked out of Olive Garden by the Pennsylvania furries.  Was kicked off Anthrocon staff due to personality conflicts, has ongoing fueds with Giza to this day.  Has dedicated his life since then to making negative attention into positive attention.

He implied in a CV (which I saw and was soon removed from the web) that he ran FA mostly by himself, certainly overstating his actual role. He also thought he knew a lot about IT and computing, in areas where he didn't and after the $16,000 donation went down, I think Yak certainly and other staff were afraid Preyfar might not actually buy what FA really needed and that he would have to be "managed" into getting what it needed. He was in the end I think. He did certainly at one point buy hardware more suited to a gaming computer (I think an Nvidia motherboard) than to a web server.

He remarked that he had spent so much money on commissions that he couldn't keep track of it all. He once talked on staff IRC about how he spent hundreds of dollars paying for a sushi(?) meal for various people at some furry convention. He dropped over $500 I think on commissioning Muzz/Sputnik for pictures of the FA staff to put on the staff page (never actually used AFAIK).

The Fender character which Preyfar made has an account on the site, originally it was supposed to be a shared account used by the admins, but soon enough Preyfar took it over and treated it as a personal account to use as he wanted to. This is small, but symptomatic.

He took a load of commissions to help out with money at one point, and delayed on them for a long long time. I distinctly remember Vitae posting months afterwards, in a sad tone, on one of his journals asking if he would ever do her commission. I think he at least refunded some/all people their money in the end.

Tsawolf - Again, unsure how he actually got on staff. He also hated the idea of Furaffinity not allowing people aged under 18 to view adult content. He was obsessed with Something Awful and thought FA should be run like Somethingawful.

Oh, come on - if FA were to be run like SA it would be awesome.

It probably wouldn't be worse than Preyfar & pals.

[an hoopoe]

Two admins I forgot to mention,

Wicht - Occasionally did the absolute minimum amount of work. Would complain all the time about how he was depressed and lonely and busy at work and thus unable to actually do anything. Went for months without even bothering to check the admin forums. Eventually was de-admined and then re-admined against after he promised that he was cured of his depression. One of the first things he said after returning was that he was in terrible pain that no one else understood his pain and how miserable he was and nothing could comfort him. Stated on the staff IRC channel that he was "too lazy" (his own words) to deal with submissions which were against the rules. I asked for Preyfar & Damaratus's opinion on this, i.e why is this person still around, they never bothered to reply to my note. He once engaged in roleplay on the admin IRC channel where he put a collar and leash on and injected with mind control injections another admin.

Silver Wolfe - Okay. Just stopped doing anything after a while and didn't communicate for months and months. Eventually de-admined. Later returned.

More on Damaratus - His reluctence to give wolfblade the boot was compounded by the fact that wolfblade owned Damaratus a $300 commission. I think Wolfblade used this as leverage, because he knew he could get away with a lot since Damaratus knew if he booted Wolfblade, bye-bye $300. I think Damaratus eventually got some prints out of it, but I don't think he ever recovered the full value.

~an incident involving F-chan and RavenRivers/Schroedinger who used to be in charge of it for a time under SageNadia, but then left/was forced out:

RavenRivers, after leaving F-chan sent an ingratiating private message on Furaffinity to Preyfar (Preyfar shared it with other staff) where he spoke about how he valued Preyfar's opinion a lot since Preyfar was such a competent and successful manager etc etc and asked for his opinion on what happened and he would sure like to help with FA cough cough. Dunno what Preyfar said in reply. This worked its magic and Preyfar was soon proposing to take Raven Rivers on staff (Also because he thought it would be a slap in the face to Sage Nada/Ayukawataur, who he hated). RR made ingratiating and obvious trouble ticket reports as sort of "look how interested I am in helping". When pushed on the fact that Raven Rivers had only showed interest after leaving F-chan and asked whether or not Raven Rivers was really interested in the community or helping the site, Preyfar backed down. Raven Rivers claimed on the FA forums that he wasn't interested in being on staff, but was called out on it by people who saw what he was about and then he vanished AFAIK.

~How Preyfar would "Get back to you":

Someone called NRR found some faults with the site software, ones which could lead to bringing it down (this was not hard to do so I am told). He went to Preyfar I think, and offered to fix them, wanted to be taken on Staff. Preyfar said "I'll get back to you" and ignored him. NRR became frustrated and brought down the site. Later, Crypto, having more or less free hand and no supervision demanded that NRR be brought on staff to develop Ferrox. Damaratus and PReyfar OK'ed this (in secret because he'd brought down the site) and Wolfblade and I pitched a fit over that and the secrecy. In the end, NRR departed from the Ferrox team because he couldn't get along with the rest of them allegedly, but since they were not doing anything I don't know how that worked.

~How Preyfar managed to get all the staff banned and the site hijacked:

Preyfar went to some furry convention and accessed his account over an unsecured wireless network. Someone got the password to it via that, and then promptly banned all the staff and put up a message about how Jheryn had a sandy vagina and was making a pearl(?). Eventually I think Crypto managed to get back control of the site. I don't think there was any proof per se, but it was believed it was Arcturus who did it. There was some kind of confrontation at the convention where I think Preyfar and Damaratus shouted at Arcturus or put their hand on his shoulder or something.

~How Preyfar failed to get the millionth submission and half-millionth:

Preyfar planned to give some money to the person who got the 500,000 submission on FA. Arcturus (who Preyfar hates) had a polling script running (this monitors how many submissions there are on FA) which automatically got him the 500,000th submission. Preyfar sulked on the admin forum about it and debated not giving him the money, but I think in the end did hand it over via an intermediary. Preyfar had a big plan for the millionth submission to Furaffinity, it would be a special flash animation and I think it would be posted using the Fender account. However Arcturus had a polling script running again, which got him the millionth submission.

~How the Furaffinity software is so crap:

The Furaffinity software doesn't have e-mail verification for new accounts (though you still have to give one, but it can just be made up). This mean that people could create hundreds of spam-bots which would over-load and bring down the site by posting thousands upon thousands of comments very very easily. They often did. For extra fun, they would making the spam-bots having insulting names, where they would take an existing account name and add something like "fucks-dogs" to the name of the spambot account. You could only ban accounts or IP adresses, not e-mails for example. The ease of creating new accounts led to much grief with some guy who might have been mentally ill or a script and who would make new accounts over and over for hours at a time which would then be used to upload photographs of cars, and due to lack of e-mail verification and banning by E-mail, he just used the same e-mail over and over. We had to ban them all by hand.

Because the Furaffinity software uses the account name as the identifying field (better designed places use a unique number) in the database to act as the thing which makes each account unique, accounts cannot be re-named or deleted, because that would screw up the database. Acknowledged this would be fixed but it was always just around the corner. The trouble ticket system would duplicate the trouble ticket if an admin replied to it more than once.

The Furaffinity private message system does not let you delete messages (you can move them to trash, but they cannot be deleted from there). This is because when you see a private message in your outbox, it's actually the message which is sitting in someone else's inbox, If you deleted it from there, it would be deleted from their inbox. The system would also occasionally put messages straight in to the trash folder instead of in the inbox.

~Rojadrik and the video:

Rojadrik trolled FA with Encyclopaedia dramatica related memes and other unfunny stuff. He was perma-banned for it. He then "discovered" that FA doesn't have e-mail verification and made a video of himself, in internet-tough guy mode, pointing this out and made threats that he would release this video onto the internet and in certain places and that such a horde of trolls would descend on FA as never before, so we better unban him. He was ignored. Nothing happened.

~Furbuy and FA

There was originally a plan that FA and Furbuy would merge, so as to offer an integrated auction feature into FA. However, Preyfar and Jurann both having large egos, clashed, and soon enough they were spreading rumours about each other and having petty slapfights in comments on FA. Preyfar has burnt a lot of bridges over FA.

[verix]

dang the thing with nrr sounds exactly like the thing with me, minus actually taking down the site

[an hoopoe]

Preyfar was extremely paranoid about things being leaked from the admin forums; the serfs finding out what was happening up in the castle etc, so at one point he intended having a legal professional draw up non-disclosure agreements re Furaffinity and he would require all members of staff to sign them.

He eventually forgot about the idea.

Preyfar would stop some people from viewing adult material due to being under 18, but he would deliberately let others do so. See attachment (it's from a journal where one "Min" pitched a fit after I stopped him from viewing adult material due to him being under 18 and clearly saying he was on his profile). I mentioned this to Wolfblade and he tried to talk to Preyfar about that, but Preyfar just blew him off.

[ProvincialTwit]

This thread is the best thread.

[Freehaven]

This thread is the best thread.

Agreed 100%.

[Pi]

Wait, so you're davehyena?

Yes, but I am a (snow) pigeon now in furry-land due to their nobility, grace and beauty. I seem to remember that I deleted some of your submissions which were 'gainst the rules and deleted shouts you had made stretching your page. I think I threatened to ban you at one point. This was a complete waste of time and needless when I should been dealing with real issues and problems. The odd desktop screenshot/app screenshot & stretching your own page was *nothing* compared to the constant stream of second life screenshots. For what little it is worth, sorry.

Again, you miss the point. At the time, the submissions weren't against the rules. With the next revision of the AUP, well... See, it wasstill is like none of the people in charge ever read them, then when I ask them to point on the rules where the bad man touched them, they clam up. Next revision, illegal.

Say what you will about Eevee, though, at least he tried (with net-cat coming in a close second):

Code: [Select]

    163 Eevee
    105 Net-cat
     17 IndiCoyote
      9 Koinu
      9 Douglas
      6 Crypto
      5 TimonThese statistics are based on the latest Ferrox git repository, Fri Mar 6 2009. Eevee has since resigned from the Ferrox project, and no work has been done since. (nb, this may be due to things like the end of the semester on net-cat's side)

Preyfar was extremely paranoid about things being leaked from the admin forums; the serfs finding out what was happening up in the castle etc, so at one point he intended having a legal professional draw up non-disclosure agreements re Furaffinity and he would require all members of staff to sign them.

Oh, so I shouldn't have that part where wolfblade was worried that if he banned me I'd "damage this site beyond what yak is capable of preventing or repairing"?

Also, in a way, I miss wolfblade. It was such great fun to elicit 2kb of text in response to my one word reply ("no").

Regarding the code, I really don't know why they're still maintaining the old'n'busted PHP codebase, let alone adding *features* to it. Shouldn't Yak be working on Ferrox? iirc Eevee even had a working import tool into what was then the latest Ferrox.

the staff would have to interfere less in drama.

Really, the staff shouldn't have anything to do with drama. If users are bitching one another out, that's their own damn problem.

[Kindrift]

I'd forgotten about that, but it does bring up a point.  Some years back I was forced to take a short vacation from FA, yes.  My local super emo furry drama queen was acting up at the meets and pushing rumors when he thought he could get away with it.  Since the only contact method I had to reach him was FA, I used that to get in contact with him.  Told him he was a negative feature of the community and suggested that he off himself.  (He's fucked off to Vegas now.)  We're damn fortunate those guys never offered email services.

More recently Damaratus contacted Shiuk to demand that Shiuk get myself and the rest of the local community under control.  The locals had habits of WRITING IN ALL CAPS in the comments and questioning Princess Piche's monetary policies.  That was nothing against the rules, but it was important enough that staff decided to name a local artist our community leader, and then go through the backpath to shut us up.

We're waiting for the day FA bans Reno entirely.

[LordNagetiere]

Damaratus seems to have a more 'crowd control' mentality based on whipping people who are esoteric at best on the impact to the community. I mentioned the CYD sock puppet account once to him (just the fact it exists, no naming, etc) and you would have sworn from the reaction I got I must have said something about selling his mom cocain.

He's incapable or unwilling to address REAL staff issues, so he has to play peon justice with a nearly random profiling.

[nobuyuki]

fun fact:  Pretty much all the FA admins have problems;  I've had to deal with many of them personally, including mr. pigeon 


disclaimer:  most of you already know my personal beefs, but as far as sucky admins go let me just say that most of them will privately admit their flaws and if you bother them enough will attempt to correct the situation instead of cracking your skull open and tossing you off a bridge.  Except the really really petty ones, who I'm assuming aren't even admins anymore.

Like Myr and Wicht   

first bastard got me so banned from FA that I didn't even know I was banned,  the second one took the liberty of going through my entire gallery and finding technical reasons to delete as many submissions as possible.  Professional