FA's developers, working hard!

[pmart]

I think it's safe to say that the much-needed Ferrox overhaul has been abandoned, seeing as there's been no progress in 14 months.

More evidence: they've actually made some changes to the existing site.  Let's name them...you can put submissions in reverse order, the new messaging system (with even more cookie and cache issues!), and SSL authentication.  Lately there's been talk of an upcoming UI redesign.  I might believe it when I see it.

My question is, what's consuming all of FA's time making "improvements"?  You see, new user registration was disabled sometime around February 27.  Here's a timeline of that.

On March 16, Dragoneer came forward:

It's called "the registration sucks, was exploitable, and unless you want scripted uploads of real women and children with their heads blown off by shotguns we need to fix this since channers really love posting hardcore gore to our site".

Someone started another thread about it, and Irreverent said on March 25:

Registration is down while we re-write a module to prevent it from being exploited by scriptkiddies and bots. Should be back online soon, testing is under way.

And it's still down.  Xaerun posted earlier this week, on May 11:

Okay.

We are aware account registration is disabled; we disabled it.
There is no ETA as to when it will return, and there may or may not be an announcement when it returns. Keep checking.

There will be no special cases, we will not make one for you, your brother/sister, your father/mother, your dog/cat/horse/mexican walking fish, or your next-door neighbour.

Please do not make any more threads about it, they will be locked on sight.

Really...no special cases?  I'm wondering, then, why I've seen groups that registered in April (especially because the admins despise groups) and at least one free request whore who joined as recently as April 22.  Who's letting these people in?  And if it's taking this long to fix one issue, well, no wonder the site is still on Version 1 after five years.

[AshleyAshes]

Really...no special cases?  I'm wondering, then, why I've seen groups that registered in April (especially because the admins despise groups) and at least one free request whore who joined as recently as April 22.  Who's letting these people in?  And if it's taking this long to fix one issue, well, no wonder the site is still on Version 1 after five years.

I've seen evidence in several 'The Registration Is Down' threads of people claiming it's up.  It appears that registration opens up briefly at times though these times go unannounced and you don't hear about it untill someone states it on a thread.  People think that registration is 'up for good' and then find the next day it's shut down agian.  They've not commented or even admitted to opening reg at times though, it's admittidly confusing.

[rodox_video]

Fun Fact: SomethingAwful worked exactly like this before the paywall went up.

[Freehaven]

Fun Fact: SomethingAwful worked exactly like this before the paywall went up.

There's pretty much no way 'Neer would put up a paywall for FA.

The site would see a mass exodus of users if that happened.

[AshleyAshes]

FA should be applauded in some ways.  It's the center of nearly all 'furry media' within the fandom but you have to wonder how long it will hold together with it's history poor maintenance.

Commisions broken?  Turn them it and promise repairs for a year.
Registration broken?  Turn it off and keep promising repairs.  FA introduced SSL encyrption on account log ins now; If that didn't fix the reg issue, why were they working on SSL instead of fixing the reg issue???

I wouldn't say the place is falling apart but it seems like it will eventually due to the limited interest in caring for it.

[Sechs]

I wouldn't say the place is falling apart but it seems like it will eventually due to the limited interest in caring for it.

Hey, look how long Geocities limped along. That can't have been having much more support given to it in about a decade than FA does, even if it was owned by a major corporation.

FA will probably never actually fall apart as long as Dragoneer is in charge of it. That's not so much some statement about his awsum powahz, but more just an observation. Even if FA doesn't actually improve from where it is now, it's still better than a lot of the alternatives, and what's more it's familiar and relatively easy. (Sage used to tell people to go back to the "practice internet". I just tell them to go back to FurAffinity, as it effectively is the practice internet.) Dragoneer's more... questionable... decisions and mod actions taken into account, he's still also about the best you could likely expect from a major furry site. He seems to put at least some effort into maintaining the place, even if it's stumbling or half-hearted effort.

Dragoneer is what will keep FA together while he's there because he's got some measure of pragmatism mixed in with idealism. Almost anyone that would follow him would be likely to be much murrypurrier, and thus much more idealistic. They'd want to reinvent the wheel and turn FA into "The furry website of the futuuuuuure!" It would be modded even more along "furry sensibilities" enough to make the current modding look like a free-for-all (say goodbye to your relative freedom to mock the blatantly stupid, which Dragoneer even joins in on sometimes), the coding would go from being stumbling and sometimes offline to severely broken as they tried to throw out features without any real thought to whether they were ready to (or could be) implemented, and the place was run from a standpoint of "What can we possibly give our furry brothers?!" instead of "What is it possible, plausible, and affordable to give the users?"

If someone who was a bigger furry than Dragoneer took over, the place would be run completely into the ground in six months. Only the murrypurriest of murrypurry furries would stay, willing to put up with a near-nonfunctional site for the sake of being protected from criticism and reality. If someone who was less of a furry than Dragoneer took over, they'd probably get sick of it and close shop in the same time period, scattering everyone, including the murrypurries, to infect all the other sites.

Really, for any flak he gets, probably the best solution for all is to have an FA with Dragoneer running the show. Even if it never significantly improves in its features from what it has now, that's still enough to keep it going for years yet.

[rodox_video]

There's pretty much no way 'Neer would put up a paywall for FA.

The site would see a mass exodus of users if that happened.

Yeah, but if you were around at the time you'll remember that SomethingAwful's paywall was touted as the only solution to a site that was constantly, constantly falling to pieces, making almost no money from ad revenue or donations, and becoming a serious burden on it's operators.

The site should have died and it's userbase should have moved on, but instead of moving on with his life Lowtax realized that people would actually pay to preserve the online community he created if they absolutely had to. Hence the introduction of the Internet's first pay-to-play forum. The revenue from new account registration (and re-registration) managed to give them just enough money to shovel at the problem of VBulletin's impossible levels of shittitude and allowed the site to continue functioning. There was no mass exodus in that case, because old accounts were grandfathered in for free and that limited the amount of people who jumped ship.

I'm not saying that FA is going to go pay, far from it. I'm saying that it's becoming seriously dysfunctional to the point where donations are not going to be enough to keep it going. And by that point, the instant someone comes up with something visibly better people are going to start jumping ship. This almost happened when FA imploded for months on end and everyone started getting on FAP.

[Sechs]

I'm not saying that FA is going to go pay, far from it. I'm saying that it's becoming seriously dysfunctional to the point where donations are not going to be enough to keep it going. And by that point, the instant someone comes up with something visibly better people are going to start jumping ship. This almost happened when FA imploded for months on end and everyone started getting on FAP.

Hm, but there'd have to be two things in that scenario for the exodus to actually occur. One, there would have to be someplace that is considered by practically everyone to be a measurable improvement over FA, and FA would have to be gone.

Familiarity with a site may breed contempt, but it also breeds loyalty. Sometimes exceptionally dysfunctional, nearly-indistinguishable-from-hate loyalty, but it does. Fuck, look at the number of people that seem to play MMOs just to bitch about them. Habit can't be underestimated. So even if it was severely broken but still at least marginally usable, a lot of the FA userbase would stay on the sinking ship even as the waters rise. So to really get an exodus, FA would have to actually completely go under, shut down, and close shop forever. No idea how likely that is to happen, even if the costs rose.

The second is that there'd have to be someplace better. FAP obviously isn't it, because if it had really been good enough to overcome familiarity, it would have become the new Main Furry Site during those months where we didn't have FA. The fact that FA is still the hub and FAP is just another alternative says that either familiarity was really, really strong, or FAP wasn't as good. So really, if FA shut down, people would scatter to the other sites for awhile, it's true... but only until something suitably FA-ish popped up, likely from someone trying to deliberately follow in its footsteps. Depending how long this took and how like the old one this new thing was, it could probably almost instantly get FA's entire userbase back.

Gah. That didn't come out well. In short, visibly better isn't really enough. Not only would it have to be remarkably better, FA would probably still have to crash for at least a couple of months again to cause a real changeover.

[ProvincialTwit]

You also need to figure in the propensity for drama among the core furry set.  Part of this does manifest as the 'loyalty' you mention, certainly, but perhaps more importantly is that Dragoneer himself seems to be liked by a large contingent of his userbase.  Sure, a large part of that is the same sort of cult-of-personality that all 'furry celebs' have (most notably our good buddy Doc Conway), but as noted, he's -just- murrypurry enough to keep the place running without being offensive to / offended by that core furry userbase. 

If, to quote a lame internet meme, A CHALLENGER APPEARS!, I believe what would take the highest precedence among that core furry userbase is not functionality, not usability, not features, not security, none of that practical sort of junk.  What would matter the most, is who.  Who built it?  Who's running it?  Who are the moderators/staffers? 

I mean, christ, given a long weekend and enough alcohol, Pi and I could probably shit out a web-two-point-oh compliant alternative to FA with twice the featureset for quite likely less than half the cost.  (After all, when you have people who know what the hell they are doing, you don't spend $16k on a ton of unneeded hardware.)  Would anyone use it if they knew we built it?  I'm thinking probably not.  Even if FA were to go down, any alternative that popped up in its place would face the same sort of scrutiny: Who is in charge, are they beloved within the fandom, and - most importantly - what do the popular people think of them.  Conversely, if Sam Conway and '2' put their names behind a project that combined VCL's image gallery with a shitty PHPBB forum and declared itself 'The New FA', you know damn well people would flock to it in droves.

Which is downright hilarious, I think.

[AshleyAshes]

ProvincialTwit, your idea holds merrit but I'm not entirely sure 'name' necessarily determines who gets the userbase.  FA itself is spawned by refugees from other sites were furries were pushed off of, and I think the only thing you'd need is something to drive users off of FA.  If one made an alternative to FA I think it's likely they could find success when FA had it's outtages.  Or even right now with FA's lack of registration.  Users who want a furry artsite account could be attracted to the site that will actually let them register.

[AshleyAshes]

http://home.runefox.net/randomsausage.jpg

I honestly can't tell if that's a joke or not.

[ProvincialTwit]

I never sausage a ridiculous thing!

Ahem.

[GreenReaper]

As noted on Flayrah, one reason to focus on SSL is that FA:U is coming up. FA does not want a repeat of what went down in 2007. It may also just have been in their pipeline. Coding takes a while sometimes, especially when it's security-related.

Sechs has a point. Yerf died hard, yet people hung on for a long time - and it's not like it was exactly bristling with features. Still, despite FA's presence, Furry Art Pile was doing fine (30,000 submissions) until it was taken down by its administrator. It'll probably find an audience despite artists' hesitance to trust it a second time.

For that matter, ArtSpots is just about to pass its 45,000th submission. Not bad considering the lack of porn. It's not exactly a FA competitor, but it shows it's possible to carve out your own little niche.

ProvincialTwit is right to note the importance of leadership. Some will care directly and some won't, but without a steady hand at the helm you'll be dogged by problems that mysteriously fail to occur to other sites. A popular name voicing their support can open doors, but you still have to walk through them without tripping over yourself.

Of course, most competent staff are preoccupied with existing projects. For example, I'd be far too busy to contemplate running a furry art site . . .

[Pi]

As noted on Flayrah, one reason to focus on SSL is that FA:U is coming up. FA does not want a repeat of what went down in 2007. It may also just have been in their pipeline. Coding takes a while sometimes, especially when it's security-related.

Implementing an SSL login page should take about 30 minutes, most of which is setting up the certificate and the rest of which is putting "redirect 'https://#{URL_INFO}' if not request.secure?" in a few places. That FA managed to both take forever to do this AND fuck something up in the process is amazing. Can anyone else log *out*? Because when I try, it just bounces me to the front page.

Also, they don't secure the "change my fucking password" page. Great job there, dudes.

[AshleyAshes]

I'm starting to wonder if there's a reason that FA is in no hurry to reactivate registration.  If reg is down it means FA has largely lost it's source of new users while there will always be users who will come to stop using the site.  If anything, the ammount of users on the site over the past couple of months likely fallen.

I'm not saying this is an elaborate plan to cut bandwidth costs by stopping the site from growing, but maybe they are enjoying that benifit and finding no reason to hurry up and fix the site?

[loki]

They still let you log in through the old http:// address without SSL; it doesn't redirect you but I guess that's intentional?

[ProvincialTwit]

"Intentional Oversight" sounds like a pretty accurate description of a lot of things w/r/t furries.

[Sechs]

Since this thread had quite a discussion of the possibility of an FA alternative, here's the latest attempt:

http://inkbunny.net/

This seems to be trying to supplant FA in two ways. First off, it seems focused (almost entirely) on being able to make and sell prints and so on of your work. So yes, you too can now think that all those people who claim they wish they could buy prints of your MSPaint dog dicks really will make you rich off them. Second, by being much, much more murrypurry than FA. From the "Acceptable Content" page:

No human characters are permitted, no matter how stylized or “cartoon-like” they are. Only non-human species are allowed. Characters that are essentially human (pixies, faeries, elves, orcs, trolls, etc) or just have ears/tails or other superficial animal features applied (but that otherwise look human), are also not allowed.

Indeed, no evil hyoomuns or even anything that might remind the poor persecuted fursons of teh evil hyoomuns shall be allowed. Because don't you just hate when you're going along fapping like mad to all the colored pencil drawings of fat genericfurs banging each other up the ass and then all of a sudden there's Oni with a drawing of an Asari or Cortana or something? Well don't worry, you can be protected from seeing all those horrible vaginas humans on Ink Bunny, and sell your crappy Second Life screenshots for big money too!

Also, apparently its creators/supporters are big into cub art and/or Softpaw Magazine, though at this point that's just secondhand info and I don't quite care enough to go digging around and substantiate it. I'll leave that to more dedicated/experienced muckrakers, provided they give a shit.

[LordNagetiere]

The overly murry intentions may just make it intolerable, but at least they launched with a 'search' feature

[loki]

It's interesting that they have a possible business model of selling digital/actual prints of artists' work. Regardless of who supports, it's pretty smart since they can take away that whole 'do it yourself' aspect of trying to make prints. Not to mention the site design isn't total shit and actual pretty nice.... 

Also, holy shit guys... the registration page has a captcha! I bet it will take FA about 3-4 years to get one of those!