FA and Furocity to 'merge'

[a pigeon]

Fur Affinity/Furocity Merger Announcement

Fur Affinity and Furocity are joining forces! Our two communities are coming together and pooling our resources to provide the largest, most in-depth online Furry community on the internet!

Along with additional coding expertise, Furocity is bringing improved administrative structure and coordination to Fur Affinity's vast wealth of users.

Dragoneer (FA) and Daemonshyai (Furocity) will share responsibilities of the sites as equals (co-owners). We'll be working together to expand the community and offer a long-term, structured plan to improve the sites, re-aligning our responsibilities and improving end-user support.

It's been a long time coming, but together we feel together we will be able to reinvigorate the Furry communities and bring much needed improvement all around, allowing us to grow and share in ways that were previously unimagined.

We're sorry that we had to be so secretive of things up until now; we've been in talks for over a year, but we had to make sure that all sides were ready, willing, and able before we announced anything to the public. We know that many of you have been asking for (and demanding) change -- it was quite difficult to keep this under our respective hats!

More details are coming soon regarding our announcement. Stay tuned!

http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/103573-Fur-Affinity-Furocity-Merger-Announcement?p=2618095#post2618095

vast wealth of users

re-aligning our responsibilities

allowing us to grow and share in ways that were previously unimagined

A new low there.

So what's actually changing that we'll notice? Are any sites merging? User bases coming together? Is one switching hosting? Just a sharing of talent but the sites remain separated? There's a lot of words but I don't understand what is actually happening.

We're still hammering out some of the finer details, but we will be sharing and posting them once we're 100% on how things are going to go.

In the mean time you'll be seeing new admins and staff coming on board, revised, improved rules and policies and more.

So they've been talking for over a year about the 'merger', but still haven't got down to the details.

Is this having an impact on the summer update? because we still haven't really heard much about that beyond the announcement and the screenshots

We'll have some further news on that soonish. I don't have an ETA on that. We're getting some feedback/suggestions on the design to improve it.

Dragoneer, are there going to be any rules dragged over from Furocity to here?

Some may, but for the most part the rules will stay the same. If you created it... you can post it. Human art will continue to be posted. Some things may be tightened down, some may be loosened, but some of those changes we had planned on our own reviewing how the community works over time.

Several of their mods/admins may be coming over. I believe we have confirmation on two so far.

Both sites will remain indepdent. Staffers will share resources

Both sites are going to stay open and separate. We won't be merging accounts.

So is not a merger then.

It's a resource merger then, not so much a site merger. Basically utilizing staff and their resources than just simply merging different websites.

And the owner of Furocity makes a post:

I suppose I really should throw my hat in the ring here, just to clear up as much as I possibly can.

First, the sites themselves are staying completely separate. What we are doing is combining our respective resources. FA will still be FA. Furocity will still be Furocity.

FA is gaining a group of excellent administrators, which will bring fair, impartial, and timely moderation. FA is also gaining a new programming staff, intent on finding and fixing problems, as well as working on a true update (read: recode) for FA, including many of the features that everyone has been clamoring for (journal favoriting, commission tracking, and more).

No one on FA or Furocity will have to change their usernames. The only real change that users will most likely see (at least until the real coding begins) is an increased turnaround time when they have problems.

Hopefully this will assuage a few of your fears.

[Dima]

according to one of the comments, furocity has been around before furaffinity

I was mistaken and thought it had just popped up during Furaffinity's large downtime back in give-furaffinity-tons-of-money times as a sort of opportunist action and this merging is really more of them just sort of giving in to how laughably so many of the people who were using Furocity when FA was down sort of just dropped it like a dirty rag when FA was back up.

I mean Furocity still did that, but I thought it was solely created for that purpose.

[a pigeon]

I mean Furocity still did that, but I thought it was solely created for that purpose.

Yes, I didn't realize that it either and was a bit surprised although it doesn't seem to have actually been made into an art site till 2008, before that it was just for role-playing profiles. Apparently, the site has been fairly moribund and most of the art being posted on it has been reposts from FA.

This is the profile of Furocity's owner, Gavin Daemonshyai:

Whether 'tis the strains of time, or the act of man, no one lives forever... or so it was proclaimed.

A sadistic laugh drowns screams of pure agony, what once was frost now steaming merely from his emergence. A cynical smile dances upon those ashen tiers, luminous orbs of cobalt coruscating in some sardonic amusement.

Demonic elegance shrouded in those shimmering scales of manifested shadow, every movement calculated and executed in time with perpetual thought; a merging of both shadows and man. He flows with an almost serpentine grace; each footstep accented with a crackling almost inaudible to even the most trained of senses. His smile, so sporadically granted, the only light to this stoic countenance.

http://gavin.furocity.com/

Dragoneer on Gavin:

Daemonshyai's a solid guy, and I'd vouch for him in a heartbeat. He's worked with us on FA United pretty much since the convention began, and we've been working together for years no. That's back in 2007. The merger will benefit the community, giving more resources and tools and more.

I note that Furocity.com is registered to psumonix LLC, and http://www.psumonix.com is the website for psumonix LLC which markets itself as web design/consultancy/software design. Their portfolio is mostly furry sites including furocity, one of the furocity admin's personal website, a furry convention website:

http://www.psumonix.com/webdesign.html

[Pi]

This is somewhat of a surprise, but at least it's someone new. I seem to recall that Gavin isn't a complete chucklefuck when it comes to maintaining a site, though.

Calling it a "merger" is probably a poor word choice, after skimming the announcement. More like a "power share".

[MazelTovCocktail]

This is the profile of Furocity's owner, Gavin Daemonshyai:

Whether 'tis the strains of time, or the act of man, no one lives forever... or so it was proclaimed.

A sadistic laugh drowns screams of pure agony, what once was frost now steaming merely from his emergence. A cynical smile dances upon those ashen tiers, luminous orbs of cobalt coruscating in some sardonic amusement.

Demonic elegance shrouded in those shimmering scales of manifested shadow, every movement calculated and executed in time with perpetual thought; a merging of both shadows and man. He flows with an almost serpentine grace; each footstep accented with a crackling almost inaudible to even the most trained of senses. His smile, so sporadically granted, the only light to this stoic countenance.

Never thought I'd see a description of someone's character that verbose without the words "hir" and "shi" being used as pronouns.

That said, hopefully the guy has more of an idea what he's doing than Dragoneer, Yak, et al.  I'll forgive him the thesaurus-rape if he can buck the trend of incompetence at FA's higher levels.  If he can't, his skills would probably be better used trolling herms on FurryMUCK.

[Freehaven]

I suppose I really should throw my hat in the ring here, just to clear up as much as I possibly can.

First, the sites themselves are staying completely separate. What we are doing is combining our respective resources. FA will still be FA. Furocity will still be Furocity.

FA is gaining a group of excellent administrators, which will bring fair, impartial, and timely moderation. FA is also gaining a new programming staff, intent on finding and fixing problems, as well as working on a true update (read: recode) for FA, including many of the features that everyone has been clamoring for (journal favoriting, commission tracking, and more).

No one on FA or Furocity will have to change their usernames. The only real change that users will most likely see (at least until the real coding begins) is an increased turnaround time when they have problems.

Hopefully this will assuage a few of your fears.

Note that there is no mention of what Furocity is "gaining" out of all of this, other than the publicity boost of working with FA.

[GreenReaper]

Dragoneer (FA) and Daemonshyai (Furocity) will share responsibilities of the sites as equals (co-owners)

One would hope that Gavin negotiated some ownership interest in Fender Art LLC to go along with that responsibility.

[Eevee]

"Oracle and Sun to 'merge'"

"My Cat and A Moth He Found to 'merge'"

[Jim Demintia]

This is pretty easy to see through- Dragoneer probably will host Furocity, and in return Gavin and his staff are going to run both sites for him, and write the next version of FA. What. A. Deal.

Piche will probably change nothing- his trust issues, his lack of action on critical matters, pretty much anything that would make such an undertaking successful. And Furocity's admins now have to deal with FA's userbase. I know nothing about the guy, with regards to his coding skills. But that's not what matters in this situation- knowing how to program is not enough when it comes to fixing FA, as several of our regulars know first hand.

Honestly, I'll bet the terms of the deal were as vague privately as they are publicly, knowing Piche. So assuming Furocity was about to go under, it will now die a much slower, painful, and drama-filled death than it would have otherwise.

[Conan]

Furocity's Twitter is just one long string of "Server issues".

http://twitter.com/#!/furocitydotcom

Furocity + FA = Match made in heaven.

[Jim Demintia]

Yeah, but let's face it: FA is, for all their incompetence and malice, the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to server and network capacity. Mostly because Piche pisses away cash on overpriced bullshit to impress people. They could afford to host little bullshit sites for Piche's buddies, as well as whatever the hell Yak is doing. FA keeps going despite everything because they spend so much fucking money on it.

I kinda doubt Furocity has that luxury (= parents paying rent on your NoVA apartment). So Piche really needs to show something for the months he's been talking up this new UI, and I would be willing to lay down cash on the fact that he has nothing. No one competent is willing to touch FA just based on the stories of sheer horror that have been cataloged in these very pages. Then there's the mass exodus of administrative personnel that's been going on since late last year. Whether or not Gavin is competent, he needs something, and Dragoneer needs something. They both have something the other wants.

The Sun+Oracle thing is really kind of apt if you think about it.

[rodox_video]

None of this makes any sense whatsoever. Unless there's an as-yet-unrevealed plan for what this is supposed to achieve, I can't see the faintest trace of a reason why Dragoneer would want to do this.

[GreenReaper]

Furocity's Twitter is just one long string of "Server issues".

It's easy enough to have server issues. WikiFur and Flayrah were down for almost four hours today after the PSU on the server hosting them exploded (long story involving 1TB of fursuit photos). The difference is we don't own the server, so we don't have to fix it.

What pops out at me is the all-too-common view of hardware as an investment. This is like calling a car an investment - it only makes sense if it makes money for you. Servers are a depreciating asset, and most furry sites don't need their own; almost none should buy them.

[Jim Demintia]

Furocity's Twitter is just one long string of "Server issues".

It's easy enough to have server issues. WikiFur and Flayrah were down for almost four hours today after the PSU on the server hosting them exploded (long story involving 1TB of fursuit photos). The difference is we don't own the server, so we don't have to fix it.

What pops out at me is the all-too-common view of hardware as an investment. This is like calling a car an investment - it only makes sense if it makes money for you. Servers are a depreciating asset, and most furry sites don't need their own; almost none should buy them.

You know, the world would make a lot more "sense" to you if you realized that not everyone is hyper-rational like you.

[ProvincialTwit]

Rationality is something sorely absent from most conversations involving furries, as is pragmatism, so it's a little refreshing to hear about someone who isn't a complete and utter loon about things.

The hardware is, as always, a status symbol for Piche and The Unrepentant Glory Of FA.

[ISleepNow]

Quote from: GreenReaper on Yesterday at 04:58:54 pm

What pops out at me is the all-too-common view of hardware as an investment. This is like calling a car an investment".

Outstanding observation.  Commenting further, some cars Do make very good investments but operating them is another thing entirely and should of course only be done by those really qualified to do so

[camellia sinensis]

It seems like the merger fell through. The announcement is gone, and so is the thread.

[Freehaven]

It seems like the merger fell through. The announcement is gone, and so is the thread.

My guess is that Furocity's admins realized that FA was the only site of the two that was going to get anything out of the deal and said "fuck this shit we're out of here".

That is, of course, if the plans did fall through.

[Conan]

It seems like the merger fell through. The announcement is gone, and so is the thread.

I still see them?

The thread was locked by Summercat, though, in an effort to stop the "OMG THERE'S A MERGER AND THEY'RE GOING TO TAKE AWAY OUR FERAL ART/FREEDOM OF SPEECH/ACCOUNT NAMES/VIRGINITY" from continuing.

[camellia sinensis]

Oh, nevermind then.