Furocity is no more

[Conan]

It's either dead, or they've been hacked and are more incompetent than FA...

As of a few hours ago (about 11PM EST, according to a journal written by everyone's favorite bandanna'd wolf), Furocity.com began redirecting to Inkbunny. Attempting to visit a subdomain of furocity.com will redirect you to this youtube video. The beta site (hosted on a completely different domain) is still up. Gavin has been on FAF recently, in a thread that mentioned this, so this seems to be intentional.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this is the redirect to Inkbunny. Could the end of the FA/Furocity partnership be officially over?

[rodox_video]

For now, I'll go with "hacked and more incompetent than FA". Either that, or Gavin got mega-pissed. Or he just doesn't care anymore. It's a toss-up at this point until we have more information.

What do we know about Gavin at this point, anyway? He has the drama cross-section of a honeybee.

[ColonThree]

Gavin has been on FAF recently, in a thread that mentioned this, so this seems to be intentional.

I wasn't aware he even had an account there, what's his user name?

[Pi]

Now the mainsite is redirecting to beta.sofurry.com. Welp.

[Jim Demintia]

Gee, I really hope he doesn't think Toumal will be better for him than Dragoneer.

[Spip]

What do we know about Gavin at this point, anyway? He has the drama cross-section of a honeybee.

It probably occurred to him at some point that furries are too shrill, demanding, self-entitled, rude, flaky, and thin-skinned to bother catering to unless you have a massive, Piche-sized ego.

[rodox_video]

p. much

[Conan]

FA staff are claiming Gavin's out of contact due to a power outage (I'm assuming they're just guessing this, he couldn't be out of contact if he was telling them his power was out).

The longer this goes on for the harder I find it to believe that it's a hack. You're telling me that over the course of 5 days he has been completely out of touch with everyone he knows?

The redirect is being served from a server operated by the domain registrar (the A record is pointed at a server on a netblock operated by "CSL Computer Service Langenbach GmbH", the nameservers have a reverse DNS of "ext1-3.server.csl.de"). The idea that someone hacked his account and set up a redirect for one domain, and that they redirected it to other furry websites instead of [insert your favorite shock site here] is really hard to believe.

I think somebody LEFT FOREVAH and the "power outage" story is just wishful-thinking PR spin.

[a pigeon]

Gavin made a post here about this matter:

http://beta.sofurry.com/forum/view/thread?id=13901#forum_post_504538

a TL:DR:

[...] in the span of a few months, Dragoneer and his massive incompetence manages to completely destroy a merger that had been planned out for more than a year, destroy any hopes of any decent coders helping out FA, cause an entire website to shut down, and break someone to the point where they give up on the fandom.

http://lulz.net/furi/res/1816930.html

Gavin's post:

I realize a lot of people have been waiting for some answers about this for quite a few days now. I have been having issues with my power at home, but everything seems to be working again just fine now.

To answer all your questions: No, there is no merger between SoFurry and Furocity. However, yes, it was my decision to have Furocity redirect here. Over the past couple weeks, I've felt incredibly... frustrated, to say the least, with how the Furaffinity merger has been going. Last week, five of the people I brought over with me to Furaffinity, five good friends, all decided to leave the FA staff because of a less-than-professional working environment. Honestly, I feel sort of foolish for letting this blindside me, for believing for a second that Furaffinity, and hell, Dragoneer himself had changed and now understood how to better run his site, but it seems I was wrong, and I take some responsibility for that misstep.

The reason Dragoneer brought me onto the Furaffinity staff is because he needed someone to code the new User Interface-- However, I would only do it unless we were made partners, equals. Despite the fact that the phrase "co-owner" is under my name on the staff page though, this clearly isn't how things panned out. Dragoneer essentially did very little to help ease the transition of the merger, and because of it, I couldn't stop most of my colleagues from jumping ship. A week later, I still feel just as frustrated, because this entire thing was in planning for over a year-- And now, in just 3 months, the whole thing has fallen apart completely.

After such a gross display of unprofessionalism, I decided that I no longer wish to code the new UI for Furaffinity; unfortunately, as I look to the future, I realize that I would get very little satisfaction out of coding for a website that was so incredibly disrespectful to my friends. However, the furry community deserves a better site than that. I originally had Furocity redirecting to InkBunny, but even then that felt strange for me, since I knew a lot of Furocity users wouldn't find the site very agreeable, since cub porn wasn't allowed and such. But then I remembered that this website, Sofurry exists, and figured that this is the best hope this fandom has for a decently designed and well-run site. I had the thought of reprogramming Furaffinity itself to redirect here, but unfortunately, 'Neer didn't give me co-ownership over the domain itself, despite Dax having co-ownership over it-- That and, it wouldn't have been terribly professional to do in the first place.

You might wonder why I haven't just quit Furaffinity altogether and gone back to Furocity. The truth, essentially, is that I've just been feeling incredibly jaded by this whole ordeal. Originally, the site hadn't been updated since January since I was working tirelessly with Dragoneer on our merger plan. However, after all this, I can't say I feel much of a motivation to code and run a truly great furry art site. Although I appreciate all the good experiences I've been graced with because of this fandom, at the age of 32, it's starting to feel like I need to grow up and move on. Indeed, I already wasn't very involved in the social aspect of the community, but as a programmer, I realize now that there are bigger fish to fry, and that I must step away to achieve greater things, greater things I know I'm capable of.

I realized I've been completely silent since this whole ordeal started awhile ago, and I felt I owed you fuzzies and scalies alike, some sort of explanation. I might one day choose to return to furry, but for now, I think that truly hard work, people who really make an effort such as Toumal and his staff, should have those efforts recognized by the community at large. I admire the level of work that's gone into this site, and I wish you all the best.

Although I would like to, I likely won't be responding to many follow-up questions or posts, since I have many other programming-related projects to handle, and writing this has taken a significant amount out of me. I hope you all find this site is up to snuff, and to the current SoFurry users, keep on doing what you can to make this community a wonderful place.

Cheers,
Gavin O. Daemonshyai

[ColonThree]

Welp, I guess it's back to business as usual at FA, i.e. Fuck All.

If FA is still going in the years to come, I can imagine it becoming akin to old Geocities or Angelfire pages, where people visit it just to remind themselves of how awful old websites used to be, then recoil in horror as they realise it's still actually being 'maintained' to this day in such a state.

[rodox_video]

You mean like Furnation?

[Jim Demintia]

Gavin made a post here about this matter:

http://beta.sofurry.com/forum/view/thread?id=13901#forum_post_504538

a TL:DR:

[...] in the span of a few months, Dragoneer and his massive incompetence manages to completely destroy a merger that had been planned out for more than a year, destroy any hopes of any decent coders helping out FA, cause an entire website to shut down, and break someone to the point where they give up on the fandom.

http://lulz.net/furi/res/1816930.html

Gavin's post:

...

This is a huge surprise, all of this. Huge.

[rodox_video]

Also, weren't we saying a while back that Toumal is, basically, a thuggish dumbfuck on the scale of Piche or higher? Only with much better handlers?

People don't seem to realize that the only difference between FA and the decades of furry sleaziness that came before it is that with FA the bad shit happens in (or is dragged into) the open.

[ColeTrain]

[...] in the span of a few months, Dragoneer and his massive incompetence manages to completely destroy a merger that had been planned out for more than a year, destroy any hopes of any decent coders helping out FA, cause an entire website to shut down, and break someone to the point where they give up on the fandom.

This doesn't surprise me at all.
Everyone should already know that prolonged exposure to Neer's incompetence and retardedness leads to severe consequences and will basically bring a metric crapton of all sorts of bullshit on your back.
How many people jumped ship from helping Neer and FA way back?

[ColonThree]

Damaratus and Sciggles claim to have spoken to Gavin and say that his post on SoFurry is actually by an imposter. How exciting.

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2884312/

Mouth, no. It was certainly typed up by someone using his name. It wasn't what I heard from him when I spoke with him over the phone two days ago. So I'm gonna wait to hear it from his actual mouth.
-------
By the way Gavin doesn't have a SoFurry account. *on the phone with him now*
-------
He said, he doesn't have internet access and that the person posting is not him.

I can also back what Damaratus is saying, we also spoke with him a few moments ago

"We" including Dragoneer? I wonder when he'll actually comment on all of this.

The original post on Sofurry was also edited to remove the part about getting FA to redirect instead, which is a strange thing to do if it was an imposter. Why bother?

[Conan]

Interesting to note that through all of this, FA staff kept calling it a hack, yet never de-opped Gavin's FA accounts, which to me just seems like a massive security risk. Have they learned nothing?

[Pi]

Have they learned nothing?

Yes.

[ProvincialTwit]

I originally had Furocity redirecting to InkBunny, but even then that felt strange for me, since I knew a lot of Furocity users wouldn't find the site very agreeable, since cub porn wasn't allowed and such.

lollin' so fucking hard at this what a bunch of horrible people all around.

[Conan]

furocity.com is working again.

Oh well...

[MazelTovCocktail]

Oh furry... when will you have a website that's run by somebody who's both honest AND competent?