FurAffinity held a town hall webcast today. It is archived
here. Some highlights:
Things to note:
-Fairly recently appointed admin Kitashi is now acting as "lead admin".
-Dragoneer thinks one of the site's issues is not being available to users, which these town halls is meant to fix. (This was the same reason the unused knowledgebase was implemented)
-An update is scheduled for "next month" that will feature a new "commissions system", which is a clone of Weasyl's commission information. Public beta due at the "end of the month".
-The ugly new headers will be part of the update.
-Kitashi has access to the code as of two or three weeks ago.
--Userpage tabs made consistant
--+watch and send note removed from user's own page
--Stream notification system being worked on
-Dragoneer thinks the writing system sucks, so they want to put in WYSIWYG editing for text stories.
-"The WYSIWYG editor we're looking at would output in a format that wouldn't be useful to download"
-The AUP is changing again. They want to change how photography is uploaded to allow for the currently banned "photobucket"/collection submissions. This will be available when folders come out.
-FA is considered a "social networking site" now.
-They want to give people the [img] tag, after they review "technical limitations"
-The staff code of conduct is being rewritten again, and Dragoneer finally understands why users want to see this document. It currently isn't public because of fears admins would be afraid of doing anything or risk being yelled at.
-The system currently does not support hiding "not safe for work" images in the submission notifications without deleting them.
-Filtering is "sorely needed"
-Tagging is coming, including mandatory tagging and the ability to change people's tags if you've been on FA "for a long time". It sounds like this will be arbitrarily given out.
-New admins ("a handful") will be brought in every 2 to 4 weeks until they have "enough" (24 new admins is mentioned later)
-FA is "growing at an incredible rate" which is why admins can't keep up with trouble tickets. There are 8 active admins, doing at least 30 tickets a week. There are 1700 tickets.
-Once folders come out, each user will have a hidden "jail" folder that submissions in violation of a rule will be moved to.
-Mentions of 'the wiki' are made.
-Folders are still "in the works" and will come out "eventually".
-The new UI will be released "in chunks".
-They want to buy faster servers, to add redundancy and save electricity, and to replace their aging infrastructure which ranges from 4 to 7 years old.
-Dragoneer is planning an Offbeatr to buy new servers.
-They want to lift upload caps once new servers are acquired.
-Kitashi: "The code isn't causing FA to crash"
-Cloudflare "caused problems" and FA is too complicated for it??? (note: their DNS was set up wrong the entire time they used it)
-The "nuke dead favorites" button (whatever it was called) had to be removed because it was "DDoSing the site from within"
-Two more developers are expected to be added, but "trust is an issue". Devs will be forced to sign a contract and NDA. No idea how they'd enforce this with people like Yak, who are far away from US jurisdiction.
-There will not be subfolders with folders.
-They're looking into ways to delete inactive accounts.
-Dragoneer would like to monetize FA, but doesn't know exactly how they want to do this.
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They are looking in to an "FA Store", that would have "subtle" shirts. Dragoneer is opposed to Kitashi's idea for "flamboyant" furry shirts.
-The commission information system is "done and finished" and just needs CSS, however Dragoneer causes it to throw database errors on the stream when he neglects to fill out the form all the way.
