Fur Affinity

Fur Affinity, also known as FA, is the furry fandom's largest online community, focusing on the promotion of art, music and stories.

The site was created in 2005 by Alkora as an alternative to various art community sites such as SheezyArt and DeviantArt, distinguished by allowing artistic freedom of expression regardless of content rating. It is led by Dragoneer.

History
Fur Affinity was launched on 16 January 2005 as an alternative to SheezyArt, with the forum going live on that date and the main site being transferred a few days later from FurPawz. Since then, it has suffered a few outages, most notably a month-long downtime over July 2008, but always managed to recover. In 2011, Fur Affinity announced a major revamp in connection to FA: United 4.

Fur Affinity: United!
In August 2007, Fur Affinity held its own furry convention, Fur Affinity: United! (or FA:U) in Newark, New Jersey. The convention was a success, drawing 310 attendees and 25 fursuiters in the parade, and was followed by another in 2008, drawing 381 attendees. In February 2009, Dragoneer announced FA: United 3 "Games United" for 28-30 May 2010. No event was scheduled for 2009 due to the economic downturn. FA: United 7, in August 2014, drew 707 attendees.

Services and features
Fur Affinity's features for users include the ability to allow users to track new updates from particular artists; highlight favorites; and upload a wide variety of art (images, music and stories). The site attempts to promote community through its comments system and individual journals.

While works of all ratings are accepted (other than photographic nudes, images whose intent are to slander or discredit others, and minors in sexual situations), art rated as mature or adult is not shown to visitors, or to users who have not specified it as a preference (which requires giving a date of birth indicating an age over 18). Keywords and tags can be added to works, though a feature that allowed blocking based on tags was disabled due to performance issues.

Fur Affinity's search engine was "temporarily disabled" in mid-2006 due to it taking up too many resources. A faux search feature was implemented for April Fool's Day 2007, much to the chagrin of some users. Search was reimplemented on 5 February 2009; it was initially labelled "That Thing You Want" and randomly included rickrolls.

Privacy features were added in May 2012 with users being able to block guests from seeing their content with messages such as "[Username] has elected to make their content available to registered users only" and being able to hide their adult, mature+adult, or all favorites from public view.

The site's artwork is inaccessible in Russia, as d.facdn.net (which serves the images) is listed on Russia's Internet blacklist. The site itself works fine, and even shows thumbnails.

On 13 September 2015, to coincide with the conclusion of FAU 2015, Fur Affinity unveiled a Gallery folders system, which had been promised in one form or another since shortly after the site launched in 2006. Some users criticized the way folders were implemented, including disappearing artwork after its implementation (found normally in the scraps folder), and the poor to no documentation regarding them.

Project Ferrox
The FA development team was working on a new backend system called Ferrox which was to be used for the next major revision of Fur Affinity, and was to be made available as FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for other sites to use. By late 2009, the development of Ferrox had stalled, with the last change to the code being made on September 7, 2009. Days earlier, net-cat, who was acting as the lead Ferrox developer after Eevee had left, announced that the code was to be frozen, citing that "Nobody knows Python."

Mascots
Fender is the Fur Affinity mascot, created by artist K-9 based on a character concept by Preyfar. He is half fox and half ferret, a "ferrox". On April Fool's Day 2007, Fender was depicted in the site's banner as a female dragon. This dragon was made a separate character and an official mascot of the site in May 2007, and named Rednef, or "Fender" spelled backward.

Controversies
Being furry fandom's largest social art site for many years, Fur Affinity has been host to strenuous discussions on various topics, including the presence and later absence of cub pornography, staff appointments and departures, allegations of staff and user improprieties, and debate over what consists of suitable content for the site banner. Incidents of downtime and unauthorized access have also been discussed, both on Fur Affinity's forums and throughout the fandom.