Furry 101

… unless it’s the Preyfar interview.  He is a man of many names, either way, you know him as the prime mover behind Fur Affinity. This then is the Furry 101 interview:

Let’s start out with with an easy one – (I’m too lazy to look up your bio on WikiFur!) Who are you? What is your life’s story up until you found the furry fandom?

My life story is not unlike any other. I was born the son of a Sgt. Major in the Army, grew up in Germany, traveled Europe, stole pieces of Frankenstein’s castle and built snowmen on the doorsteps of the famous Weiss Kirche in Bavaria.

Y’know. The stuff everybody else does as a kid.

Sure. I used my piece as a paperweight. How did you get into the furry fandom?

Through unfortunate “Googling”.

Way back in the mid 90s, I used to be an avid Werewolf: the Apocalypse player (which, I swear, is a gateway drug for geeks into this fandom). We noticed that all the female werewolves had a distinct lack of bouncy cleavage upon shifting, and the empty, vacuous chests became something of an in-joke amongst our group.

Out of curiosity (or perhaps nerdly horniness) I decided to search Yahoo! for an answer. Keyword: Werewolf boobs. And that’s… uh, when I found Bender’s Werewolves of Suburbia. In fact, I didn’t find werewolf boobs at all. I did, however, find werewolf peen. An entire pack of werewolf peen to be more accurate. Not… not exactly what I was expecting, no.

. . .

And yet somehow I’m still here today. Go figure.

Ah, a classic tale – who hasn’t Googled for something innocuous and innocent, like the Tomb Raider Nude Patch and ended up as a furry? Moving on, we know you by a few names – Who is “Preyfar”? How did you come to create him?

As much as I’m ashamed to admit it, Preyfar was originally created as a half-wolf, half-elven character I used in D&D campaigns. I wish I could go back and bitch-slap myself for coming up with that combo, but eh… I was about 13 or 14 at the time. Somewhere along ‘97 or ‘98 he transmogrified into a deviant hyena spotty thingy.

Preyfar’s more or less the personification of my id; smart-ass made manifest.

Fair enough. So who is Dragoneer? How did you come to create him?

Dragoneer was created entirely as a joke, meant to be a disposable character as I tried to experiment in art styles, designs and… odder mature art. Given he was originally disposable, I’d ensured the name was intentionally generic. I’d never really intended for him to stick around. But he did.
I’m kind of glad.

What is your favorite brand of whipped topping?

Cheez Whiz

Damn, I thought we’d get you with that one. What do you do outside of the fandom?

Travel, visit friends, play copious amounts of Team Fortress 2 with Shalkaii, draw and all the usual stuff. Movies, Xbox, weekend assassinations, etc. The lot of it.

Have you ever sneezed so hard you lost one of your fillings?

I’m 28, and never had a cavity. :) So nope!

Huh. I lost one to some especially truculent toffee once… Moving on then, let’s talk a bit about Fur Affinity.

Why FA? Why create another furry art portal? What separates FA from VCL, ArtSpots, etc.

“Why FA” is probably a better question for Alkora. I didn’t create the site, though I did inherit it. Looking back, when I first heard of Fur Affinity I recall thinking “Fur Affinity? HA! That’ll never work…”

Foot meet mouth meet ass. Have an irony threesome.

As for what makes FA different? Eh, there’s a number of reasons. I’d rather not compare FA to other sites because each on caters to a different segment of the fandom, yet contributes to a greater whole. Corny answer, I know, but I really don’t compare FA to other sites. I really don’t.

What did you think when Furry Art Pile went under? Are any plans in place in case FA fall prey to you ever being bored running the site?

Ooh, boy. There’s a question. Uhm… well, to be honest, I think the community got kicked in the shins. There was no warning, no way out for the users. If it was a funding problem, Ekigyuu should have made the reasons he was terminating the service clear to the users. Not just “Bye, thanks for all the fish!” and poof, gone. The way it was handled was akin to not just burning a bridge, but dousing it with napalm and then dumping a flaming cow on top of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure he had his reasons and he did what he had to do, but I disagree with the execution. I don’t feel the reason was anywhere remotely legitimate. There was a much rivalry between FA and FAP (mostly between the users) and for all the people who gave FAP their loyalty, money and time… they got burned.

Establishing yourself in an online community like FA, DA or Sheezy is an investment. Nobody wants to upload their stuff, establish themselves and then have to pack up overnight with no warning.

Ekigyuu, while taunting FA, once said that Fur Affinity could learn a lot by “FAP’s example”. To be honest, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to have learned.

As for FA there are no contingency plans. I suppose I should correct that, and soon.

What are the current specs of the servers that run all of FA (data, forums, etc?)

http://furry.wikia.com/wiki/Fur_Affinity#Hardware
WikiFur has a complete list of the servers and their general specifications.

In the event of an emergency, can FA be used as a flotation device?

If FA history has shown us anything it’s that in the event of an emergency FA sinks. Use at your own risk.

Wise words. But that bring sup the question of the horrific cost in human (or otherwise) lives if FA goes down with all hands.

How many users are registered? What is, for instance, the largest number of active users at one time, and how much art, music, and text is posted?

I don’t have a complete rundown available for all statistics (they’re in my other pants) but we’ve started posting them on a monthly basis. We like stats. They show a lot of where FA’s content is, and good ratios of it.

Statistics for February 01, 2009 through February 28, 2009

• New Submissions:89,926
  • General: 67,829
  • Mature: 11,401
  • Adult: 10,696
• New Journals: 30,823
• New Comments: 997,014
• New Users: 8,217
• Active Users: 55,847
• Data Transferred: Not available.

Yowch! That’s a pretty hefty chunk of users! I can’t imagine it’s free, so what does it cost to run FA, and how are you funding it?

As of this writing, FA costs $1,025 a month to operate. The main servers and site cost $890/mo while the forum server costs $135/mo.

While we could run the forum server on FA’s server rack we want to ensure the servers have optimal up-time in the event that FA goes down users can still interact with the staff and get status updates (see: the Great Crash of August for why this is justified).

Revenue wise, FA is paid for by a mix of donations and ad banners. Donations cover roughly 70% of the operating costs while ads cover about 30%.

Any money left over from ads goes into buying or upgrading new hardware on the servers. We recently upgraded the old Bahamut server (now called Neo Bahamut) using extra funding.

That’s pretty amazing. There a lot of porn on FA – 22,079 new pieces for February alone! – What’s your overall feeling about it?

There’s always the assumption that FA is 90% smut, 10% clean. In fact, we tend to see the exact opposite is true. There’s no doubt a vast majority of mature art on FA, but in reality, we tend to see things about just opposite. There’s about 10 to 20% mature art posted -vs- general. Quite a surprising statistic, really.

Porn, however, is the most popular art on FA. It’s the most powerful chunk of 10%. Not that anybody didn’t see that coming.

Hmm… 22,000 porn pictures vs. 67,000 non porn. That is a surprise! Moving on from that, we’re curious – with all that content and traffic, why use physical servers instead of a service like Amazon’s EC2 or virtual servers?

Cloud computing is definitely the future, no denying that, but I don’t feel they’re “there” yet. When you factor in costs, price-per-GB, transfer rates and more, a site FA’s size with no guaranteed revenue would be far too costly.

Our operating costs would go up about 50% per month, and there’s just no way the site can sustain that — especially since FA is growing.

Cloud offers fantastic redundancy, but as I said, the costs are expensive and can be easily abused.

That’s true. You don’t know that Amazon wouldn’t suddenly decide that all the porn is breaking some sort of T&C!

In about five years conditions will have changed, and jumping onto the cloud will be the right move.

The benefit of owning our own servers is that we can control how much processing time is used, upgrade what we need to and control costs. It gives us limitations to work within and improve services. In the cloud you pay per cycle; the more CPU time you eat the more you pay. Physical servers are ala carte. We can pick and choose the resources we want to use from our own pool, and if we feel the need to push our system harder than normal we’re not punished with a bigger bill at the end of the money. We pay an up-front fee and that’s it. Predictable billing is necessary for a site in FA’s position.

Virtualization is a better alternative to cloud computing. You can maximize performance while cutting costs. I’m a fan of cutting costs.

What factors were considered in purchasing the latest servers for FA? Anything you wish you could have purchased instead?

FA was in a position it may never be in again – we had money, and we had a lot of it.

We could have gone cheaper routes, but we opted to invest in enterprise-grade servers that were backed by some of the industry’s strongest hardware and best warranties (we love you, next business day!).

That said, I do wish we’d have invested in a third server with room to grow. Since purchasing the servers, prices on storage have dropped by as much as 50%.

We could have purchased almost twice the storage capacity as we did back in August. However, we had to make a purchase and didn’t have much time to waffle. Besides, I don’t think anybody foresaw 1TB drive prices plummeting as fast as they did.

Still, you can’t look back. When it comes to buying computers you have to buy now and buy within your budget, because there is always something better and cheaper on the horizon.

Rumor has it at one point Google approached to about advertising on FA. Is there any truth behind that?

Fact. Google approached us about integrating AdSense into FA and the Forums. When they contacted me I swore up and down that somebody was playing a prank, but… turns out it was legit.

We went through with the deal and began incorporating ads into the forums as a test, and everything seemed to go well. At first. For about a month. Unfortunately, due to an excessive amount of click fraud our status was revoked.

<sarcasm>Totally didn’t see THAT coming. </sarcasm>

This is why we moved onto the advertising system we have now (thanks to Tsawolf’s brilliant work on that!). It’s FA controlled, and it runs on a pay-per-month basis -vs- pay-per-click schema. It’s a fair system that prevents exploitation and abuse while offering all our advertisers a chance to get seen.

It’s been suggested that there should be a unified log-in for furry sites, but you’ve suggested that this would not be a Good Thing. Can you expand on your reasons for us?

Some of the staff my disagree with me on this one, but the reason I’m against it: domino effect.

If all the furry sites used a shared log-in, and said log-in became compromised, it could allow a would be intruder to do serious damage. There are ways to secure it to help prevent that damage, but I really don’t feel that Furry is big enough for its

A problem that was highlighted recently, when FA had to be shut down.  Let’s discuss that. If I recall, a list of usernames and their passwords got out, and it turned out that a lot of those people never changed their passwords .Are you going to put in place any additional security measures in the future (minimum password complexity requirements, change password every few months, HTTPS, etc,)?

The recent exploit was a re-visitation of the original FA hacking, and a small amount of damage was done. We worked with the users affected to restore what we could, and filed action against the hacker’s ISP and the proper authorities.

Action was taken, and we took it through the proper channels.

That said, the coders are working to improve security on a number of facets (stronger encryption, better security standards and more).

How is “Project Ferrox” coming along? Can we get a peek of what’s going to be in the next iteration of FA? Is there a suggestion box available for feature requests?

Eevee is leading the Ferrox team, and is posting updates to both the forums and to Twitter (tweet: Ferrox).

Updates are posted regularly and openly, and there are Ferrox-specific suggestion forums on the Fur Affinity Forums for people to chime in, offer advice. And I highly suggest EVERYBODY chime in, take interest.

And while I’m at it this is the third iteration of “Ferrox”.

Ferrox was chosen as a name for the next iteration of FA coding, not one specific platform. There’s been a lot of confusion that “Ferrox” has been in development for about three years. There have been different version of code under the same name. It’s sort of like the Dread Pirate Roberts. Same name, different flavor.

Since we’re on the topic of moving forward with FA – Will FA ever be optimized for mobile devices?

Eventually. Probably. More than likely. But honestly, does it really need to be? I can browse FA just fine from my iPhone, and even my old Palm Treo 650 handled the site well.

Some phones are just not optimized for mobile browsing, and I personally feel that having to recode a site to work on a cell phone/game device is like putting a Band-Aid on a bigger problem. It’s not the site that’s the problem but the lack of mobile computing/internet standards.

I’m by no means a fan of Apple, but I believe with the introduction of the iPhone and mobile Safari, Apple set a standard for mobile web browsing. Over time, more phones will compete to meet that standard to take away sales from Apple, and mobile internet surfing will resolve itself.

Finally, on the subject of Fur Affinity’s website, if you could go back, knowing what you do now, what would you have done differently with FA?

I’d have run in the other direction.

Well alrighty! FA’s not the only place to find furry art though – And some of the alternatives aren’t as “opt in.” What’s your opinion on sites like e621 and “art theft” sites?

I think they can be good and bad. Good when they respect the artists and bad when they just rip content for the sake of ripping. The sites serve as good platforms for people to advertise, get seen and win fans. Sometimes it’s the best way to find undiscovered talent.

In that respect, I believe all artists should tag their art appropriately. Provide links, names and contact information in their images (in a simple, unobtrusive tag or watermark).

Art is going to be re-posted, it’s going to be “stolen”. There’s no stopping it. However, like the music industry, artists need to adapt and learn to use it to their advantage.

It’s an interesting point, and one fairly made. You can’t stop people passing around art, even RL art – it just gets scanned. Talking of the real world vs. Online, let’s talk about conventions!

No other furry convention has started off of based of an existing furry fan service. What prompted the creation of FA:U?

I’d wanted to host an FA get-together at cons, but panels were too limited and room parties didn’t seem like the right way to go about it. After discussing it over with friends we decided a weekend meet could be fun, and from there it sort of spiralled out into “Hey, what if it we did a convention and it didn’t suck?”.

Sort of how like the United Nations was formed.

Yeah, I hear Churchill used to get a lot of Con-sex. Talking of which – what’s in store for this years FA:U? Have you got a theme and Guests of Honor?

(I’m totally available for that gig, by the way)

More details on FAU3 (May 28 – 30, 2010) will be announced in time. We’re trickling out information as we go, but here’s one: the convention theme is “Gaming”, and we’re going to capitalize off of that in every way possible.

Amongst one of the Guests of Honor is Nek0gami (I’m sure you’ve heard of him) as well as a few others. We also REALLY want to focus on the live music performances at the con. We WANT our patrons to come out and have a good time, come out and party with us. We’re really focused on that.

We opted out of doing a full convention in 2009 for a number of reasons. We saw the economy tanking, and planning for a full con in ‘09 seemed akin to planning for a picnic when you knew there’s a storm brewing.

We opted to push it up to May 2010. This give us more time to prepare and to watch the economy, not get burned. Conventions cost a lot of money, and there’s a lot of risk. We’re playing it safe.

With all that said, we’re still planning on FA:U 2.5 for 2009. Not a full con, but just a weekend party. We’re looking into renting a hall, hosting a cookout and a big ass summer bash with live music and booze. Our theme is the American Revolution.

“Furries: We’re Revolting”.

Take that as you will.

Is there any competition between FA:U and any other nearby cons such as Anthrocon?

I don’t see Anthrocon, Fur Fright or other East coast convention as competition, no.

Each convention caters to a different audience. We’re here for both the Furry community and FA as a whole, and to play on that strength.

Really, our only competition is ourselves. As a convention if you fuck up it’s on your resume, and you don’t have much wiggle room. You get a once-a-year shot to do it right, that’s it, and you’ve got to both do it right and do it better than the year before. There is very little room for “Oops”.

So far, we’re 2 out of 2.

That said, many of our staffers volunteer for AnthroCon, Fur Fright, FWA and others. There’s a lot of experience behind the scenes, and a lot of good people. The fandom is small enough that there’s just no room for competition. Everybody knows each other. If there’s 6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, in Furry, there’s 3 degrees of separation from… well, everybody else. It’s small.

We have over 50,000 unique monthly visitors to FA, and that’s our audience. Not other cons. We want them to come out and party with us, make some new friends and have a good time. That’s sort of FAU’s strength – our audience is built in.

To run a convention in a recession, you must have a mighty pair. Is it true that you once smothered a goat with your mighty testicles?

The goat probably deserved it.

But seriously, if my mighty balls were so large, I’d not go for a goat. Small game. I’d try to crush a Hummer or a sleeping Kodiak or something. Not an awake Kodiak.

Trying to suffocate an angry bear with your testicles is just stupid.

Words to live by. So what’s your preferred concealed carry method – Boxers or briefs?

Boxer-briefs. I am all about hybrids.

Finally, a more serious question, but a topical one. I understand you and Patrick Reed/Furp didn’t part ways on the best of terms. What happened? Any last words?

Sometimes the past is best forgiven then forgotten.

Understandable. Thanks for your time!