Furocity.com
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| Furocity | |
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 VixelPixen, the Furocity mascot, as part of the site's banner. | |
| Author(s) | Owner, Lead Administrator & Site Founder: Gavin O. Daemonshyai
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| Website | http://www.furocity.com
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| Launch date | October 21, 2003 (as a gaming/roleplaying site)
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| End date | November 2012 |
| Genre | Multimedia archive |
| Rating(s) |  |
Furocity was a social networking website, image gallery and role-playing profile site aimed at the furry fandom. The site evolved since its founding in 2003 and had a registered userbase of over 34,000 people before an attempted merger with Fur Affinity in 2011. It dropped offline in November 2012.
History[edit]
Furocity was founded in fall 2003 by Gavin O. Daemonshyai and Vallen, New England-based coders. Originally, the site was strictly designed for roleplaying profiles, in response to Furcadia's limit on character descriptions. Over time though, the website became useful for other roleplaying games, such as World of Warcraft and Ragnarok Online, and soon became an important site for roleplayers, furry and non-furry alike.
Around 2008, gallery and blogging functionality was added to the site in order for members to display their work. However, because many felt as though that these additional functions felt tacked on (including Gavin himself), an entirely recoded version of Furocity was written starting in Spring 2009, in order to shift the focus of the site to multimedia upload. This new version launched about six months later at the beginning of October, and supported written and musical submissions. After the launch of the new version of the site, Furocity amassed thousands of user submissions.
On 4 March, 2010, the server suffered a PSU failure which sent it offline.[1] The backup server was affected by a similar problem and the downtime persisted until April 5.[2]
In 2011, a series of events began which concluded with the inactivation of the site:
- On July 14, 2011, a "merger" of staff and resources was announced between Furocity and Fur Affinity.[3] The sites themselves remained independent. Seven Furocity staff joined FA's ranks, but the majority left at the end of October 2011, citing friction with FA's existing staff.[4]
- On the evening of November 2, 2011, furocity.com began redirecting to Inkbunny with no explanation.
- On November 3, the site's Url would redirect to several sites and media, such as Inkbunny, SoFurry, a YouTube video of The End by The Doors, and cycling back to some of those addressees again, including Furocity.
- On November 7, a "Gavin" announced on a SoFurry post that Furocity had closed, in part due to the problems caused by the collapsed merger with Fur Affinity. People commented that this "Gavin" was in fact a hacker that had taken over the site.[5]
"Gavin" post on SoFurry.
- On November 17, the site came back online under the control of its owners. The real Gavin said in a Furocity blog that the November 7 SoFurry Gavin was an impostor.[6]
- In early September 2012, the site disappeared with no explanation, and remained offline for three weeks before returning. It again disappeared in late November 2012, this time apparently for good.
Features and services[edit]
Furocity allowed users to choose whether their profile centers around their gaming and roleplaying characters, or around their gallery submissions. The gaming/roleplaying page layout focused on a character profile and description and user comments. Gallery-centric accounts minimized comments and character profiles in favor of gallery uploads, favorites, and journal entries.
Like LiveJournal, the site had the ability to make a journal entry friends-only or even private, so that only people you have friended (as opposed to watched) could view specific journals.
AUP[edit]
Furocity was more restrictive than some art websites with regard to more extreme fetishes. As of December 2009, it was against the Acceptable Upload Policy to submit art revolving around the cub or bestiality fetishes.[7] A tag-based filtering system was used along with a multi-level rating system (General, Mature, Adult, Possibly Offensive), so that users could avoid looking at submissions which they find objectionable, assuming they were tagged and rated correctly.
Paid and free accounts[edit]
The site offered paid accounts to provide an incentive for monetary contributions to the site, much like deviantART. Paying users had larger upload limits, the ability to choose what sort of notifications (gallery entries and journals) they received from individual friends, and access to a commission queue in order to keep track of commissions. A folder sorting system, a commission information page, and the ability to delete, screen, and freeze comments were available to all users.
References[edit]
- ↑ Furocity tweet (4 March 2010)
- ↑ Daemonshyai tweet (6 April 2010)
- ↑ Fur Affinity/Furocity Merger Announcement - The Dragoneer, Fur Affinity Forums (14 July 2011)
- ↑ Five Fur Affinity staff resign, some citing leadership failures - Rakuen Growlithe, Flayrah
- ↑ Furocity Merger?. Comments about "Gavin"s post on the SoFurry forums. Retrieved November 8, 2011
- ↑ Gavin O. Daemonshyai's blog response to the November "situation" with Furocity. Retrieved November 17, 2011
- ↑ Acceptable Submission Policy