What do you want to see more of at Flayrah?

I don't think furry news has to be soft news. This and this, for example – and a lot of our coverage of websites. Of course, much of this is not specifically about anthropomorphic animals, but the community, which is my own area of interest. I aim for hard news style on most coverage because I think it's useful and relatively rare in the fandom.

The Chained Wolf has some experience in the area of reviews. I tend not to do them because I don't buy or watch a lot.

Editorials and other opinion pieces tend to be popular but are often dramatic in the comments. There's also the question of whether it compromises the non-editorial news reporting; the Washington Post and New York Times have separate editorial and news boards for this reason. Often I express my personal opinion in the comments, but some might be better-suited to a full editorial.

Practical guides would include articles like "Latin Vixen shows us how to build a fursuit head", or PK's tutorial on the use of color in artwork. Edutainment. Either original material exclusive to Flayrah or brought in from elsewhere.

Interviews are a little more complicated to arrange than the average coverage, and having been on the receiving end a few times I appreciate they can be a little stressful. As we are a community, though, I know they'd be popular. I don't think we're short of options.

I threw advertisements in because it might be a way to encourage companies and freelancers who value the site to donate to it in a tax-deductible manner while gaining some benefit. I don't foresee a huge amount of money being made, especially considering how many furs use ad-blockers; probably not even enough to cover hosting costs. We'd probably use Google AdWords, which would handle fairness; the people who paid the most and were most interesting to readers would be shown auotmatically. But donations might work better.

The term "con reports" was intended to refer to material tagged con report – opinions from attendees. Closing figures and suchlike are welcome as well, of course, though I might not write it up myself unless I thought it was newsworthy (like TaniDaReal's tablecloth).

Topical cartoons was my vote. I would be glad to devote a side block to them if a reasonable update schedule can be maintained. Perhaps you or others have some suggestions as to suitable artists?

Flayrah's contributor page, author panes and the new "Recent contributors" front page block are there to recognize our volunteers, but there is always more that could be done. I'll investigate further options, such as user badges.

After much wrestling, we have a sidebar box ad. If you want to give it a whirl, you can enable it by editing your user options (you need both the main block and the loader). I don't know that it's worth keeping, though.

For a start, the ads lack relevance. This isn't that surprising when you consider the small scale of furry businesses. Anthrocon's had ads for a while, and sometimes you see costuming ads, but in general there's just not much out there.

There's also a noticeable delay while it loads the ads. I've tried to improve this (which is where the wrestling came in - Opera didn't want to cooperate), but it's still there to an extent.

Most importantly, our on-site traffic is still too small for ads to make much sense. A fairly large portion of our audience is based on LJ, Facebook and RSS, which means we don't get to serve them ads here most of the time.

Oh well. At least I learnt some jQuery while working on the loader, and upgraded our version of it (JS should be a bit faster now).

Anonymous posters really haven't been a huge problem so far. I'm willing to delete comments if they get truly abusive.

If there's no hard news or in-depth feature up front, I do feel a little bad, because I think those mark us out from the competition, and I'd certainly like it to be the reason readers come back to us.

Part of why I'm less interested in the softer news is that it's often regurgitated from other news sources. Flayrah will always have its share of rehashed stories, and I'm sure some readers enjoy them, but my heart is in the original work. In that respect, today's Flayrah deliberately departs from Aureth's vision of a "furry Slashdot". I admire Slashdot, but it's limited by its format.

[Science-based stories often have their own issues, not least that the original stories are usually based on press releases.]

The cost is reduced participation. If you try to write up each story professionally, you end up not being able to write many stories – and many people, right or wrong, feel they lack the skill to help out at all. (They may also have better things to do with their time.)

Showcasing new artists is a good idea, and ties in nicely with some of my wider goals for Flayrah, but I suspect it will take some time to get to that point. It took almost half a year for the site to return to regular posting by non-staff, and even now it's shaky.

Well, I don't know if the voters agree with your definition of "hard news" or not, but they definitely seem to want more of it, whatever it is. :-D

I've slipped a few Google ads into unobtrusive places. They're not that relevant, unfortunately, and haven't earned anything yet, but maybe someone wants a stuffed tiger . . . or perhaps we'll get more furry advertisers dropping by.

I initially looked at Project Wonderful, but I've heard bad things about the return vs. other options, as well as their general overhead, and I found their user interface frustrating as an ad buyer. I'm also a fan of the idea that ads should be relevant, and Project Wonderful just doesn't have the ability to do that. Whoever is willing to pay the most wins.

I found AdWords worked well for WikiFur when we were advertising, but you have to spend quite a bit of effort into targeting individual sites and crafting good messages. It is easy to spend a lot of money without a reasonable return.

It is tricky. It's best if you can be very specific in your call to action. For example, if you say "make a custom bunny suit now" and link to the relevant page (or a page also demonstrating some of the suits), that's a lot better than "bunny-shaped things you might like". You might get traffic with that but they probably won't be interested in your product.

Where you advertise can be as important as how, of course. There are a lot of AdSense sites out there, and you have to be a little ruthless about cutting off those which are sucking away money without a reasonable return.

I will be reviewing the return and if it doesn't work out, I'll probably look into other options - perhaps just direct solicitation of adverts.

More posting is difficult - I'm an admin on three sites, plus a developer, so there's only so much time to do it myself. I'm sure there are others out there who could help if they put their mind to it, though.

Well, you aren't logged in, which is probably a big part of it . . .

The button's not there because the submission page isn't accessible to anonymous users. I should probably hookup some kind of fake-submit that at least lets visitors know submissions are welcome.

You can also use the contact method to submit tips, but that's non-obvious and we'd prefer people wrote stories.

I don't live near a lot of the stuff I report on! A little research and chatting to the right people can go a long way. Often you can come across news when you're not even looking for it.

There are relatively few stories about furs in the media, it's true. But the sort of journalism I'm trying to focus on isn't based on talking about already-well-covered stuff, anyway. Like WikiFur, it's more for "stories by, for and about the fandom". Unfortunately there aren't that many fans with the time, skill and interest to write them.

Money is not a huge issue. Flayrah takes up relatively little in the way of resources; the time people volunteer to post stories is far more important. I considered ads as I know people like to support the site and I support furry commerce.

I like the idea of our work being exceptional, but I know it won't be all the time, and I want the tagline to be a fair description. It'd work well for our vision statement, though. :-D