WikiFur moves to Germany to quell legal threats

Running a furry encyclopedia isn't all fun and barnstars. Over the past five years, WikiFur's administrators have been faced with edit wars, trolls, spam, exclusion requests, profit-seeking hosts, battles over WikiFur's service mark – and above all, constant legal threats, including the dreaded DMCA takedown request.

It all got too much for site founder GreenReaper, who moved WikiFur to Germany last weekend.

Editors hope the move will resolve the site's legal issues, as none of its law-loving detractors – all from the USA, UK or Canada - can use German.

Also justifying the move were statistics showing that the English-speaking audience, while large, was not critical to the editing process:

The truth is, all the growth is in other languages anyway. Spanish, Portuguese . . . our Russian editors were keen to lower their latency.
And of course dedicated servers in Europe cost half the price of a Linode. Now [hosting admin] Timduru can finally afford a new fursuit!

Germany was chosen by editors for its central location, its support for animal rights and tolerance of questionable literary works.

GreenReaper admitted the site might be "slightly slower than usual" for regulars in the Americas and Australasia, but emphasized that WikiFur's new skin had been optimized to reduce latency and bandwidth usage, with significant savings coming from removing instances of "http:" in links.

The founder was unavailable for futher comment, as he was busy moving to work at GameStop, a few miles from WikiFur's old server in Dallas.

Editor's note: WikiFur has been optimized and moved to Germany, and its founder does have a new employer. The rest . . . not so much.