Five Fur Affinity staff resign, some citing leadership failures

Five members of Fur Affinity staff announced their resignation yesterday:

• Photographurer, former photography department head
• Luftwoofe, former photography department administrator
• Writerwren, former writing department head
• Grammatist, former writing department administrator
• Silver R. Wolfe, former support administrator

All but Wolfe were brought from Furocity and placed directly into administration positions. Grammatist cited privacy concerns as the reason for his resignation; three others directed criticism towards the original FA staff members, and slammed Dragoneer for poor leadership.

In his detailed resignation notice, Photographurer claims:

The site owners repeatedly gave all administrators, old and new, an Administrator Code Of Conduct, which stated that we were to only handle tickets that pertained to our departments (so that rulings could be made by people who understood the intricacies of the art form), as well as how to act professionally.

From day-one, some of the original FA administrators have blatantly ignored the Admin Code Of Conduct, repeatedly handling trouble tickets outside of their departments (after countless warnings from owners, and while their own departments’ Terms Of Service tickets go unresolved), undermined and overturned Department Heads’ rulings, shown gross ignorance towards the AUP, spread false information about the AUP and site policies, botched countless trouble ticket rulings, acted unprofessionally, leaked private site information, and have intentionally hampered the ticket/administration process at every turn (we have found proof of this from chat logs, notes, and trouble tickets). Their actions have been childish, petty, and detrimental to the site and its users.

The original site owner has known about this gross misconduct, but no action has been taken and nothing has improved. We found evidence in trouble tickets, chat logs, and notes that some of the FA admins were intentionally leaking private information, ignoring site policy, and trying to sabotage the administrative process. The original site owner (Dragoneer) has not effectively reprimanded or fired ANY of the offending admins under his leadership. Every gross violation and problem is met with weak excuses, indifference, and endless second chances. There is no leadership or follow-through.

People with little or no administrative experience, who know nothing about photography, are striving to alter the AUP and destroy the works of fellow photographers and the art form I love.

I’ve seen FA from behind the scenes. The administrative foundation of FA is badly broken, and the site owners seem unwilling or unable to make the tough decisions that will better serve the site and its users. These issues have made it impossible for me to perform my duties and serve FA’s users in a way that I feel is effective and beneficial. Therefore I am stepping down as an administrator.

Luftwood and WriterWren had similar complaints about the site's original staff:

At all times I have tried to honestly improve your user experience but with the weak, unprofessional, childish original staff this proved to be to great a challenge. Being met with endless bickering and bullshit a simple job of helping users on an community art website is impossible.

My services here are not wanted nor appreciated by the previous admin staff. And security issues have arisen for which Dragoneer has no care about, regardless of what innocent people it affects.

One of the remaining admins, Summercat, has made a journal addressing the privacy concerns, and commented on the other allegations:

Personally, I feel the assertions made are unfair (at the very least), and only show one viewpoint of a situation.

Dragoneer has not yet made an official comment on the situation as he was unaware of it until recently and is trying to learn more. He said:

Somebody decided to "dox" the admins, and posted their findings last night in a release. Some of the Furocity admins didn't take too well to that, and outright left over the doxing in and of itself. I can't comment on the other issues, because as of right now both myself and Daemonshyai have been blindsided by it.

I'm trying to find out more about the details right now, and what they're claiming. [...] All I know is that one of the admins who left last night came into admin chat concerned about the "dox", and everybody left all at once (pretty much within an hour).

Meanwhile, Arshes Nei suggested part of the problem lay with an unwilliness on the part of Furocity staff to integrate with the others:

I don't really know the other admins because I don't think they made an effort to know/understand the rest of the staff and I tried to get them to...I bear no hate but it was frustrating to say the last.

The merger between Furocity and Furaffinity was intended to bring in new admins to the understaffed furry site. Four months on there was no sign of the desired changes and during that period FA also suffered from a DDOS attack, controversial addition of Viglink and a temporary read only period. The read-only period was criticised for being entered into with no user warning, although staff had been aware it was necessary for at least a week as they prepared for it.

You can follow the ongoing discussion in the forum thread.