A much less furry month than July, and nothing novel, though the Dentiblù and Drawn & Quarterly offerings are from pretty intermittent series.

Hello ladies and gentlefurs! Remember to keep your cursor over that close button just in case your mum walks in on you, cause this issue is all about fighting your way out of the closet and announcing your fuzzy little persuasion to the world… should you wish to of course.

You see, announcing something like the furry fandom to the world is like having sex with a beautiful woman (or man, depending); there’s no right or wrong way of doing it, and in any case you’re going to need to do it softly to coax it in as if it were something good but perfectly natural. Go in too hard and you could cause more harm than good, too soft and your advances may go unnoticed.

Okay, that simile got creepy. Anyway, should you choose to oust yourself or not, you can at least enjoy the tunes along the way. Yes, in a desperate act to do something completely different I’m going to be doing my article through the medium of music, colour and text.

Enjoy the show, be sure to take advantage of comments, and be sure to sign The Chained Wolf’s petition! (Although you’ll probably want to know why first!)

Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens. Some furs have voiced discontent with the current NorthernFurs meet schedule.

A new discussion has cropped up on the UKFur forum concerning the current NorthernFurs meet schedule.

The current six cities rotation of Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Chester, York and Leeds is considered by some to be too unbalanced, with Manchester and Sheffield furmeets drawing significantly larger crowds in comparison to Chester and Liverpool – where attendance rarely exceeds 30 people. Hull and Newcastle may replace these cities come 2009.

Others however have more ambitious ideas and wish to completely reshape the Northern organisation, adding numerous new cities and increasing the frequency of others. Some of the most aspiring ideas put larger meets – such as Manchester – hosting up to 18 meets per year. No conclusions have yet been drawn on the matter.

With a merger of Furry Art Piles and MyFursona looking set for the near future, whatever are they going to call the new site?

Major furry archive and community Furry Art Pile suddenly announced it’s closure on August 27, 2008, sending repercussions across the furry community. Lone site administrator Dylan Hafertepen posted an offline message stating: “This isn’t fun for me anymore. I spend too much time everyday developing new features and optimizing the code to perfection; I never have time for my other projects.”

Many criticized his decision to bring the site offline without any warning to the users, and the site came back online later that day with a new closing date of September 1. Following the announcement there were a few people showing interest in taking control of the site, one of these being the consortium behind the furry fandom’s largest dedicated social-network, MyFursona. Talks between the two parties were not completed at the time of writing.

The WikiFur international homepage

Internet furry encyclopaedia WikiFur has finally made it’s way from Wikia following disputes over the wiki-farms new advertising policies.

Wikia, co-founded by Wikipedia chairman Jimbo Wales, has in recent years been struggling to make enough money to keep itself in the black and a few months ago introduced plans to introduce more intrusive advertising and the forcing of new formatting of wikis to anonymous users - which make up the majority of Wikia’s userbase (curiously Wikia’s largest hosted wiki, Uncyclopedia, is unaffected by the changes, ensuring cries of favouritism).

After Wikia refused to change their stance on the matter, WikiFur administrators voted unanimously to leave the host with just one abstention.

The new server has been kindly donated by popular fursuiter Timduru at no cost to the WikiFur userbase.