Furry auction site FurBuy remains offline, a month after it was abruptly taken down, leading to severe corruption of the 19-year-old site's database.

Site owners say May 23's emergency shutdown was intended to recover from a freeze triggered by a self-styled security researcher's access, and announced a months-long renovation.

The researcher revealed their involvement, claiming to have been blocked by FurBuy after contacting them on Twitter. They said they did not access the database, but that someone using the vulnerability they found would be able to do so - which is disputed by the site owners.

Modern database systems and server hardware are meant to cope with unanticipated downtime by writing to disk in such a way that the data can always be recovered to a consistent state; however, this requires appropriate configuration, and tends to decrease overall performance. It is also possible for hardware to fail under stress.

The last successful backup of the site was made in October 2017, but this remained unnoticed after the death of long-time system administrator Mordrul last August, from thyroid cancer.

Furry auction site The Dealers Den is running a sweepstakes to promote increased activity.

Auctions, bids, referrals and invites earn varying numbers of points, which are to be totaled to calculate a user's proportionate chance of winning.

The competition is to end June 16, with the three winners receiving a $50 Amazon.com gift card, a ClawGFX t-shirt, or a Dealers Den t-shirt.

Founded last October by Sinabu, The Dealers Den is offering free advertising, but faces an uphill battle against decade-old competitors FurBid and FurBuy.