Flayrah has migrated to new North American hosting, with WikiFur planned to join it by the end of the year.

The 'new' server is based on a quad-core Xeon-D 1521 with 32GB RAM and four 2TB HDDs - 2015-era hardware, but double the capacity of prior hosting provided by Timduru. Base software has been upgraded from PHP 5.6 (first released in 2014) to PHP 8.1, resulting in major performance improvements, along with recent releases of nginx, Debian and MariaDB.

Update (April 2024): Another move is due; to a cheaper, ~40% faster server with 64GB RAM, running a Xeon E5-1630 v3 @ 3.8Ghz. Some downtime is expected.

These features may be more important for WikiFur, which will be upgraded to a newer and more complex version of the MediaWiki software; with the intent to add Wikibase to process and visualize data about convention instances, as well as better-documenting "furspeech" words used within the fandom and languages such as Foxish, Lapine and Primal.

Flayrah is 20 years old as of January 2021! In that time we've published 5,000 stories, 181 polls and 5,200 Newsbytes.

To celebrate, and to aid readers, we've added a feature that wasn't ready in 2009, when Flayrah was rebuilt – faceted search!

You can narrow down to Pokémon reviews, work of the Furtean Times/WikiFur News era, Flayrah retrospectives, Fred Patten's 18 stories mentioning the word 'anthropomorphic' in September 2012, or fox stories by crossaffliction and his mild-mannered doppelgänger.

Furry art community Fur Affinity has announced restrictions on the use of automated watching scripts, which they termed "watchbots".

While staff had been "addressing botters on a one-on-one basis for several weeks", to the tune of "roughly two dozen" accounts, they faced a growing number of users who were unaware of their position. Some also became concerned upon being watched by "TheNSA".

The trend appears to have been started by Mishka Burr, who claims to have watched over 160,000 users using a script on a Raspberry Pi. Several other accounts running a published watch script inspired by Mishka's work had over 40,000 on their watchlists prior to clearing.

If you’ve got to get the bad news (or maybe good news if you’re lucky) about this crazy weather that we’re having, why not get it from a cute little bunny? “Weather Rabbit is a unique combination of weather app and virtual pet that rewards you for keeping your rabbit happy by dressing it in different clothes to match the current weather conditions. It features accurate, up-to-date, local information using your GPS and weather data sourced from Wunderground.com. You can earn new outfits for all four seasons plus more seasonally themed costumes.” This animated app (available on Google Play and The App Store) was created by Rabbx, with character design by Tracy Reynolds. You can find it at the Rabbx web site, too.

image c. 2014 Rabbx

Inkbunny is celebrating three years online by announcing a major redevelopment project – and a T-shirt contest.

We want to move to an open source model to get the community involved in extending the capabilities of the site, and so that anyone can easily create their own art/social site.

To do this we are creating the new site engine from the ground up. It will have all the features that people like from Inkbunny v1.0, but will use an established web framework, will have a new and improved interface and will launch with a bunch of new features we've always wanted to see added to the site.

The site, which saw its 300,000th submission this week, was launched in June 2010 after three months of closed testing. Since then, Inkbunny has added various features, including user-suggested keywords, but development has come in bursts due to time constraints.

Dragon's Eye Productions, creators of long-running social MMORPG Furcadia, have set up a Kickstarter project to fund a web-based overhaul of the service, entitled The Second Dreaming.

On the morning of 28 November, the project met its its base funding goal - $55,000 - for which DEP and spinoff Catnip Studios pledge a web-based client (to be offered on Facebook and elsewhere), and a new Furcadia website. All backers may choose a new feature and avatar from a list: the winning choices will also be added to Furcadia.

Upgrades are sorely needed; the current Windows client was designed in 1996 and lacks support for modern platforms.

While the sale of virtual items (or digos) provides sufficient funds to keep the service running, development has slowed to a crawl; according to DEP, core team members have not been paid in two years, and most have found other jobs. *

Furcadia's creative director Dr. Cat (Felorin) is to host an "Ask Me Anything" for potential backers on Reddit at 2PM CST on Wednesday November 28, and will be a guest on Twitch TV's TopWizard channel on Saturday December 1 at 3PM CST. Funding ends December 14.

Remember Ubuntu Furry Remix? There's a new version out (10.04) with an art software focus.

The distribution ships with GIMP Paint Studio (package) – a set of brushes and presets intended to improve the free image editor's usefulness for designers and artists. Support for the Wacom Bamboo and many other graphic tablets is included, as are five more furry wallpapers.

Ubuntu 10.04 is a long term release, with full support through 2013.

Alex Vance has revealed a preview of the SoFurry 2.0 interface.

SoFurry is the sequel to furry porn site Yiffstar and was released at the end of 2009. However the user interface was not popular with users. Work began on SoFurry 2.0 in April 2010.

SoFurry 2.0 is not yet available generally, but is scheduled for release in first quarter 2011.

UK furs – and a major software company – have shown their appreciation for Huskies, Malamutes and Samoyeds in a big way at this year's RBW.

The London-based convention raised £6396.90 (~US$9922) for Sled Dog Welfare, exceeding ConFuzzled's £6200 donation earlier this year, despite attracting only 216 attendees.

The figure includes a donation from Bariki's employer, Microsoft UK, which matches yearly fundraising of up to £7500 per employee, totaling over £250,000 this year.

Even without the match, the sum donated was £1330 higher than in 2009.

A trailer for Solatorobo, the 'spiritual successor' to anime-style action-adventure/platformer Tail Concerto, has been published. [tip: Goldkin]

The Nintendo DS game will be released October 28 in Japan. Import pre-orders are available; the collector's edition includes an artbook and soundtrack.

Furry multiplayer social game Furcadia is now available on the iPhone for US$4.99. Purchasers will also receive five golden dragonscales, redeemable for in-game goods.

Initial reviews appear good, though some are disappointed by the anti-idle mechanism (enabled when unplugged to prevent battery drainage):

Runs smoothly, no graphical lag at all and the whisper feature is awesome.

The app was developed by Ayluro (Ghost Tiger and Talzhemir) in collaboration with DEP.

FA Rank – covered in more detail last February – has moved to its own domain: popufur.com

The service has also launched a Java-based distributed updater to spread the CPU load.

Want to know how popular you are on Fur Affinity? FA Rank, by Taren Nauxen, will tell you.

The site uses a form of the PageRank algorithm, which forms the basis for Google's rankings. Watched users gain points which are distributed among their own watchlist.

Not everyone thinks it's a good idea, with an old straw poll showing 42% in favour of closing the site. However, FA admin Dragoneer appears unconcerned.

For those wishing to know full details, source code for the ranking system is available.

Yes, this is old news, but it was never covered here and the rankings were updated recently.

A team led by Russian WikiFur administrator Shnatsel have released the first beta of a furry-themed version of Linux distribution Ubuntu.

The collaboration includes a boot skin, several wallpapers by Kosh (Alexander Faolchu), icons, a Metacity themes, a GIMP splash screen, and eight sets of smilies. A full GTK+ theme and logon screen are scheduled for future builds.

A prior effort to create such a distribution — Furbuntu — appears to have stalled in 2008.

The general consensus I (the submitter) get is that the name and logo for the Firefox browser does not by itself constitute being furry.

However, I do think that this is: according to this article, the Mozilla Foundation will now begin selling Firefox plushies. So just in case this is your sort of thing, now you know.