All-ages furry art community ArtSpots is to close January 2, as efforts to create a new site could not be reconciled with the existing one. The move was announced by the official staff persona of Seurat:

These last few weeks planning the future of ArtSpots has been full of great ideas. However, we have wrestled with many roadblocks as well. This site has been around for over five years now, and with that has come a lot of expectations. We have come to the conclusion, sad as it may be, that given ArtSpots original goals and its history, it would be impossible to move forward with these new ideas.

The Yerf historical archive, currently hosted at ArtSpots, is to move to a new site built by WikiFur custodian GreenReaper and hosted by Timduru.

The closure will leave a vacuum in the market for all-ages furry art hosting. Many artists are expected to move to deviantART, where a group has been created for trading-post art.

Update (March 11): Yerf appears to be back online. No explanation as yet for the outage.

Yerf is facing its latest crisis . . . although what that is has yet to be announced. A cryptic post by long-time administrator Dingo accompanies the latest 404:

I think it's the end for Yerf. I have to close Yerf immediately.[1]

Yerf is no stranger to downtime. The last two years have seen the once-mighty PG furry art archive suffer through extended outages, starting just after Christmas 2004 when the server's hard drive failed.^[2] Crucially, no backup of the art or software was available.^[3]

The site was down for over ten months, returning only after an effort to rebuild it led by Locoindigo. Yerf remained in a read-only form for two months before full access was restored. Further problems emerged over the third quarter of 2006, leading to several artists demanding that their art be removed from the archives.^[4]

Floofyfur, a new clean furry art archive, is proud to announce that it is now going online after about six or more months of procrastinating and testing.

Yerf, one of furry fandom's most prominent archives of art has recently experienced a catastrophic hard drive faliure. They're currently looking for donations towards getting a data recovery service to look at the disk, as there was no backup of the data. You can find out more information, including where and how to donate on the Yerf Community.

Much like Flayrah, financial support for the online furry art gallery Yerf has been provided out of the administrator's own pocket. Unlike Flayrah, the bandwidth costs for Yerf are much, much higher, and the administrator has been unemployed for some time. He's looking for contributions. You can also buy merchandise from Yerf's CafePress store.

Yerf, that popular archive of PG-13 furry art, has returned, after a long battle of the DNS with Verisign.

And the masses rejoice...

Some folk are reporting that they cannot look at Yerf's website -- it just reports ether unavailible, or it's web address as being unresolvable. One fur (me) off of CableSpeed of Maryland and another fur using Bellsouth is unable to resolve this URL, thus connect to it. (A check via Sam Spade also is unable to resolve it) It is unknown if there's something going on with Yerf's DNS provider, Global Crossing, and that ISP's

affiliation with spammers.

Yerf is back!

.. as of this friday, the 12th. So until then, go and stare at the URL and look at the cute lil' mousie. Awwww!

The popular furry art archive, Yerf.com is currently unavailable. After a few days of simply returning errors instead of pages, the front page now cites unspecified software faliures as the problem.

From the Yerf News page, posted June 15th:

I'd like to ask for some feedback, please. I want to know what everybody expects, wants to see, wants me to do, etc..


To tell you the truth, I get very little to no feedback as it is!



So, if you like Yerf but would like to see some things change, email me.

If you like Yerf and don't want to see anything change, email me.

If you hate Yerf and want to see some things change, email me.

If you just want to say Yerf sucks and not care if anything changes, email me!



I'd seriously like some feedback so I can improve this place. That's what I've been wanting to do all along.
I'll post some of the feedback I get here at the end of the week (without names, of course). -Dingo

Yerf.com is accepting applications.

Please please please read the uploading guidelines. We're *already* getting applications with stuff that breaks the rules on the application page. o_O

I spent the better part of the weekend surfing around some of the best known artist archives on the World Wide Web. My trip ended with the Yerf archive, which is considered by some to be the premiere archive on the Internet due to its selective nature and supposedly rigid quality control standards. But after spending some time examining the Recent Uploads section on Yerf, I found myself wondering:
What makes Yerf so great? It's like a refrigerator for developing furry artists.

Just to make sure I wasn't having a knee-jerk reaction to a slow weekend of uploads I took the time to go back several weeks. The more I perused this archive the more my sense of dismay and disappointment grew. This didn't seem like an elite archive where the "best of the best" came to show us what hard work and dedication can do. This seems like a place that is very loosely administered and often used for bragging rights. I found frequent, flagrant violations of the much-touted Uploading Guidelines and a general atmosphere of "we're better than you." Not to mention artwork that, to me, falls far below the caliber the site purports to host.