Smaller update, tired, exhausted, had a long day.

Completed surgery today. They were able to extract and remove samples of the growths in my lungs, and in 5-7 business days we'll have a definitive answer as far as what it is... and how to treat it. Full recovery likely in 1-2 months.

Met with the specialist today. They think they've narrowed it down to one of two things: an extremely rare, serious bacterial fungal infection... or, well, lung cancer.

Because of the severity of my condition, they're escalating me surgery on Thursday. I'll under go anesthesia (which has its own risks), and stick a camera/robot into my lungs to cut off pieces of the growths so they can determine what I'm dealing with once and for all.

This has escalated far, far more serious than I ever could have imagined a month ago.

Well, it's been a while since I last updated my FA journal. I was hoping to hold out until we had our next big update (soonish, and it's got something y'all really want -- no speculations though!), but unfortunately life... uh, life has chosen other paths for me.

I'm currently ill. Exceedingly so. Several weeks ago I went to urgent care, who diagnosed me with pneumonia. I had all the symptoms, and man, they've been brutal. However, urgent care said they'd never seen a case as serious as mine, and instructed me to go to the ER immediately as I was far too severe for them to treat.

Well, heck. Fine. I'm not fighting this, I'm far too sick. Arrive at the ER, they do a CT scan, and... no, it's not pneumonia. It's something worse. I have something growing in my lungs. A lot of nodules, and... nope, they can't help me either. What I have is far too severe for them to diagnose or treat, and I need to seek a pulmonary specialist.

To say I've been under the weather would be a vast understatement. For the past month and a half I've been plagued by constant fevers of 102 - 103 degrees, multiple times a day. Just constant fevers. Extreme fatigue. Exhaustion. Pain. Dizzyness. Complete disorientation. I go from extreme chills where the air feels like it's burning my skin to extreme sweats that last for hours, and leave me completely dehydrated. Feel like my entire lifeforce has been drained. I've never gone through something so debilitating. I can't do anything. Game, draw, even work on FA. Even watching YouTube can be an extremely demanding task.

It's left me completely broken.

Most days I only have about 2-3 hours of functional energy in me, and the rest of the time I'm sleeping or just trying to survive. Whatever the hell I have has all but completely disabled me.

That said, there's good news. In about a week, I'm seeing pulmonary specialists to try to figure out what the hell is plaguing me (word choice intentional), because man... these constant fevers are soul breaking in a way I can't describe. There are days where I'm just so drained all I can do is cry, and I'm not the kind of person who cries. To say it's been a lot would be a vast understatement.

I'll try to post more updates moving forward, as I know the community is thirsty for communication and to know what we're working on. And don't worry, we'll have a big write up as to why it's taken so long (major database rewrites to start). Also, towards the end of 2022, after getting covid, things left me in a totally broken state and it took me a hell of a long time to recover both mentally and physically. Long covid ravaged my body and left me in a bad state for far too long, and it took way longer to bounce back back from it.

Now this...

It's been a rough few years. I'm tired, boss, but I'm still here to fight. I'm a brawler digi, after all. I don't quit til the battle's over.

When making banners:
1) 1850x300px
2) On mobile the banner prioritizes the left half of the banner, so anything you want to show should be emphasized there.

I'll be adding some adjustments, guides, and a banner PSD template soon!

I hope you like it.

Here's a spoiler: you won't have to use the edit submission button soon to upload larger art.

And yes, actually soon.

Also...

Really cool new addition regarding journals coming to the fall update. You'll like it. Not saying what it is, but you'll like it.

You don't even have to give me $8.

NINJA VANISH!
*Gaussian blurs away*

$44 billion doesn't seem to buy you much these days, eh?

Don't really know what to say that hasn't already been said, but I know some people have been asking so I just wanted to say this: the FA team is watching closely, and we're listening to feedback and concerns. We're talking, and we're going to be trying some new things in the future. I've already got some working early concepts on my dev box (more soon), and I can't wait to get your feedback so we can work build off it further.

Oh, and a few people have asked if we'd ever consider doing what DeviantArt's proposed with their built-in AI art generator. To that, I say: EWWWWW! No.

Woke up this morning and the bite in the air was just frigid, despite being reasonably decent outside. I haven't posted in a bit, and some things have been kind of going down in the background, so I wanted to chime in with an update.

How things are going:

Twitter
On fire.

Fur Affinity's Autumn Update
Much of the code is complete, though we had some delays due to hurricanes, sickness, and unfortunate life events. The majority of the dev work is going to be done within this week, then we move on to testing! Improvements include things like writing support for writers and readers alike, customizable profile banners, improved thumbnail support, UX improvements, and a few additional items.

We've also recently invested about $20K in increased storage capacity to allow the above features! We appreciate everybody who's been supporting the site, especially through FA+, as we wouldn't have been able to make these upgrades without you. FA+ is what helps keep the site alive, especially given the issues of the current economy, both local and global. We greatly appreciate your generosity.

What Comes After?
Not much I can say at this time, as with the current Twitter flambe we need to re-evaluate some areas we were planning on focusing code-wise. I can tell you that we've been discussing how to implement feed systems into the site and better ways to users and creators to try to communicate with each other. This is something we've been looking at doing for a while now, but with the current state of affairs, is something we need to evaluate a bit more.

That said, after this update, we do plan on rolling out features more swiftly, especially as they're done! There's just been a lot of moving parts needed to this one update for some time, but that's wrapping up soon.

This video isn't getting the love it deserves.

This is the single greatest song I have ever heard. Ever.



I'm working on other stuff in the background (FA improvements and art), but this legit broke me tonight. So many layers.

EEVEE! Eevee eevee.
*dramatic floof pose*

EAT 'EM UP

EAT 'EM UP

EAT 'EM UP

EAT 'EM UP

I forgot how amazing this is/was. Going through older videos and I just... otamatones break me every freakin' time.

Just a quick journal, especially as a way to say thanks.

Things are finally starting to settle down. If you've followed me on Twitter or elsewhere, you may have known things haven't quite been going right over the past two years. Thanks to an amazing group of people and assist from a lot of people I've been able to mostly get back on my feet. I've finally overcome a lot of the hurdles that have been keeping me down, and I'm working to get back on track. If you follow me for my art you may have noticed I've gotten back into the swing of things, and fierce!

I don't plan on dropping that momentum, but building on it.

Places you can find my art:
https://www.furaffinity.net/user/dragoneer (hi!)
https://twitter.com/preyfar (18+ only)
https://t.me/+Ull14Xt3woR_K3yE (18+ only)

We're also working on a decently sized update for FA behind the scenes which should roll later this spring. Hope to have some more information in the nearish future.

Giving this a lil' bumpy bump. I think it's a noble action.

https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10138995/

This is one heck of a powerful video from one of the most well known Russian YouTubers on the internet. This is a person who took pride in their country, who celebrated the weird, bizarre, and beautifully wonderful aspects of Russian and gopnik culture. Boris promoted the cultural significance of Russ food and culture, of its people, and brought a lot of Russian culture forward through comedy and more, but you can hear the pain in his voice.

It's important to hear the words of those who fly the Russian flag with pride suddenly have trouble reflecting on their country and legacy.

Stay cheeki breeki, Ukraine. We're with you. You're showing the world what patriotism and sacrifice truly is.

To our Ukrainian friends, please stay safe. I don't really know what to say in such a stressful time that can help, but... our heart goes out to you.

To everyone else, please remember the furry community is an international one. There's furries from all over the region. Please remember that individuals are NOT their government, and that most people just want peace. Artists are here on the site to create, design, promote, share, and take part of a community.

Stay cheeki breeki.

🇺🇦💖🇺🇦

We understand users aren't, uh, particularly fond of reminders... which is why I'm happy to let you know we're working on an update to address this in the future. This update, aimed sometime mid to late spring, will separate reminders YCHs, and other items marked "for sale" apart from regular submissions.

I'd like to also take this time to explain part of the reason we haven't outright ban them: artists and creators rely on FA for commissions and money to cover things like rent, food, and general life needs. Especially with the pandemic and rising costs we understand that cutting these off right away could be severely detrimental to creators. While we understand reminders are frustrating, we want to offer a proper place for them aside and move them away from the main submission areas. This will make the site better for those looking to for tasty new submissions to consume (NOM!) and to give a better place for those looking to get commissions and custom work done.

I also take full responsibility for not addressing this sooner.

That said, I have been taking stricter action on abusers. For the past week or so I have been taking 2-3 hours a day and going through every new reminder submission on the browse page and reviewing upload histories to try to ferret out abusers. Sometimes this happens late at night, sometimes early in the morning, sometimes whenever I just feel like it. I have been taking escalated actions on accounts found abusing this policy and issuing warnings, suspensions, and the occasional permanent ban for gross offenders.

We want you to be able to use FA to show off your work and promote your goods on the side, but this isn't the place to spam. And if you're spamming excessively you WILL have a bad time including, but not limited to, outright account deletion to clean up said spam.

See, it's worse than that actually. Google has progressively been pruning those who doesn't quite conform to their logic of "brand safety". It's not JUST YouTube.

I'll preface this post with a statement that one of my goals is to improve FA, rebuild some of our community trust, and get us to the point where we have enough funds we can ditch those ads and return to 100% built-in advertising solely for furries, by furries. That's my goal. But servers and hardware cost a bit of a money, so it's a necessary evil I must contend with until we reach that point, but the moment we do, dropped they will be.

Google used to be one of FA's primary ad providers for a number of years until they weren't, and when they weren't, they spontaneously dropped us and ghosted the entire community, but it had nothing to do with mature/adult content. Google signed off that it was totally fine so long as we hosted their content SOLELY on SFW pages. They approved of it. Not once, in fact, but multiple times.

When Google was an ad provider they'd used to send us these lists, right? Spreadsheets with hundreds/thousands of submissions that were in "violation" of their advertising policies and practices. These lists would come with warnings like "indecent," "pornography," "hate speech," "violates Google policy," or "no content". But there was no way to understand what any of these labels were or why they were applied. No definitions were provided to us as a website to help us understand why things were flagged. You'd look up a picture tagged "hate speech" and it'd just be a furry standing without a shirt. You'd look up pornography and it'd be a fat fur chilling on the beach. And I don't mean furry levels of chonk but realistic. Zootopia pictures of Nick Wilde without pants as portrayed in the film? "Indecent."

There was a point where I'd go through hundreds of these submissions to try to find WHY they were in violation. I never could. There were always a handful of submissions that were in violation, but I'd wager 99% were fine. The best part? We'd contact our Google rep to ask for clarification on why these actions were taking and to help us understand what the warnings meant... AND NOT EVEN THEY UNDERSTOOD THE ERRORS. Google could literally not tell us why they had flagged these violations. It was entirely algorithm based.

After I purchased the site back we tried to get back with Google for advertising. They ghosted us. When Google decides they're done with you, for whatever reason, you get ghosted. Forever. I have contacted multiple reps over time and never once received a response. They apparently decide responding to your email isn't profitable and outright stop talking to you.

This decision by Google cost us quite a bit in losses, as it cut off one of FA's main sources of funding overnight. Things are VASTLY better now on that front, but 2021 was a quite a rough year.

We worked with another ad provider to get things back up and stem the losses. That same ad provider also happens to be a Google ad partner, and they tried to hook us back up with Google... who immediately said no. But this time, ahh, they provided an answer. Not to us, naturally, but our advertising partner. "We are no longer supporting UGC websites." User Generated Content. This means sites that exist based on user-provided content like FA are considered too high risk for brand safety so they pulled the plug. And not because of any one reason. Just user generated content.

Now consider what's happening with YouTube. They're not just suspending accounts of people they feel are in violation but outright deleting them. Videos are UGC, and they're cracking down on anything that isn't brand safe.

If you've been paying attention to what Google's been doing over the years you'll see this come up time and time again. Brand safety. This is the reason YouTube videos showing people drinking alcohol get demonetized. Curse too much? Demonetized. Talk about "political" issues like trans rights? Demonetized. They're pushing creators off their platform(s) across the board. It's not just YouTube. It's not just FA.

This has been happening more and more over recent years, and from what I can tell you I've seen behind the scenes, it's only been getting worse.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Coffee and donuts will be served in the lobby.

Hi, hello there, it's me! I wanted to check in with a general update as to certain things going on. One of the big comments and questions is "why does coding take so long?" or "why can't you add feature X?" With a site like FA, we have over 16 years worth of content. This can prove a challenge as it makes implementing certain features a bit more difficult as we have to factor in modifications for over a decade and a half worth of content.

As we've stated in the recent news post we're working on an update that we're targeting for spring (April/Mayish) which will introduce new features, improvements, and some rather nice QOL of tweaks. Additionally, we're hoping get in some upgrades (improved JavaScript, AJAX) which will have some major changes to the feel of the site (that said, we don't quite know if that if that will come with that update or shortly after).

Here's a look at one particular current issue and how they impact the community as well as development:

Features we want to add:
-- Video support (webm, mp4)
-- Proper high resolution upload support
-- Larger file size uploads
-- User page profile banners

All of these features are towards the top of our wishlist and yours as well. Especially with YouTube cracking down on a lot of more niche furry content and outright deleting accounts we recognize this is a goal we need to focus on sooner rather than later. The problem is we need a long term storage solution to make it happen. Towards the end of 2020 we massively upgraded our servers. Every system FA uses was completely new, improved, and with some really good tech. The problem, however, is that there was supposed to be a second part to this upgrade for long term file storage, but with the rollover to FA going independent that upgrade was delayed.

In order to add those features we need to increase our storage solution with a focus on the long term, and that means new servers servers with 60TB+ capacity with additional drive bays to allow for future expandability. Due to data replication and backups that 60TB ends up being cut down by about 60% for actual storage space. The great news is storage on that level is fairly reasonable. Due to system redundancy we also have to replicate the data across multiple servers which ultimately adds to the cost, and our estimates for these upgrades are currently about $20-25K.

Not only that, but due to the increased download size and demand this will also increase our monthly bandwidth requirements quite a bit. We're looking into options to make this happen, and we've got a few things in the works to try to raise funds.

There's a lot of things being scoped out by the team and getting where we need to go (in addition to trying to pull on some additional developers). I wanted to share the challenge that a site like FA has in introducing features. We're a large site with a limited budget, but we're working towards the future in making the site better for the entire community.

We're working towards some really cool things in the future. We just have to factor in potential hurdles and how to clear them, but these are the things on our radar moving forward.

HERE COMES THE PLUG

Want to help the site reach those goals? Consider signing up to FA+. Funds from FA+ all go back towards funding the site directly... and you get a few spiffy perks in the process.

END PLUG

MERP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJIVcoqrftM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJIVcoqrftM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJIVcoqrftM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJIVcoqrftM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJIVcoqrftM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJIVcoqrftM

MERP

It should be this one. Heck. This is so good. It deserves all the views. All of them.

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/45880526/

I wanted to say thanks to everybody who helped out. There's been a crazy amount of things going on, and I appreciate everybody's help giving me a buffer. There's a lot of things going and I just got overwhelmed, and I was waiting/hoping on something specific to happen, but then all the bills came raining down at once and everything else with it.

The stress of life can just be overwhelming sometimes.

That said, on to more positive news, we're working on quite a few things and looking to make some much-needed improvements. I'm hoping to have a bit more to announce/show in the near future (I know, I know, "soon" is a four letter curse in FA's history, but we're in active dev!).

I do want to take the time to talk about renames. Renames are high priority for us, and we know it's one of the community's top requests. We're trying to work on raising some funds to bring on an additional coder, as development costs are always a factor. At the same time, we're trying to modernize/fix some very specific areas that will make the site vastly better for the entire community.

I just want you to know that we hear you, and we very much understand the community's needs. There's a lot of things in the fires right now, some of which we hope to be able to share soon.

I hate to do this, but I'm kind of out of options. After losing my dad, multiple losses of friends, various hospital bills, my computer dying, I've been in bad shape and I've been having a hard time catching up.

If you have a few bucks to spare... it'd be greatly appreciated.

https://ko-fi.com/dragoneer

I've been carrying FA for the past year, and while the site is doing fine, I personally am not. 2022 hit me with wave after wave of personal tragedy and unexpected expenses and ER bills and I'm just having trouble keeping afloat. I hate to ask, but I'm kind of in a bad place. There's a lot of amazing things just on the horizon, but I'm having trouble getting over the current hurdle. I just need a hand to try to get over that hump.

All the bills have just hit all at once, and I'm struggling at the moment. There's great things going on over the horizon, and we have a lot of great stuff planned ofR FA, but I'm just having a hard time. I feel like I've lost almost everything in the past month and some days I wake up and just don't know what to do. I've been fighting depression and bipolar my entire life, and last year my insurance denied me my meds. "No longer needed."

I'd been doing better, but then January hit... and everything fall apart. Every other day something horrible happened. It started with my dad, and just spiraled out of control. I was hoping to have a job come in to help but it kind of fell through.

So... I hate to ask, because that's not generally me, but... if you have a few bucks to help out, it'd be greatly appreciated.