Hey! HEY YOU!

You know what you want? A free popsicle! Maybe a cherry, or one of those freakin' amazing orange creamsicles (Popsicle of the Gods™). But uh... yeah, I actually don't have any popsicles, so you can have one.

DENIED!

What you can have is a commission from my girl, Sciggles! She's doing an Iron Artist, and slots are open! And in fact, she's better than a popsicle (and tastes better, too!). Plus she's blue! Who doesn't love a nice, tasty blue.... sweet, sweet... uh... *cough*

Commission.

Yes. Commission Sciggles!

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1597079/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1597079/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1597079/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1597079/

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1597079/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1597079/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1597079/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1597079/

It's "Happy SysAd" day, so I thought I'd give some props to some of my favorite SysAds:

Yak (FA) - You are *the man*. The *dude*. You are the reason this site continues to improve and rock hard tasty abs.

Dax (FA) - You've done so much for FA's back end (hurr hurr, "back end") that this site owes you a shit ton of love. Or cookies. Or whatever! Then again, you're now an admin on this website as of today, so quit reading this post and get back to work!

Carenath (FA) - You've kept the forums running smoothly, and you've got a beautiful anal attention do detail. That's a good thing! <3

Gavin (Furocity) - You do a lot of awesome stuff for the community, and you don't get the props you deserve. You're seriously one of the key people who helped FA: United get on track, and we're forever in your debt for it.

Toumal (SoFurry) - You've always been a level and awesome guy, and you've got one hell of a sexy character. What can I say. I am so gay for you.

Jery/Starling (Inkbunny) - Smooth launch. No massive drama. Level headed. Are you sure you're a furry site? IMPOSTER! Or maybe... *gasp* POD PEOPLE!

Ch'marr (VCL) - No idea where you're about these days, but you've always been an awesome guy and an inspiration me (goin' all the way back to '99!).

So, I got my copies of StarCraft 2 today (yay) and it came with a special "Boost Pack" promotional offer (I got three of them)! The Boost Pack is an "exclusive" code with access to special giveaways and more. It's a very special offer.

Or is it?

Exhibit A)- http://twitpic.com/29th8x - The Boost Pack card. The First Rule of Boost Pack? DO NOT LOSE THIS CODE! Look it over. It seems to imply that this is a very special code, and a very special offer.

It's not.

Because I give you...

Exhibit B) - http://www.gamestop.com/gs/landing/.....boostpack.aspx

This is the website that the Boost Pack code takes you to. SPECIAL! But it's not. This is no exclusive offer that only Boost Pack code holders have access to. Yes, the code may be accessed by anybody. Anybody at all.

IN FACT... why, the code doesn't exist at all!

Because I give you...

Exhibit C) - 1) Go to http://www.gamestop.com/scii
2) Marvel at the "enter your code here!" page and wonder way special offers await behind it.
3) Type anything into the box. Anything at all! I chose "shitshitfuckwad" and... hey, wait a minute, I go to the Boost Pack elusive offer page! YES! THE CODES DON'T WORK!

The god damn Boost Pack codes are a lie!

Which leads me to...

Exhibit D) - The Boost Pack card claims the code can be used to access a giveaway with prizes! But the same giveaway is posted directly on www.gamestop.com, the main site, and is open to anybody. Anybody at all. In fact, there's not even a way to enter the "Boost Pack" code.

At all.

This entire thing is a joke and a shame on GameStop's part.

What a crock.

THANKS FOR BEING A LYING PIECE OF SHIT, GAMESTOP!

Congrats  thejackalface of Dinohoodies ( http://bit.ly/9UWpiP ) and  animeamy ( http://tinyurl.com/2wnkq83 ) for being featured on premiere gaming website, Kotaku! YOU ARE CREDIT TO TEAM! Two FA members getting Kotaku posts in under 24 hours? That's just effing awesome.

Anime Amy's awesome FA "Spy Pony" submission:
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3932647/

Good general press for some awesome artistic creations by community members! We likes this.

http://kotaku.com/5596751/meet-pokemon-triple+zero

Victini, a new Pokemon... looks like a cock'n'balls. With buttwings.

Now that I've seen it I can't unsee it, and want to share this horrible mind vision with you!

This is just... surreal, and beautiful, and it looks kinda like Missile Command. But that's just not the point. It's incredible!

Right around the halfway point, the thousand and one tiny surges you'd never be able to see with your eyes... AMAZING.

Note: First off, we're listening to feedback over the new UI, making changes where appropriate. This is not the first UI change we've gone through, and the reactions are pretty much what we expected (and on par with reactions of our last UI change in 2007). We're making improvements as we go. So fret not.

---

A lot of grumbling that Saturday's downtime was a "15 hour outage to change the layout". No, it was far, far, far more than that, actually! It was a 15 hour outage because we replaced our main database server. We just committed the changes from Sigma to the main site while we were at it.

We relocated from Tiamat (32GB RAM, 2X Opteron 2212s dual-cores, 4X 74GB WD Raptors) to Novastorm (64GB RAM, 2X Xeon 5420 quad-cores, 2x 15K 74GB SAS drives + 6X 10K 146GB SAS drives). There's a lot of raw power, storage and performance at the site's usage now. Novastorm has a cost of about $7,500 to the site so far (about $10,500 if you count all donated hardware that went into it!). Moving DB servers is never a pleasant experience, and took longer than we expected (our apologies!).

If you're not a geek then all of this is pretty Greek to you. If you are, then you've probably got a nerdboner going on right now. It's a big upgrade, and one that we sorely need.

Performance across the board has spiked.

With our new bandwidth, we hit a noted peak of 201.19mbit of data at a given point (that's 51.19mbit higher than our previous total cap!) and at one point had 7,587 users comfortably on the site at one point (with no slowdowns!).

http://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/19470768428

That's pretty impressive.

There's a lot of changes that took place under the hood, and while we can't share them all (some were admin side) it was a fairly meaningful update. =3 We're improving it as we go along, and smoothing things out.

Yak deserves a mountain of credit as he spent all day working on it and getting everything taken over, transferred, configured and setup. And on his weekend. He spent almost the entire e day handling changes.

So thank you, yak. =3 You don't get the credit you deserved.

[img]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/546166/fa/p.....-2.0.png[/img]

For those of you disgruntled and frustrated, as a reminder, this is a stepping stone for us to build towards our new UI which we are working towards right now.

It's coming, and a shitload of improvements (some big, some small) are on their way.

So take a deep breath. Breathe in, breathe out. Just not too hard (especially if you have asthma).

For example, today we added in Session Management (lets you be logged into multiple devices at once, which is part of FA Mobile). We upgraded to a server from 32GB of RAM to 64, from a quad-core system to an octo-core box (with almost 4X the total CPU power) and a LOT of other little things that are under the hood that go towards makeing FA the single best furry site there is.

Little steps towards a big goal.

Sometimes those steps aren't fun between A and B.

[img]http://preyfar.furaffinity.net/fa_update.jpg[/img]

We're still working on some tweaks and updates to the "Sigma" site. A few people have claimed the site design looks massively flawed.

If you are not seeing FA look like the above example your browser is not properly caching the updated site files. Do a CTRL-F5 on your browser, should look fine. We've had these changes up on Sigma for over a month, and have had the community publicly there to test.

We'll be improving the "Control Panel" in the next few days, so sit tight. There's some massive changes going on underneath the hood, and what a lot of you are seeing are growing pains.

Not everything is as we want it, but we're going to be smoothing some things out. =3 It's not as bad as you think. Don't be afraid of change.

As a reminder - yet again - always double check the address of any website when you click a link. It takes about two seconds to do so. It's very easy to mask a link to take you to another site, especially one engineered to look like Fur Affinity.

Don't be an idiot. If you click a link that takes you to "furaffiniity.t35.com" it's probably *NOT* Fur Affinity. I'm just saying. This is your accounting security you're handing over to people. Don't be stupid with it.

We've been through this before. However, some of you are idiots (yes, idiots) and continue to click these links and lose your accounts. Stop it. Have the past 10 years of Nigerian bank scam frauds not taught us anything?

Granted, right now about 6 accounts have been compromised (and secured) out of 390,000. That's an incredibly low number, but that's still too high for my tastes. Do not be an idiot. Know the basics about protecting your accounts, because if it doesn't happen here, it will happen on your e-mail, another website, your Paypal, wherever. Phishing scams are /common/ - learn how to identify them.

This is not an FA security issue. It's a common sense issue, but phishing scams are easily defeated with a little common sense.

Read more about phishing here:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/sec.....ing.mspx?ifs=0

NOTE: Yes, if I come off sounding harsh... understand I'm doing so for your own good. Do not be an idiot. Learn the basics of internet security. This can happen on SoFurry, Inkbunny, DeviantArt... anywhere. If you lose your account because you log into a fake website there is very little we can do to assist you if Bad Things Happen™.

Our bandwidth got upgraded from 150mbit to 250mbit today (woot). We're not even in prime time, and we're already hovering at 165mbit a second (about a 9% difference).

So yeah. FA would already start its slowdown period right about now, but the bandwidth cap is pushing up nicely.

We also push out 31.84tb of data month, by the by. Fun fact. Now that we've got 66% more bandwidth... =)

 fablefire is on FA. This makes me squee!

Fablefire is one of the artists behind almost all of the /best/ Woot shirts there are. I've got at least six of their shirts, and... heh, most of my friends have more. They're a totally awesome, creative and funny artist, and damn worth a +watch.

<happysqueepimp!>

They need to make an alarm clock that blares out the sound of cats puking. Because, as any pet owner can attest, nothing gets you out of bed faster than kitty harfing up all over the floor.

"I'm a cat!"
"What's your job?"
"I sleep 18 hours a day and puke on the rug... and on your bed, on your chair, on your desk, pretty much I puke just because, and damned if I don't look cute doing it."

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3587496

This image is absolutely fantastic. The colors, the layout, background... fantastic image.

It needs love. <3

Been drawing snakes all day 'cause of it.

 vtforpedro is fantastic. Give them your watches!

Lyapis' videos always blow my mind. The guy (and his AV team) always manage to compile a mixture of still photography and video manipulation to create a surreal world that just has a life of its own. The genius that goes into taking simple 2D imagery and breathing life into it with a flawless 3D is just... well, amazing.

Just had to share. This video is so simple, yet... magnificent. This what art and digital crafting should be.

A spam bot messaged me on Yahoo. And no, I didn't know this was a spam bot at first. I answer IMs that way. Long story.

[NSFW] http://pastebin.ca/1901260

Just a little update: We're continuing work on Sigma, and you will no doubt see Sigma's changes go live soon. I've been reading criticism that "Sigma is just a cheap UI edit".

On the outside looking in... yes, Sigma is just a slightly different UI with a few tweaks here and there. But there are a lot of little changes under the hood, and they all improve FA's usability. Maybe you'll see them, maybe you won't.

These changes are the first in a series of updates we'll be doing on the site over the next two months, and it's all building up to the new UI (and some other goodies that will be popping up here and there).

We'll need some downtime, too. Yes. Downtime in August. There's 1,001 FA jokes to be made in there. But here, let me trump you with single greatest FA joke ever made:

Q: What's the only other thing in history with more downtime than Fur Affinity?
A: The World Trade Center

*cough* Too soon?*

I thought of that tasteless joke myself, thank you. *bows* But now that we've got that out of the way, how much down time will we need? 24-72 hours. We'll give fore-warning before the downtime occurs, and we'll try to keep it as short as humanly possible. I don't have an accurate estimate yet, no. We still will need to crunch numbers on our side. We've got a bit to do. We're swapping over servers to new colo racks, adding MORE BANDWIDTH (ca-ching!), adding services and upgrading sub-systems so we can implement things like enhance galleries with folders (yeah, those folder things should be about a month or two out)

Oh, and we're going to be pulling the Furry streaming site Watchtail onto FA's systems, too.

All in all, we're fixing bugs, improving support and tweaking a hell of a lot of things under the hood as we go, and improving things as we gear up for the new UI.

It should be fun.

- Dr. Neer, Ph.D in Banology

* Yes, it's a tasteless joke. Life moves on.

I  Sciggles.

That is all.

http://www.furaffinity.net/full/4104236/

Seriously.

Cutest. Picture. EVER™. I challenge you to do something cuter. You can't! You just can't.

It's America's Hat Day!

Run up to the first Canadian you see and hug him! And remember: Canadians drop timbits when shaken! So shake shake shake 'em up!

Just a lil' notice: we've got a special coupon running between FA and FurPlanet this month! You can save 15% on any order from FurPlanet just by using coupon code "FA2010" when you check out!

www.furplanet.com

Coupon expires July 18th