It's been said that FA consistently has several times more clean artwork than mature/adult-rated artwork -- thus, the site cannot possibly be all about porn.

The bit about the numbers is true. But I object to drawing conclusions about what viewers think from what artists do.

So here is a chart of faves, comments, and views for each rating, and the average number per submission:
http://eevee.pastebin.com/Ze8hNXEL

There's almost five times as much clean art as blatant porn, and yet porn still has quite a few more total views. Hmm.



Disclaimer: my data is way old. Who knows; maybe something has drastically changed in recent months.

Right, so, still going. Currently chillaxing in Baltimore with purplekecleon. We arrive late Wednesday night sometime; I will surely keep the internets posted about the arduous journey.

I don't have a ton of plans and don't usually go to a lot of the panels or whatever at these sorts of things, so feel free to ping me about doing whatever.


floof (that art site) is still plodding along; it's pretty much just me working on it when I'm not working on veekun, which is rare, and I don't have nearly the web of furry interest that BlueTaboo or Inkbunny have so it's.. just me. We'll see if it gets somewhere cool despite this. I don't think it's that much work to get it functional and pretty, and then perhaps I can get a few people using it. I just need to find some guilt-free time to do that.

Man, I hate marketing. I've never been good at it, and prefer to avoid doing it at all. I just want to build something cool and have that speak for itself.

Doin' it again. Rooming in the main hotel with one purplekecleon. I don't even know who else is going. :V

I'll be permanently attached to ~~the internets~~ via my bitchin phone so it won't be super hard to find me! Maybe I will even make google latitude completely public for the duration of the con. And then make a cool graph of where I go or something. Fuck yeah graphs.


I'm sort of sad that Twitter has caught on so much, because it used to be perfect for keeping up with other people at events, but now it's more overflowing with "I'm buying milk" and "beep boop automated message that I just played MW2". :(

I hate notes. Hate 'em. They're just a cheap copy of email, except they're less functional, they all work a little differently, I have to go to X Y Z etc sites to check them, and they only work within that one site. I already have a way for people to send me not-immediate messages; why not use it?


So I propose the following and am curious what people think:

I want to send a "note" to purplekecleon. On her userpage or wherever is a link to do this.

The link is actually just a mailto:, with a recipient of purplekecleon[at]floof.com (or whatever). I don't have to know what her email address is.

I bang out some emotionally inspiring message in my email client.

to: purplekecleon[at]floof.com
subject: dicks

please draw dicks

heres 20

attachment: $20.jpg

Right. Off it goes.

PK then receives an email that is marked as being from eevee@floof.com, but to her regular email address. She doesn't have to know my email, either.

She can then reply, or star it, or label it, or do whatever zillion things her email client does. At no point is either of our emails exposed publicly, and it's obvious that the emails are coming from a specific user of a particular site.


Thoughts?


Some things to keep in mind:
- Email does support read receipts.
- In theory, only email from known email addresses would actually be passed on by the server like this. I'm not quite sure how this would actually work at the moment, but the idea is that it still works functionally like notes: only user-to-user communication.

The lesser version of this is to allow people explicitly ask to receive their notes as email, but then they'd still have to use the site to reply, and that's a bit self-defeating.

So a few others and I have started writing an art site, inspired by what I wanted Ferrox to be.

http://eevee.livejournal.com/314027.html

As I only talk about FA-related things here, and this isn't related to FA, I will likely not mention it further here.

10:34 » Bobskunk [~Bobbler@1BB2FFAC.9C5D13C0.EA86DD5C.IP] has joined #furaffinity
10:34 » mode/#furaffinity [+b *!*Bobbler@1BB2FFAC.9C5D13C0.EA86DD5C.IP] by ChanServ
10:34 » Bobskunk was kicked from #furaffinity by ChanServ [User banned for going into other channels and asking them to troll #furaffinity]
...
10:46 < Eevee> 10:45 <~Bobskunk> I said, in #softpaws, "lol they're going ban crazy in #fa
10:46 < Eevee> 10:45 <~Bobskunk> someone says "oh lemme see"
10:46 < Eevee> hm
10:47 < Bacu> wall trut
10:48 <%Eli> Please don't talk about user bans in the channel
10:49 < Eevee> why not
10:49 < Eevee> are they not relevant to the channel population
... (no response from Eli)
10:53 < Eevee> :|
10:56 < Eevee> "<Bobotter> By the way if I said what I just said in #furaffinity I would have been banned (because they're going crazy in there)"
10:56 < Eevee> asking them to troll #furaffinity eh.
10:57 < Bacu> DRAMA
10:57 < Eevee> why does the FA staff only talk when it's for PR and generally clam up otherwise
10:57 * Carenath watches with rather cold eyes.
10:57 < Eevee> hello cold eyes
10:57 » mode/#furaffinity [+b *!*@fur-6C6610A3.sttlwa.fios.verizon.net] by Pinkatron
10:57 » Eevee was kicked from #furaffinity by Pinkatron [user banned for trolling and failing to follow channel op requests.]

10:57 » Irssi: Starting query in furnet with pinkatron
10:57 <Eevee> how is that trolling
10:58 <Eevee> it seems like a reasonable question
10:58 <Eevee> "what are you doing"


Questioning Pinkuh is trolling.

She has not responded. She never does.

So lulz's Internet Detectives found a pastebin log between Dragoneer and TORA. I'm not going to spread it around; go find it yourself.

I'm sure others disagree, but what I find most interesting are the following bits:
Preyfar (9:37 PM): We've got notes of you talking to him about his "yoga" and ability to go down on himself... [snip]
Preyfar (9:53 PM): Do you even realize that by law I probably HAVE to report that?

Without consulting law enforcement, Dragoneer read a user's notes in the name of being furry police. And now he laments that he might... have to involve law enforcement, which is only a problem because he violated privacy in the first place. (I like the "probably", btw.)

Incidentally, either TORA or Dragoneer must have put this log on pastebin in the first place. I'm dying to know who and why. I don't really see TORA as the pastebin type.


Dragoneer, you are not an inherently bad person, but this dance is really getting old fast.


addendum:
@eevee Because we had reason to believe he was in violation of the law and, in fact, he was.
So, yes, Dragoneer is taking the law into his own hands. Christ.

Part one. Man, this is all starting to sound familiar.

So, first we had someone possibly (I don't know, I didn't watch it) make the fandom sound sleazy on a talk show. Dragoneer banned this person for the "good of the fandom", then backpedaled hastily and apologized. That "good of the fandom" quote from the ban message seems to conflict with Dragoneer's statement that "Chewfox was banned (temporarily) to prevent drama against her and for site stability". Hm.

Then, recently, someone else was banned for "pedo"-related charges that happened over eight years ago. Evidence would seem to indicate that this person was convicted, has paid his debt to society, and is now clean in the eyes of the law, save for whatever sex offender shenanigans we have. Not so in the eyes of furry art sites, I guess, although I have seen zero administrative comment on this one whatsoever.

(If I may go out on a limb: I would be extremely surprised if the teenager involved in the above case weren't a dumb furry kid who wanted some e-dick, rather than some poor soul sucked into a tangled web of lies and whatever. I certainly remember being fourteen and on the Internet. Not that this makes it okay or teenagers less dumb, but I don't like that this is equated with grabbing an eight-year-old off the street.)


"Generally, what happens off site is not my concern. I've seen a LOT of things, and look the other way."

What are the rules? Why is the furry community slowly being turned into a giant witchhunt?

Still no accountability.
Still no transparency.
Still wasting admin time punishing people for posting shouts on banned accounts, even though it would take less than ten minutes to make this programmatically impossible...


Addendum: Also, Internet detectives on lulz reveal that Dragoneer has no qualms about reading your notes. He read TORA's as part of his decision to ban, it seems.
Let's repeat that: Dragoneer reads your notes.

Ferrox is dead. Or, at least, net-cat wants to start over from scratch in PHP, throwing away all the work that's been done so far.

I think this is a dumb thing to do, but I'm not really interested in berating anyone for it. I don't think Ferrox is going to be completed at this point no matter what the dev "team" does, and I don't think FA would be significantly improved even if it were.


The administration's position is increasingly implied to be that the reasoning behind administrative decisions, or even that they have been made at all, is nobody's business and should never be asked about. I don't really understand such an attitude, and I'm trying to envision how things would go down if, say, governments acted the same way.

I enjoy the SA approach of making the ban log entirely public.


Pinkuh continues to ban people from IRC for mystery reasons, never respond to anyone who's been so banned, never explain her criteria for banning, and ban people who ask about bans. I see she's finally made an addition to the IRC rules explaining that she'll ban for racism. Only a year or so late. I also notice the rules call for a warning in the general case. I don't think I've seen very many of those.

Meanwhile, people who have nothing of interest to say are protected, because they don't rock the boat. This cannot possibly end well for #furaffinity.


FurAffinity's relation with the law is increasingly difficult to follow. We have the following information, quoted from Dragoneer:

General rule:
"However, the moment you begin discussing such activities on FA it goes from being private to public, and once it becomes public it becomes our problem."
"Generally, what happens off site is not my concern. I've seen a LOT of things, and look the other way."

Murder:
This has happened once off-site. The user was in national news and was banned for it.
"Alan Panda was exception, but when you make the national news and the circumstances involve what they did... I will make exceptions. In such instances, we banned those accounts to show that we do not support their actions."

Drug use:
I've seen my fair share of "lol so high" comments scattered around FA.
"However, generally drug usage is different (it's not an instant-ban). We remove comments/journals first, warn them. If it happens again..."
"It's sort of a different scenario since when it comes to drug usage, for the most part, the only person who gets hurt is the individual. Their direct actions don't afflict another."

Bestiality:
If you say you diddled your dog, you get banned.
"We are only taking action against "zoos" who openly discuss engaging in sexual activity/bestiality with animals on the site."

Possession of real child porn:
Happened, uh, off-site, obviously. Frank Gembeck was convicted and is now banned. I haven't seen any administrative commentary on this one, but presumably it falls under the same stance as murder.

Posting of drawn child porn:
Dragoneer continues to defend this. I would too, because I think harsh punishment over the content of a drawing is appalling. But the approach here is questionable.
First comment from Dragoneer: "In every case that's happened the person has had images of real children and proof of such deviancy, and the art was used as additional evidence."
In response, someone cited a recent case where a guy plead guilty solely for possessing lolicon.
Dragoneer said: "The problem is he pleaded guilty from the start, and did not fight his case and stand up for himself. Because he did not stand up for his rights he gave them up, and the penalty of the law was placed upon him from the start."
I'm not sure what to make of this. Does it mean that, should FA come under fire, Dragoneer will take the case as far up the chain as necessary rather than bow and outlaw cub porn? Will he protect the artists potentially affected by this? Is anyone even aware of this ruling?

Minors viewing porn:
I hear tell that Dave Hyena thinks I'm some kind of creepy pedo for bringing this up maybe two or three times while I was working on Ferrox. No, I don't have a fetish for children looking at dicks. I just remember being 16 and enjoying looking at dicks, and at the time there seemed to be a giant witchhunt going on, with people reporting teenagers after hopping through three different social networking things to find their real ages. I think that's completely ridiculous.
But more than that, what I kept asking for was a law that backed the rule. The ONLY law I am aware of that compels Web sites to give a damn about the age of visitors was COPA, and it has been utterly destroyed in court. tsawolf once linked me to a section of the US Code that has nothing to do with the issue, but had no comment once I pointed this out. Dragoneer once said something hand-wavey about it being illegal in Virginia, but extensive Googling turned up nothing, and he couldn't provide a citation or name of the crime.
I'm not bringing this up because I want to fight to abolish the rule. I'm bringing it up because it helps paint this confusing picture.

Minors viewing porn is not illegal and has never been in a case of interest, as far as I can discern. Nobody has any interest in repealing the rule.
Adults posting porn of minors is illegal and has been used to convict people in several cases. Dragoneer defends it.
Real traditional crimes happen off-site. The relevant accounts are banned, to show that the site "doesn't condone their actions". Just in case someone thought having an account on a site meant the site's owner is personally giving the thumbs-up to everything you do?
Talking about committing bestiality, a state crime, is deserving of a ban.
Talking about drug use, a federal crime, is deserving of a warning.

I actually have no idea if it's illegal to talk about doing something illegal, how that applies to the Web, how state lines are involved, etc etc. I'd be interested to know, but it's somewhat orthogonal.

My point is simply thus: FA's actions regarding illegal activity have nothing to do with the law. It appears to be based entirely on the administration's average sense of morals.

And that's fine, really. What I don't appreciate is this whole responsible-upstanding-citizen tale. If your actions are based entirely on your spur-of-the-moment opinion, come out and say so. I find it very hard to believe that the administration's response to illegal activity is based on what Dragoneer has claimed to be the general rule, because nothing they've done is consistent at all. Rather, they appear to be taking action on people relative to how "bad" the illegal activity is (in every case, not just as exceptions).

Why are we doing the job of the court system on a furry art site? If someone's in jail, does it matter that the account is banned? And once someone is out of jail and his Debt To Society has been repaid in the eyes of the law, why should he still be banned?


I'm not trying to spell doom for FA or convince everyone to rise up and rebel. It doesn't matter much to me anymore what happens here, and it's no skin off my back if everyone thinks I'm making mountains out of molehills. Just jotting down some observations in a journal.

http://www.furaffinity.net/search/

Open beta.

Didn't write it, but yak made it live at my suggestion, and I can pass comments along to him. Or just tell him to read the comments. Or you can, uh, just tell him directly I guess.

prependum
Let's try this. Even if the original artist says it's okay, I don't think you should stick work you ~did not do~ in your gallery, because that's not what your gallery is for.


No, I don't mean stealing and claiming it as your own. I mean posting commissions and gift art that you didn't create.

I don't understand this practice at all, and it shocks me that an art site continues to condone it. Your gallery is yours. Every submission page says "by (username)", with a copyright just above attributing it to you. Even the upload page says "Submit your art and images." The implication everywhere is, as is pretty typical for an art gallery, that you will be uploading art you made.

Why, then, are there so many accounts littered with every scribble the owner can possibly find that contains eir likeness? What did you do that makes you just as deserving to show off this work as the artist? Send someone twenty bucks over PayPal? Make up a super-creative persona that greatly resembles a fox with a funny haircut? How does that compare to years of practice and hours of work?

It's not yours. All you did was financially encourage someone to spend their limited time on something you would like. (No, you don't own the copyright, either; that only applies if the artist agreed in writing that it is a work made for hire. See here and here. Artists give permission, I know, but that's irrelevant; the point is that you did not create anything, and the very point of an art site is to show off things you created! It is embedded right down to the core code.)

I have even seen people take a commissioned work, alter it to suit eir needs without consulting the artist, and then post that. Words fail me.

It has been claimed many times that furry artists don't value their work, with painfully low commission prices held up as evidence. I think this speaks volumes louder.

I just don't get it. This is supposed to be an art site, and this community is supposed to be built on art and ride on artists' backs. Why do people who merely manage to scrounge up a few bucks insist on stealing the limelight from those with actual talent who exert real effort? Are we really that desperate for attention? Is someone else's art just a trophy to stick on your mantle? Look at me, look at me, someone drew my yiffy dragon murrsona~


ps: Just to head off this counter-argument since I've heard it time and time again: yes, I know the AUP specifically allows this, and no, that doesn't make it okay. I am also specifically disagreeing with the AUP. Being permitted to do something does not automatically make either the action or the rule good.


addendum
I have no problem with people disagreeing. I enjoy it; it makes things interesting. kalu, for example, disagrees with me but posted an interesting and well-thought-out response. I am taken aback, though, by the number of people who not only disagree, but insult me and then completely fail to understand why this irks me in the first place no matter how many times I explain. Thanks, furry community!

For the record, I dislike this practice merely because it is incorrect. It has nothing to do with giving credit. There are no deep severe practical consequences. It's just not the right thing to do. This may explain a little better.

It is unrelated to my original gripe, but the comments here have given me the sense that the general furry population -- artist or not -- really does have a tendency to treat art as just some trophy to show off. A lot of people have invoked "I give credit" as though it were an ultimate pass to do whatever they want with a work. That troubles me.

Was the original journal really this misleading? I tried to emphasize that my complaint is about creation, not permission.


addendum 2
WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING THIS IS A LOT OF COMMENTS

trackbacks:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/554500/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/554530/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/554641/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/554708/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/554822/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/554883/

I abhor blog quizzes but this one actually has some practical value, although I have edited the fuck out of it so it's not really a recognizable quiz any more. kalu made me do it.

daytime location: Hell if I know. Possibly chilling with purplekecleon at her dealer table (A14) or hogging Rock Band and rocking the fuck out ∖m/. If you are desperate to find me, follow me on Twitter; I will attempt to tweet what I'm doing fairly regularly.
nighttime location: Westin.
roomies:
art: Hurr I can't draw worth a crap; I'd have more luck taking commissions to promise never to draw people.
gender: dongs
age: the absolute difference between the first two perfect numbers less the multiplicative identity
touch: Hugs are cool if I have the slightest idea who you are. Complete strangers may be met with mace. Possibly a mace.
talk: What the hell would I be going to a con for if I didn't want to talk to anyone? :V
drugs: I'm not flying across the damn country for a limited and finite amount of time to spend it inebriated. I live with a bartender, for christ's sake.
yiffles: If you have to read an FA journal to figure this out, the answer is probably no!
appearance: I will have a badge labeled 'Eevee'?

post-script 1: Everyone who is going should get a Twitter account. You can tell it what you're doing by sending it "tweets" via text messages, and you can get selected others' tweets sent to your phone too. I expect it will work much better than attempting to mass-text or mass-call two dozen people every couple hours to find out where the hell they are.

post-script 2: Again, will be at YAPC::NA in Chicago next week on the off chance anyone else will be too.

We are now actually at 0.0.1. I just closed the last ticket.

We are also already halfway to 0.1. Well, 48%, but close enough.

The version numbers are kinda arbitrary, but the basic idea was: 0.0.1 is "enough stuff works that we can start building on it", 0.1 is "more or less does everything FA does now", and 0.2 is "ready to replace FA".

So, yeah. Getting there. I'm sure I'll find way more tickets to open along the way.


Next up: watches and blocking (since they use the same backend), and then we'll have all the basics of FA. After that is lots and lots of polish, admin UI, and figuring out clever things to do with tagging/search. Maybe we're further along than I thought.

I also need to write an FA database import script at some point; I'm going to see about making a dump of the db to play with, without bringing down the entire site 8) Would be nice to have some real data to develop with, anyway.


Uhm. Still going to AC. Will probably post something more relevant and useful about that later. I'm also going to YAPC, if anyone else even knows what that is.

Been a while.

Somewhere along the line, I developed a life, and it has sapped my free time a little more than I expected. Sorry. Comments are functional, though, as are a few other little backend things. This leaves one more thing for our first milestone: user pages. The only complicated part with them is figuring out what exactly sort of metadata we want, which is really the first set-in-stone decision that will drive the site's direction. For now I can clone what FA has, but there are a lot more possibilities leaning more towards social networking land: address? schools? relationship status/orientation? more specific bio fields?

I think I want to split up profiles, too: one page for latest activity and brief stats, one page for an actual profile. Cramming them both together kinda limits what we can put on either, as well as how much space we can devote to anything.

Anyway, uh. Crypto has moved on to.. something else, leaving me in charge. Latiass, kalu, Indi, and verix are all even busier with other things than I am and so awol for the time being. This leaves net-cat and myself. Kinda sucks (a whole month went by without any commits), but we are chugging along.

More important is that first bit. I'm one of those hippie openness FOSS whatever faggots, and the current level of consolidated information from FA -- including from me doing these silly little status updates -- is a little depressing. Reading Planet Mozilla while Firefox 3 was being developed was enlightening to say the least; I had a constant stream of blog posts to read talking about planned features and where they stood and how they could potentially be implemented and who was working on them. We are so distant from this that it's not even funny. It occurs to me now that I was even putting off writing this in the hopes that I could finish something else notable besides comments and look more impressive, which is really not the sort of thing I do.

I've toyed with the idea of making the existing code and bug tracker publicly available, so people can see exactly what is happening and when, but this seems to be an unpopular idea for the moment. I did unlock the IRC channel, though; #furaffinity-dev, same network. Kinda idle but you can watch us geek out every so often. Or tell us why we suck, whatever. Having people to bounce sudden ideas off of would be nice.

Need to get the tracker and repo on my own server sometime; probably tonight, if possible. Not that it matters a whole lot to most of you!


In related news, I am going to anthrocon. It has been suggested more than once that there be a Ferrox demo of some sort there, which would be cool, but I'm not entirely convinced a demonstration of a half-finished art site would be very interesting. Dragoneer also suggested a meet-n-greet, but the idea has yet to go anywhere. Open to suggestions for cool stuff to do. (As a fallback, I have a laptop with me a lot of the time and I am not difficult to find...)


Uh. I think that's all I've got. :(

I'm out of town this week to chill at work (I work remotely), which usually means I'm getting a disproportionate amount of real (read: profitable) work done and not so much the free stuff. Oh, well.

Mostly last week I spend combing through the existing code cleaning it up; there was some quirky stuff written from before we got the hang of Python, things duplicated that shouldn't be, and things not duplicated that should have been. Overall functional difference is approximately none, but the whole point of this exercise is to make the code gorgeous so I consider it a productive use of time nonetheless. Total patch ended up being something like 2000 lines.

I didn't touch the gallery much, but I believe net-cat is going to give it an overhaul; some of the logic just for figuring out which thumbnails to create and when has gotten hairy. He's also looking into MogileFS to fix some of the current grossness involved in storing the absurd number of files we have right now.

Speaking of nets and cats and hyphens, Ferrox now has tagging and full-text search. Only tags will be used for filtering and RSS and such, but the ubiquitous search box looks through both. In theory, you will just have a default filter that will apply to any gallery you're ever looking at, so you can go "-sex -violence -pokemon -armpitvore" or whatever.

I'll probably do comment support next. It's the only really critical basic feature that's still missing. (Everything else is just very complicated icing.) I have some vague ideas on how to collapse threads intelligently after a certain point without nuking the server.


In other news, apparently my screenshots made it onto wtf_fa! I would like to emphasize that actually reading what I write is a good idea, especially when I write things like "I think this theme needs sprucing up a bit" and "the old theme is still available". Also, if you have constructive comments -- i.e. not "this is crap" but something to make it un-crap -- it is far more helpful to tell me rather than bitch on an LJ community I don't watch. The point of writing anything here is, after all, to get feedback.

"Feedback" of course also includes feature requests, which are somewhat lacking so far. I'm gonna have to go through the entire FAF suggestions forum.

I had the flu last week, took a couple sick days off work, and slept through the weekend, so not a lot done.

Rather, I figure I'll mention a few design decisions that have been made fairly arbitrarily but that aren't set in stone yet, so people can yell at me for wrecking the site and driving the community apart ahead of time.

Relationships
I don't like "watches". Right now, they cover the entire broad gamut of "I have some modicum of interest in this user; please spam me with everything e does." I'd like to split these semantics up. Access control, buddy lists, and anything semantically revolving around users you know should be done with a friends list. Who you watch should be independent of whether or not you consider them a "friend"; there are people I don't know but whose art I would like to watch, and there are people I do know who only upload gimmicky stuff I don't care much about. (Yes, this means I want to have separate watches. RSS for both individual users and my own watchlist would also be nice.)

Maybe "friends" should also have some other labels, since "friend" is in itself a bit vague, but those would probably be entirely for show.

Scraps and Featured Art
I hate the concept of scraps. It's completely arbitrary, unobvious when someone uses it or doesn't, and inflexible. On the other hand, I don't have any great ideas for replacing it. The UI could be improved, I suppose, but that's about all.

The next-best thing to do is to merge scraps with featured art; make them both just levels of how much you like a particular piece. This would let you have multiple featured pieces (several shown at once? latest shown? pick at random?) and switch between scrap/feature/normal at a click and be generally less grungy.

By You, For You
It may or may not be obvious at this point that I have a hardon for semantics. <p> means "this is a paragraph", dammit, and I want to smack people who use it as a generic container; lists should be in list tags; header text should use header tags. Similarly, I am uncomfortable with the number of users who have uploaded art they did not create. This is okay according to FA rules, yes, but a gallery of your art means "I made this", not "this is probably related to me somehow". In a more practical sense, this leads to double uploads, keeps artists from seeing all the comments and faves their art attracts, and just gets confusing if someone uploads both eir own art and gift art.

So! I'd like to generalize this "[user] made [artwork]" thing and let you pick one of several relationships you have with the art. Most notably would be "I made this" or "this was made for me", but it's also possible to have things like "I recorded this" or "this includes me" for cases like someone else photographing your fursuit or for art or photos not specifically meant for you but that include you or your character. This would also allow for collaborations and OCs to be uploaded just once but belong to multiple artists.

There are of course a lot of semantic nitpicks and implementation details to go over here, to make sure everything makes sense (if I commission art of me, it's both for me and contains me) and is easy for users to use, but that's what I get paid to figure out!

These would also probably have one combined set of comments; not sure how people feel about that. Presumably actual control over the work and description would be in the hands of the artist, if one exists, but it's possible everyone involved could get to contribute their own description. Cases with multiple artists are more complicated. The simplest solution is just to take the first attached artist as the primary artist and give em the final word.

Assuming this works out well enough, I may also scour existing uploads for duplicate uploads by both an artist and commissioner and allow them to merge the submissions if both agree.

Watchstream
Essentially sending a note for every new work uploaded by someone you're watching is ridiculous and unmanageable. I'd rather just provide a view of all your watchers' art, in the order it was uploaded backwards. No need to mark anything read, as it will (somewhat intelligently?) remember the last time you viewed the list and indicate so, but still go further back if you missed or skipped something. Even better, you can use an RSS reader and let that take care of marking old stuff.

Also, remembering page size. :V

User pages
Would like to split these up, too. Right now it's a piecemeal of recent activity with a half-assed profile. I'd like to have a more fleshed out recent-activity view (why only ONE recent-upload thumbnail?) with a minimal profile, and profiles separate, with more metadata and attempts to make use of some of it.

Not sure where shouts go in this.

Front page
Bit too static. Should be more useful to logged-in users, showing perhaps friends who are logged in, recent messages, a few recent watches, etc.

Recent uploads are of course still a staple, although I'd like some options besides that; "this was uploaded recently" is not very useful information on its own to me, and occasionally leads to floods and races and whatnot. This is part of the general problem of finding art you don't know about but might be interested in.



Braindump on the first things coming to mind that may be noticeably different. Not much of this is designed in yet, so it's very subject to change, although the next thing I do is probably going to be on this list since we're running out of basics to build. (Woohoo, almost at version 0.0.1...)

I guess these are done, or at least equivalent to what we have now. Mostly.

The following are some screenshots. Some notes on design:
1. This is not the default theme; the default theme is more or less a copy of the one we have now. I just happen to be unable to stand it, so I made a simple replacement. I am far from being a design master, due to not actually being any sort of artist. I don't know if this will be final, or if I'll revisit it again; it was meant to be inspired by the current design, but I'm wondering now if it's too boring. Either way, it will be the style I will probably focus on more, as (a) it is a lot cleaner and (b) since it's not the default, I didn't bother with any CSS hacks. Zero. This means it doesn't work in any version of IE. In fact, since I used inline-block, it doesn't even work in Firefox 2.
2. I am using Firefox 3. Obviously.
3. The pinkish outlines are just reminders of dummy data that needs replacing.
4. The ads floating in the bottom right are just.. chilling. I don't know what to do with them yet.
5. bbcode doesn't work yet; it is almost ready to drop in, though, I think.
6. I am heavily abusing Tango icons. I love Tango.
7. I borrowed a dummy fox icon from Rose Quoll to use in here, because apparently I have this driving urge to copy tiny features of LiveJournal. Whether it survives is still kinda up in the air.
8. Look! Shiny new favicon!
9. Timer bar at the bottom doesn't work yet.
10. Okay, well, I could ramble forever about the bloody theme; screenshots, right, right.

Inbox
Viewing a note -- the idea was to rip off gmail's threading, but I don't know how well I succeeded here since I don't actually use gmail; collapsed notes load inline and fallback without javascript
Send a note

Nothing spectacular, I suppose, but I figured FA deserved some screenshots.

net-cat is, apparently, making inroads of some sort on tagging. I'm not sure what I will do next; perhaps fleshing out galleries.

The veil has been lifted! I'm going to make periodic (for some value of "periodic") reports of Ferrox progress from here on out. This is about the FA equivalent of painting a gigantic target on my chest, I'm sure. Here's what the hell is going on.

First of all, for the 98% of people who still don't know, Ferrox is a rewrite of FA, from the ground up, in Python. It also has a bit of a rocky delay-filled history. It's been in some form of planning (read: "we should do this sometime") since at least last March, but for whatever reason there wasn't really a call for coders until August, and the list wasn't finalized until I guess sometime in September. Initial setup and speccing happened on and off from there on out, and the first real code commit didn't happen until early November. It's been slightly rough going from there on, as we all had to get familiar with the combination of language/libraries/platform we'd ended up with, so small changes often turned into an entire evening of poring over a manual. We also went through at least four different image-handling libraries and discovered they all sucked, at which point we had to find something else and rewrite the existing code again. That's all more or less past now and things are speeding up a bit.

Since this doesn't seem to be actually mentioned anywhere, the current list of coders is:

 thecrypto (illustrious leader)
 indicoyote
 latiass
 lexyeevee
 kalu
 net-cat
 verix

Due to a variety of extenuating concerns, not all of these people are actively contributing at the moment. Who is and who isn't is strictly classified (and rude!), but I will say that I am, and I wish more people were. Some of us just have school/work consuming time like Gabe Newell on donuts.

(If I may soapbox for a moment: honestly, it rather sucks being expected to build a fairly large, vaguely backwards-compatible system that will make users of the old crumbling system happy with tools I have never used before.. and have that userbase constantly make Duke Nukem Forever jokes to my face. Thanks, furs, very inspiring.)


Anyway, current status of Ferrox right now:
- Registration and login and all that boring crap works, complete with an actual damn captcha, for all the good the stupid things do.
- Permissions system, well, exists. I guess there's not a lot to be said there.
- Admin panel is started. I'm basically making admin things up as I think of them, since I am not an admin and have no idea what current FA can and can't do.
- Gallery has basic functionality. Upload, look at stuff. Tagging/searching is roughly working.
- News and journals exist, can post/edit/view; no comment support yet.
- Clone of the current theme exists. Support for different themes and color schemes exists. There's also an alternate theme I made up, but I think I was trying to keep too much in the spirit of current FA and made it too bland.
- I'm doing notes right now; they're almost done.
- I'm trying to aggressively refactor and clean up as I go, so the code stays as compact and simple as possible. Always an uphill battle, but seems to be going okay.

3300 lines of code, 1100 lines of template, seventy or so commits.

Not much in the way of user-facing stuff (watches, profile, whatever) has been done, but a lot of that stuff is really just icing that can be banged out in a few hours. What I mostly want is a fast, flexible, and robust search backend we can use everywhere. Ah, I can dream.

Feel free to watch me; I will try to post something every week or so, and possibly throw up screenshots sometime. In theory, this will get my ass in gear so I actually have something to say every week. 8)

I might also brainstorm here if I don't know how to approach some feature; I'm not an artist, after all, so I am occasionally guessing wildly at how people might use this thing.

take a look at my userpage

...since I have a permanent LJ.

But, again, spidering.