New FFG?

[Danny95]

I’d like to get everyone’s opinion on an idea.

 

I’ll start out by saying the den is great- I read a lot of what you’ve all posted and it’s helped quite a bit to explore this hobby in my life- but respectfully, FFG was the golden age of this community. There was a place for everyone to find more like their own, & content for whatever you liked to see even in the more niche categories.

 

We’re a scattered community. Between TFD, tumblr, fetlife, insta, pinterest, fourrere, Mr Mockles, discords, reddit. & we’ve scattered even more since PH & Xhamster decided to require verification of vids. The only mod here has written that he does not want to do it anymore and the host has been radio silent for years, which i agree isn’t fair to him. So who knows when this site will go down?  The design is clunky and outdated,  no mobile optimization, the search feature isn’t great, the gallery has quite a lack of subcategories & depth. I’m not saying this to insult anybody, just to point out the fact that we need a new hub for like-minded people with out very specific interest.

 

I have the time, technical skill, & money to set up a new website. I’m in school right now on break, so i can only dedicate time for the next few months so some others would need to be willing to take a role in it if I were to set things in motion. I’m sure there’s a lot more to consider i haven’t thought about yet, but I wanted to get a feel for the idea from the community. Maybe possible names? Design ideas? Dangers? whatever you’d like to see on the site you feel is lacking elsewhere. I doubt it’ll blow up overnight but it would be a consistent, modern forum for us to reconnect & reinvigorate our.. interest 😉 with others. 

 

eager to hear your thoughts. my dm’s are open also. 

[furs limited]

I am a great fan of this website. Having an alternative IF this site ever goes down would be most welcome.

I have zero technical ability and depend entirely on others. The more outlets available - the better. We have shown that we can follow quality content from myriad sources. 

Have at it Danny95.

[furlvman1]

I too support your suggestion, though have near zero technical ability as well, I'd volunteer, but work a lot of hours and my health is declining. Still, while very appreciative of this, i agree, the FFG was a much better platform all around. It was also more commercial. The dangers would be what normally comes with a porn site, namely illegal content. A good legal support system would be wise. Much as I hate to say this, and I really do, I think you will need to run it as a business more than a hobby. Having your own, in house, fur porn would definitely help. You would have to set it up in a way that content theft is immaterial.

[TSCO]

A site won't be taken down unless the host you have gets a complaint from the local government, which is pretty extreme considering the number of much worse sites online, gore and isis websites to name some. So i don't think one should be worrying on legal stuff, and should just go at it.

Personally i would 100% support a new website and would be very open to completley moving to it, because as thankful as i am to the host paying for this site, because they are never communicating we never know if the site will go down and then that is it. So if you did decide to do it it would be very much appreciated.

To me I wouldn't look for anything that specific on site except from a stable host, as in, a host who will communicate and transfer control to some other paying people if need be. Also a better system for verification might have its benefits in stopping any anti-fur people from finding this place, because if they do, they can have a hay day, as i think one did a few years back.

As a suggestion, you could maybe implment a donation feature to help with the payments if one wanted, maybe offering badges people can display, or maybe access to hidden areas? 

Anyway if you do it I wish you the best of luck, I do have some experince in HTML and graphic design too, but I have an incredibly irregular schedule, so as much as I would like to help with this, I can't but nonthless good luck!

[ozfurlova]

6 hours ago, TSCO said:

A site won't be taken down unless the host you have gets a complaint from the local government, which is pretty extreme considering the number of much worse sites online, gore and isis websites to name some. So i don't think one should be worrying on legal stuff, and should just go at it.

The more likely to occur is when the money to continue hosting the domain runs out - and since the owner has been seen here almost as much as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and Yeti combined, who knows when/if that day is not too far from us...

 

To the OP: by all means have a crack at it but one of the FFG's mainstay of successes was lack of competition: a number of the platforms you've named above didn't exist back then and the closest at the time were the old Yahoo/Geocities Groups, which were on the way out as Yahoo went through a clean-out. Where you are almost certainly going to get your niche however is with an online chat function - it was always popular on FFG and on the older version of TFD before that was turned off. There hasn't really been anything that's come close to it since (I've only just realised that the terrible, crappy one that was here seems to have disappeared too)

[fourrureclub]

Hi, interesting topic there, I'm surprised that the FourrureClub is not named anywhere here, as we are the latest / oldest online fur lovers community still online and a bit active. As the founder of that forum (that was 20 years ago) I've to explain that the problem is not about money (hosting such a website is less than 100 € per year), not technical skills (easy to find a perfect scripts for forums, websites etc.), but what people is waiting for. Understand that 20 years ago, a forum was the best place to discuss. Now people have changed, they are used to social medias, and do no more effort than clicking on a like or posting a "you're hot !" comment. Having a discussion board means asking people to read, write, add content, and this is the big thing that has changed in depth in the use of the internet. So at the end you can create any new platform that you want, you will always encounter the same problem about its members involvement. 

FFG had many members because they were offering a huge quantity of fur related porn. Today it is soooo easy to find such videos, and people is not wanting anymore for discussion boards, but for massive updated and targeted video/photos content. If you can't offer that, than a website that is only a discussion board won't meet the former success we have known. Also promoting such a website today implies to be massively present on social medias, once again, by offering content. If you cannot provide unseen content (which also means not already copyrighted and stole from others), you won't be the new FFG everyone is waiting for. Updating the interface, offering nice looking website, being responsive, developing a smartphone app, etc etc is only an envelope, a skin. What is behind that is the desire of people to talk. Today they want to click on a "like" button, and be fed by tons of videos and pictures, nothing more. People want to be easily entertained, if they wanted to talk more, write more, contribute more, we would have many more posts here or on the FourrureClub. Just one more example ? To join the FourrureClub, I ask new members to answer 3 very simple question about themselves, 1/only half of the new applicants take some minutes to write that, are the others even reading the subscription form ? I guess they don't.

I stay fully available to discuss about this and share my experience, sorry for the kind of pessimistic answer, but this is also 100% realistic.

[foxs]

Personally, I think the design is not an issue. The current design is better than that of most sites in my opinion. But long-time persistance is an issue.

It is nice that new content is being produced/linked to by members but what happens to the old content? What will prevent this new site to become an empty shell full of broken links after some time? Or just a domain without a host? It is very common to see forums/sites with very long history (some russian forums for ex.) but almost no practical use after 3-4 years -- most thumbnails/links are broken and unusable. With larger files the situation is even worse. As it happened with old version of this forum, even good textual posts and stories can be lost. This time, maybe, we could try and create something which lasts.

--------

A possible solution that comes to mind could be IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) [1]. It is a decentralized protocol [2] for the Web created in 2015 with quite good future adoption prospect - given problems with big tech, for example.

To access a website/text/media/... you would normally try to navigate to the website where the content is - you can access this thread like http://www.thefurden.com/index.php?/forums/topic/9501-new-ffg . When thefurden.com website goes down, the content I linked to is gone.

In the IPFS, you could access this thread by what [3] the content is: something like ipfs://pizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco. The "random" characters are a hash [3] of this page. When you try to access the IPFS locator, it tries to find all nodes, which have this page saved. So if there are more machines which have this file saved, you are fine. So even if the main server would be gone/lost funding/changed owner/had disk corruption, the content would still be accessible See below for more discussion.

Another (theoretically, practically not so much in the near future) major advantage: Imagine that you want to post some beautiful image to this forum. Again, normally it would be accessed according where it is located as http://www.thefurden.com/index.php?/forums/topic/9501-new-ffg/IMAGE.JPG . But in the IPFS it is accessed only by what it is - (for simplicity) ipfs://abc123. Meaning, when somebody did not know about our new FurDen forum but would still be using IPFS and tried to share the same picture, he would generate the SAME locator ipfs://abc123 ! This would lead to even more redundancy as any other fur sites existing on IPFS would contribute to a shared collection. But as I stated in the beginning of this paragraph, that is not going to happen in upcoming ~5-10 years.

To access the IPFS, you don't even need to install additional software - if you really do not want to [5]. The new site could theoretically operate on the IPFS and regular users will still access it using regular old HTTP, like this current site. But you do not need to be a pro with command line - there are browser extensions and GUI apps [6] for full IPFS support. This way, everyone could contribute by using some of their bandwidth and disc space to keep the content alive.

We certainly cannot assume that there will always be enough individual people sharing the content. What I image is that there would still be a paid-for server hosting most of the newest/oldest/most popular/least popular content. And if we would like to fully contain linked content from other sites, we would need a quite large storage even for the selected criteria. In that case, funding should be more discussed. In the end, it will still depend on the community one way or the other.

PS: For more tech-savvy people, check out https://awesome.ipfs.io/ and mainly https://github.com/ReForum-ipfs/ReForum-ipfs .

[1] https://ipfs.io/

[2] https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/

[3] https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/what-is-ipfs/#content-addressing

[4] https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/what-is-ipfs/#participation

[5] https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/address-ipfs-on-web/#http-gateways

[6] https://ipfs.io/#install

------

This post, mainly the solution, is a big if. If the IPFS will still be there after 5-10 years. If the new site gets some adoption. But mainly, if we succeed to implement it. And if it will even be worth it.

It is a giant task. With enough time and resources, it might be possible. But currently, I do not know much more about the technology than what I sketched here. From what I read, there can still be problems with network performance. I shall try to make some experiments and post more information here. Sadly, I'm very occupied with school & work at the moment. I will be glad for any objections and ideas.

[furlvman1]

12 hours ago, fourrureclub said:

Hi, interesting topic there, I'm surprised that the FourrureClub is not named anywhere here, as we are the latest / oldest online fur lovers community still online and a bit active. As the founder of that forum (that was 20 years ago) I've to explain that the problem is not about money (hosting such a website is less than 100 € per year), not technical skills (easy to find a perfect scripts for forums, websites etc.), but what people is waiting for. Understand that 20 years ago, a forum was the best place to discuss. Now people have changed, they are used to social medias, and do no more effort than clicking on a like or posting a "you're hot !" comment. Having a discussion board means asking people to read, write, add content, and this is the big thing that has changed in depth in the use of the internet. So at the end you can create any new platform that you want, you will always encounter the same problem about its members involvement. 

FFG had many members because they were offering a huge quantity of fur related porn. Today it is soooo easy to find such videos, and people is not wanting anymore for discussion boards, but for massive updated and targeted video/photos content. If you can't offer that, than a website that is only a discussion board won't meet the former success we have known. Also promoting such a website today implies to be massively present on social medias, once again, by offering content. If you cannot provide unseen content (which also means not already copyrighted and stole from others), you won't be the new FFG everyone is waiting for. Updating the interface, offering nice looking website, being responsive, developing a smartphone app, etc etc is only an envelope, a skin. What is behind that is the desire of people to talk. Today they want to click on a "like" button, and be fed by tons of videos and pictures, nothing more. People want to be easily entertained, if they wanted to talk more, write more, contribute more, we would have many more posts here or on the FourrureClub. Just one more example ? To join the FourrureClub, I ask new members to answer 3 very simple question about themselves, 1/only half of the new applicants take some minutes to write that, are the others even reading the subscription form ? I guess they don't.

I stay fully available to discuss about this and share my experience, sorry for the kind of pessimistic answer, but this is also 100% realistic.

Thus is a good experienced perspective. I hadn't as I'm sure several others hadn't either, given thought to the changing  nature of the jnternet over time.

[fourrureclub]

5 hours ago, furlvman1 said:

Thus is a good experienced perspective. I hadn't as I'm sure several others hadn't either, given thought to the changing  nature of the jnternet over time.

You can trust me, we at FourrureClub.com, are the oldest still alive community. The thing is that people's behaviour changed so much, let's take a quick example :

Fourrureclub : 4891 members (founded around year 2000)

Take any random fur related instagram account :

https://www.instagram.com/furboyy1/ : 4340 followers (created 2 and 1/2 years ago)

See their viewed / liked / commented stats and ratios, this reflects people's behavior : watch a lot, sometimes click on a like button, and rarely comment with a few words only.

These accounts offer content only taken from other instagram accounts (so easy), compared to a discussion board, where the content is 100% original, made by its own users. If you have nothing more to offer than 100% original content (as this was the case in FFG with home produced videos), or super easy to consume content (thousands of stolen photos to scroll like in these instagram accounts), then you will just be another attempt to revive the good old discussion boards, and fail. Internet has become a huge consumerists place, compared to the contributive place it was in its beginning. Today people want to be entertained, watch a lot of easy found content, and that's it. Click on one of these instagram accounts and you'll access thousands of pictures to watch. Believe me, this is far easier as going to a discussion board, reading the newest posts, taking some time to write some words and contribute to a topic... people are so lazy today, they just need to be fed with ready to digest contents. In that case, creating a new website will change nothing, I'm sorry about that.

Also about the photo galleries, you should consider the copyright question. At Fourrureclub we removed the photo galleries because :

- too much stolen photos (reminder : taking a photo anywhere on the internet is not allowed without the person's permission)
- sorting the posted photos to keep only the real original ones is time consuming
- many people don't want to post personal content, which leads to empty galeries

At the end, as the webmaster of that website, my main fight today is offering a nice place to discuss, keeping the site alive and secured on a technical point of view, and accepting that today less people is taking time to read and write than it used to be. Anyhow, we have our own place, ruled by us, and not dependant of Facebook's rules or other social networks that will ban you in case you post a tit or some explicit sexual language 😉

Edited April 18, 2022 by fourrureclub

[LeComte]

Thanks @Danny95 for bringing up this topic. I also thought about starting it.

I also have my doubts about the longevity of this place. And I see the persistent need for a english-language forum on fur fetish. Therefore I definitly consider it a good idea to open up a second forum, primarily as a backup, eventually as a replacement.

As for now I consider fourrureclub.com as the backup. Yet, I guess most people would not be willing to go to a french website.

As @fourrureclub concluded, there wouldn't be much activity on the new forum. I also think that it would be difficult to spread the news about the new site for a variety of reasons. Anyway, even a small forum would be great.

 

As the main problem I consider copyright issues (see fourrureclub's remark) and information security. Both are solvable. And: I'd happy to help.