Hello Fur Affinity!
This is
Chase broadcasting to you today alongside
dragoneer. I’m the Director of Operations for the website and I am currently working with our digimon overlord to help improve the website for everyones’ use, including staff relations and communication. I wanted to address some concerns that our users have had as well as some recent issues of which I have been made aware, and then comment on other things that may be weighing on curious minds.
2014 DDoS and Fundraiser
Dragoneer had been exploring options to provide users with a way to donate to the website since this option had been unavailable for about 3 years. Originally, users were able to use Paypal and AlertPay; however, those options were removed due to Fur Affinity hosting mature artwork. He originally had settled on GoFundMe; however, I protested against opening for donations until we could provide users with meaningful updates to the website as a show of good faith.
Soon after the GoFundMe was created in preparation, Fur Affinity was DDoS’d by unverifiable assailants which resulted in loss of access to the site. Smaller attacks have been launched in the past with varying levels of impact on the site, including financial, but this one was the largest. With the intent to alleviate these issues, Dragoneer launched the GoFundMe. Unfortunately, the donation site was closed due to people filing reports stating that Fur Affinity was a pornographic website in an attempt to prevent him from collecting the maximum allowance. There were also unfounded conspiracies posted about the timing of the DDoS and the creation of the donation page, falsely leading patrons to believe that Dragoneer had paid to attack his own site and other furry art communities in an attempt to collect money for his own personal gain. These lies unfortunately lead to approximately $500 in chargebacks against the donation drive.
In spite of these setbacks, Dragoneer was able to raise $18,932 in donations for Fur Affinity to help combat future DDoS attacks and improve the website.
$18,932 (Gross Total Donations)
-$1,827.77 (GoFundMe Fees and Chargebacks)
-$2,500 (Taxes)
-$2,500 (Supporter Gifts and Shipping)
-$1,710 (Promised Donation to SoFurry)
=$10,394.23 (Net Total Donations)
The money set aside for taxes and supporter gifts is a rough estimate. Any additional funds necessary or leftover will be accounted for and used appropriately.
Supporter Gifts
For our amazing patrons who have donated, we are providing the following gifts:
$25 Level: Thank You card
$50 Level: Fur Affinity T-Shirt
$100 Level: Fur Affinity T-Shirt, Patch & Lanyard
$250 Level: Fender Wall Sticker
We are working diligently to garner these supplies and send them out to patrons; however, there is a setback concerning T-Shirts. We do not know the sizes of the patrons who have earned this gift and we do not have access to email accounts to send inquiries. In lieu of this, we will be sending out letters to the addresses we have on file to seek out these sizes so that we can batch order the shirts and get them out. These letters will be sent out no later than Friday, December 5, 2014.
All other gifts are scheduled to be ordered no later than Monday, December 8, 2014. We will keep you updated on the status of these gifts.
Fur Affinity Taxes
There has been concern about the donation drive and taxes that Fur Affinity owes. Fur Affinity currently owes approximately $10,000 to government agencies for taxes on advertisements and
Fur Affinity United. These taxes were not correctly appraised. I have discussed this with Dragoneer, and to prevent this error in the future, he has asked his certified public accountant to calculate taxes on a quarterly level, resulting in higher accuracy when estimating taxes and saving more money to cover any unforeseen issues.
Dragoneer originally stated that it would be ideal to use part of the donations to alleviate this burden; however, I have dissented against this since supporters were not told originally when donating and would constitute a breach of trust. As a result, none of the donations will be applied to any owed taxes and will be only used to support the website. And whenever any of this donation money is used to support the site, it will be publicly announced.
Donation Money Uses
$10,394.23 (Net Total Donations)
-$25.00 (Cloudflare: 2014/10) [Monthly]
-14.99 (OVH VPS: 2014/10) [Monthly]
-252.72 (Pingdom: 2014/10) [Yearly]
-$25.00 (Cloudflare: 2014/11) [Monthly]
-$9.31 (Amazon SES: 2014/11) [Monthly]
-14.99 (OVH VPS: 2014/11) [Monthly]
-$25.00 (Cloudflare: 2014/12) [Monthly]
-$9.31 (Amazon SES: 2014/12) [Monthly]
-14.99 (OVH VPS: 2014/12) [Monthly]
=$10,002.92 (Donations Available)
=391.31 (Spent to Date)
Expense Reasons
Cloudflare (Monthly Expense):
Offers a limited amount of DDoS protection and asset caching that decreases page load time, thus increasing site performance.
Amazon SES (Monthly Expense):
A bulk-emailer utility that provides cloud storage for site resources, increasing email reliability to ensure users receive emails concerning account registration and password resets.
OVH VPS (Monthly Expense):
An email host system that provides the site with separate bandwidth for staff communication.
Pingdom (Yearly Expense):
An uptime and monitoring suite which provides both users and staff to active server monitoring. Text alert notifications are sent to technical staff in the event of downtime to increase response times to server outages.
Bugs Affecting Site Performance
Missing Notifications:
You may have noticed that when you attempt to upload a submission or post a journal that it takes an excessive amount of time before the content is available on the website. This issue is compounded when a user has a significant following. The reason for this delay is due to the notification system attempting to send out messages to all of these followers in unreasonably sized batches. In order to counter this issue, which also causes site lag as a byproduct, our tech team moved to a new system which staggers the batches. Unfortunately, this system inadvertently allowed these messages to start building up in bulk to the point where messages were lost or never sent out at all.
To counteract this issue, the tech team has made changes to prevent notifications from being sent to accounts that are permanently banned or deceased and is in the process of deleting millions of rows of notifications on those accounts. This process is estimated at about 1 week and may impact notification delivery during batches that time out. The work began last Friday and is estimated to be completed on Thursday, December 4, 2014. Many of you may have already noticed an improvement in the system, and when the process is complete, performance should increase greatly.
Furthermore, we are discussing pruning notifications that are old to further augment the system being put into place to increase performance further. In the meantime, we apologize for any inconvenience and will keep you updated.
Icon Images Not Loading:
Cloudflare offered a feature to increase mobile performance. Unfortunately, this feature resulted in improved mobile performance at the cost of overall site performance. It has been removed and icons should be loading properly now.
Uploading Content Errors:
Users have reported timeout errors when attempting to upload content. These errors were often accompanied by a Cloudflare message. This issue is tied to length of time it takes to upload content to the website. Upload times should be drastically reduced when the notification system maintenance is completed. In the meantime, the timeout windows have been increased to compensate and users should no longer be experiencing this issue.
Database Error When Accessing Deceased/Banned Accounts:
We have recently been made aware that some users are encountering database errors when attempting to access deceased accounts and their content, including favoriting. This issue is the result of current maintenance, and will be resolved once it is completed.
How Do We Improve Fur Affinity?
Currently, our tech team is working diligently to correct all of the aforementioned bugs which promises to deliver a great deal of performance improvements; however, site performance is not the only issue at hand.
Increase Content Capacity:
Dragoneer is looking into the possibility of purchasing additional servers so that we can increase content upload sizes for all users. This will also come with new coding to properly provide site resizing in addition to being able to download the full resolution.
Conquer Trouble Tickets:
Fur Affinity is a massive website home to 1.15 million accounts and we do not have enough staff answering tickets, resulting in a backlog. Hiring and training more staff is a necessity that I will discuss shortly.
Transparency and Accountability
There are those buzzwords again, but can Fur Affinity stay true to its promises? I think the issue with saying that “Fur Affinity is going to be more transparent” is that there is nothing attached. Are we going to be completely transparent across the board like a public agency or are we going to be more transparent in specific areas of our business, like the private company we are? Furthermore, how does accountability play a role?
As Director of Operations, I am making the promise to you to uphold the standards I present in this journal. If my position is ineffective in making a difference to this website whether due to my own incompetence or due to roadblocks outside of my control that I am unable to overcome, then I will resign. Like many of you, Fur Affinity is my home and the website has given me so much for nothing. I’ve used this site for over 8 years. I have volunteered to serve this site for half of that time, and now have reached a position where I feel I can do a great deal of good, helping transform this outdated site to something modern of which we can be proud.
Transparency Subsection:
Money:
Fur Affinity will be transparent with all donations made to the website and how those donations are used.
Staff:
Fur Affinity will be transparent with our System and Community Administrators, Directors, and Owner.
The Owner is Dragoneer. He’s ultimately responsible for the total management of this website.
Directors have a broad range of responsibilities, including overseeing daily operations, reviewing staff performance, training, etc. Currently, I am your Director, and I hope I’m making a good impression!
System Administrators have access to Fur Affinity’s code and database.
Community Administrators supervise Moderators and primarily answer disputes made via the Trouble Ticket system against actions taken by Moderators.
Moderators will operate under anonymous accounts, which is standard business procedure; however, their responsibilities are restricted and communication between them and users will mostly take place via the Trouble Ticket system.
Site Performance and Bugs:
I am doing the best I can to ask the questions I see raised by users in tickets, on the website, and experience myself so I can help resolve performance issues and bugs. As you have seen, I have provided you with a great deal of information concerning this topic earlier. Hopefully, this section will be mild while performance is awesome. Either way, I will do what I can to keep you all in the loop!
Accountability Section:
Staff:
Since I’ve worked for Fur Affinity, there has not been a unified way to train new staff members. Typically, a new volunteer is taken under the wing of a veteran and taught the basics before being allowed to work solo and without any supervision. There were no checks and balances nor any way to maintain performance standards.While Sciggles served as a member of staff, she saw these issues and did her best to enact reform by creating moderator teams based upon content to improve training and provide a supervisor to lead and instill company policies. This was a big improvement, but was left unfinished when she stopped volunteering to focus on personal projects.
I have taken it upon myself to finish where she has left off and will be providing staff with a handbook that will not only provide training, but serve as a reference guide to ensure uniform and efficient performance. I will be building upon her team skeleton and providing Fur Affinity with a true business model to augment professionalism and treat Fur Affinity with the respect it deserves.
Although content removal notifications are sent by the Fur Affinity system (@SystemAdmin) and communication may be with anonymous Moderators, rest assured that all removals and conversations via the Trouble Ticket system are documented and can be appealed. In addition to the handbook, I will be working to provide users with clear information as to how staff actions can be disputed for easy reference. Lastly, staff will be subject to nondisclosure agreements and will need to provide documentation of identification to protect your privacy and the website’s.
I am currently estimating that interviews for new staff members (Mods, Admins, etc.) will commence on Monday, December 15, 2014. If this timeline changes, I will note it.
Zidonuke/StarryKitten:
On November 13, 2014, Zidonuke was made Lead System Administrator of Fur Affinity under the alias StarryKitten. He was volunteering for Fur Affinity since Summer of 2013 (about a year) as a consultant under supervision and had no direct access to the site’s code or database at that time. Dragoneer was aware of Zidonuke’s past and wanted to give him an opportunity to start anew within the community and try to make things right due to his checkered history as a black hat hacker. It should be noted that it is not unusual for companies to hire reformed hackers to help improve performance and the security of websites due to their desirable skill sets and experience.
Unfortunately, since Zidonuke was introduced under an alias and was eventually outed for his past hacktivities, many users felt unsafe with him and his new role on Fur Affinity. This led to outrage and serious threats made against him, ultimately resulting in his resignation.
As a user of this website, I sympathize with everyone who was uneasy with the decision to appoint Zidonuke to a System Administrator role. I do not condone his past actions nor was I involved with this decision. I only knew of this appointment after the announcement was made. Although this appointment was intended to be both beneficial for Fur Affinity and Zidonuke’s future, the way that it was handled was embarrassing. I have been assured by Dragoneer that I will be kept aware of all future staff nominees and will be able to appropriately give weight to decisions in accordance with my position here on Fur Affinity.