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March 23rd, 2026- Notification Purge and Downtime
an hour ago
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Journal Start
Hey there, Fuzzies!
We hate to have to make a post like this but we’re sure some of you noticed some issues with your notifications this morning. Back on July 18th, 2019 we had announced we’d be autoclearing notifications. We didn’t end up clearing them as aggressively as mentioned in that journal, however with time it became apparent we needed to. So on May 4th, 2025 we announced that we were planning to start auto-clearing notifications that are older than 6 months. We’ve been working in the background to prepare for some upgrades and downtime to get this done, but we never intended for this to be pushed live before giving another announcement so everyone would have a heads up that it was going to start.
Our tech team was discussing this purge during their most recent meeting. It was decided that we’d announce the downtime in this journal, then purge the notifications during that scheduled downtime. Unfortunately, due to a miscommunication, the pruning process was mistakenly started much earlier at 2:00 AM ET this morning and ended at 9:00 AM ET when staff was alerted by our community.
Because of how large these tables are, we cannot estimate how many notifications have been removed, nor can we restore this data. We have, however, been able to determine the cutoff date of where notifications were cleared.
Any notification older than the below are no longer in the database (all times in ET):
Journal comments: September 24, 2025 9:11 AM
Submission comments: November 23, 2018 10:26 PM
Favorites: January 30, 2013 9:02 AM
Journals: September 24, 2009 4:37 AM
Shouts: September 24, 2025 9:08 AM
Submissions: August 9, 2018 11:57 AM
Watches: August 24, 2016 6:49 AM
To be clear, it is only the notifications that have been removed. All the actual comments, favorites, journals, shouts, submissions, and watches are still there.
We have discussed the miscommunication with our team to ensure something like this will not happen again. We apologize profusely for any inconvenience this may have caused. We never intend to push these things live without communication unless in emergency situations, and this was not one of those exceptions.
We have a planned maintenance window to upgrade our system hypervisors, apply much-needed security and stability patches, and continue the notification clearing process.
A reminder for why we need to clear old notifications from our database: The impact on our system is immense, and can cause site slowdowns, inefficient use of space, and query lockups. Currently, even after this accidental clearing, the notifications table still takes over a terabyte of space and has billions of rows populated. The notifications system was built with a smaller site in mind, and because of that we are now seeing the limits of scaling that system.
This downtime will take place on Friday, April 3rd, 2026 from 1:00pm to 7:00pm Eastern Time. This maintenance will involve taking several key pieces of infrastructure and moving them off the affected nodes we are planning to upgrade. The large window is to facilitate that process and ensure we have wiggle room in case any update process needs extra time to complete.
We as a team have said over the last year that we are working on our ability to communicate with you, the community. This is part of that desire to continue providing you with transparency at Fur Affinity—something we still fully believe needs to continue, even if it’s bad news or embarrassing for us.
Thank you again for your understanding as we work through our premature pruning of notifications.
Please keep comments on topic and reminder to be excellent to each other!
We hate to have to make a post like this but we’re sure some of you noticed some issues with your notifications this morning. Back on July 18th, 2019 we had announced we’d be autoclearing notifications. We didn’t end up clearing them as aggressively as mentioned in that journal, however with time it became apparent we needed to. So on May 4th, 2025 we announced that we were planning to start auto-clearing notifications that are older than 6 months. We’ve been working in the background to prepare for some upgrades and downtime to get this done, but we never intended for this to be pushed live before giving another announcement so everyone would have a heads up that it was going to start.
Our tech team was discussing this purge during their most recent meeting. It was decided that we’d announce the downtime in this journal, then purge the notifications during that scheduled downtime. Unfortunately, due to a miscommunication, the pruning process was mistakenly started much earlier at 2:00 AM ET this morning and ended at 9:00 AM ET when staff was alerted by our community.
Because of how large these tables are, we cannot estimate how many notifications have been removed, nor can we restore this data. We have, however, been able to determine the cutoff date of where notifications were cleared.
Any notification older than the below are no longer in the database (all times in ET):
Journal comments: September 24, 2025 9:11 AM
Submission comments: November 23, 2018 10:26 PM
Favorites: January 30, 2013 9:02 AM
Journals: September 24, 2009 4:37 AM
Shouts: September 24, 2025 9:08 AM
Submissions: August 9, 2018 11:57 AM
Watches: August 24, 2016 6:49 AM
To be clear, it is only the notifications that have been removed. All the actual comments, favorites, journals, shouts, submissions, and watches are still there.
We have discussed the miscommunication with our team to ensure something like this will not happen again. We apologize profusely for any inconvenience this may have caused. We never intend to push these things live without communication unless in emergency situations, and this was not one of those exceptions.
We have a planned maintenance window to upgrade our system hypervisors, apply much-needed security and stability patches, and continue the notification clearing process.
A reminder for why we need to clear old notifications from our database: The impact on our system is immense, and can cause site slowdowns, inefficient use of space, and query lockups. Currently, even after this accidental clearing, the notifications table still takes over a terabyte of space and has billions of rows populated. The notifications system was built with a smaller site in mind, and because of that we are now seeing the limits of scaling that system.
This downtime will take place on Friday, April 3rd, 2026 from 1:00pm to 7:00pm Eastern Time. This maintenance will involve taking several key pieces of infrastructure and moving them off the affected nodes we are planning to upgrade. The large window is to facilitate that process and ensure we have wiggle room in case any update process needs extra time to complete.
We as a team have said over the last year that we are working on our ability to communicate with you, the community. This is part of that desire to continue providing you with transparency at Fur Affinity—something we still fully believe needs to continue, even if it’s bad news or embarrassing for us.
Thank you again for your understanding as we work through our premature pruning of notifications.
Please keep comments on topic and reminder to be excellent to each other!
the highest i got before i nuked it was back in 2016 when i had2834995S2553C
703907J266F415Wnever have gotten back up to those numbers since i purge weekly to monthly to keep it up to date
And maybe it's just me but I clear notifications right away no matter what, I hate having unread messages/notifications and I have no idea why it bothers me so much
On a picture yes I want that there forever but not in my notifications
I did notice that my number of Watchers (or rather, notifications about them) dropped by 4 today, so I figured something had happened.
You can purge them all, or you can bulk select the most recent ones (then purge them). Inverting the first page might work, but I haven't tested it - that would only let you delete everything but the most recent 128 (or whatever page you're on) anyway. So you're stuck either deleting them all, or deleting the most recent ones.
I think I was at 250k before?
I'm just lazy.
... oh well, I never read them anyways even though it doesn't come in that often. I should really clear them out to be honest.
Whoever had the most needs a stamp or smth because it's honestly kinda impressive LMAO
Hmm this page has everyone's icons, but it's for the people you follow.
I had long-since purged my backlog of notifications, so I only kept like nineteen on my watch notifications. Lost eight of them. It's a shame, though I'm not as active on here as I used to, so I can't complain too much about it.
Also possibly for "high score" bragging reasons but that's more of a secondary motivation thing lol
It’s still feasible to do, just means I’ll have to get a snapshot of my data on the 30th of June. Definitely would be nice to have that reporting somewhere
Notes notifications should not have been impacted; only the items listed in the journal have been.
I hope this helps! :3
I started in 2018 so I dont have one that old but if I did
What about old journals we can write??
Any user with content that dates from the start of their account would not have seen the content itself removed.
I hope this helps! :3
Edit: He just came up to my bedroom and I showed him this comment, he laughed.
That's part of future planning. But we've got work to do before we get there, and there will be a notification about the auto-removal before it becomes live. :3
But when it comes to Discord or Bluesky usually it's either things I don't really care much or I'm talking with my friends or other peoples so I go clear out the notification ASAP.
But wait....that's accounts marked as deceased. Ah! There are some accounts that the users have died but obtaining proof of death is hard....
Personally I don't view this as system flaw, rather people piling unnecessary amount of who they watch, without even actually going through their artworks/updates. To me that just feels weird to see on any platform, honestly, people watching 1000+ accounts without any realistical way to keep up with all of them (which additionally devalues followers count as a whole as well).
Regarding notifications here though, I am speaking as someone, who didn't catch this website at its birth. Based on comments here - people really had different approach to notifications initially. Although I can understand keeping Watchers, Favorites and Comments for personal motivation and gratitute purposes, collecting Submission notifs is just weird flex for not reason, truly...
I'm not trying to judge you because I just want to know what in your psychology compelled you to use this website's counter for that.
Although all I want is to have:
26S
26J
26C
26W
26N
Why 26? One for each letter of the alphabet.
There's no real harm in that, right?
Well, I guess I have a question, Does this purge apply to my watches? Or rather the new submissions my watches upload?
Because if so, that might screw me up as I like exploring even years back to where it all started for memories sake.
I'm just very scared to see how everyone else will react, considering what I've seen before...
Honestly, not a huge deal, just a bit of an oopsie doing it early lol
At least the other notifs, including the 360217 submission notifs are safe.
It IS a bit ironic how we weren't notified about the notification removal, which is pretty funny in hindsight haha, but considering the circumstances, it can't be helped haha.
I understand though. Well, I will have to be DOWNLOADING next time so this will not happen again...
It hurts, but if there is a good reason, I get it.
But I think it'll be very good since there's a lot of people who rarely visit the site or who have abandoned their account, so I think it will be good to have the notif removed from theses accounts. And... Yeah I have friend who just have like + 500 notifs and never delete theses so I think it'll force some cleaning!
Thank you for the hard work!
Also unrelated, your icon is adorable
Now I wipe them once a day when I'm at my PC instead
Someone's popular!
not that it matters to me, I usually clean my things every week or month XD
But it will be nice to know for how long one can estimate a notification to be there before being deleted by the system.
And also, it's a good way to let users know that.
Understood.
Thank you for the information.
<this is a joke.>
I have several journals I've not cleared out which are made in remembrance of people who've died.
I'm curious as to the total file size of the files holding the notifications? I have to imagine it's in the terabytes at this point, having to store at minimum the links or numerical ID to each [submission / journal / comment] in an ordered list for each person on the scale FA operates at HAS to have a wildly huge total file size.
Each table contains the source of the notification (who performed the action), the target of the notification (the submission or action that the action was done on) and the time that notification was generated. All of which are numbers.
I went to query how many records were in the submissions notification table in total. It took roughly 10 minutes for it to return the *count* of the number of records in the table. 14,547,907,692 by the way. /Just/ for submissions. Not including favorites, journals, or other notifications
I mean, one extra hour is not the end of the world, and it wasn't all that long ago that a botched maintenance happened. I don't say this to humiliate anyone, just a reminder that humans are capable of unintentionally making mistakes even though one is confident of one's work.
I will also suggest to prune accounts that have had extremely long periods of inactivity (i.e. 10-12y+) as well as permanently banned accounts. They take some amount of space too, don't they? It's a draconian measure, sure... but it's not like those accounts / galeries are going to become active again in the next eleven days... right?
Alternatively, inactive accounts could just be given a special flag that more aggressively prunes notifications from.
Just some suggestions worth discussing, I think. Or maybe not, I'm no psychic.
Hopefully the future-planned auto removal is a bit generous though, as I tend to maintain comment notifications for my own tracking of which artists I'm still waiting for commissions/ychs to be completed from, though it won't be the end of the world for me if not, as I can always switch to a local tracking form, it's just convenient for me as its right there when I check my notifs ahah
It is the USERS' responsibility to keep some of their dearest things on their computer or on paper for reference or keepsake. A site can go and do so much for it to maintain itself-like how I learned from Twitter just before it turned into X.
For those like this, I will say to them,
"Oh come on! Are you treating them like spam on your email account(s) and never delete them?! FA is not like that..." 😒👎
And all of that also applied to the front page too, by the way, effectively burrying any upcoming or small time artist into permanent obscurity. It was utter madness! UTTER MADNESS I SAY!!!
Unless you wajt them for metrics like one person mentioned, it's just building up a number for dopamine of hooray increasing number at the cost of damaging user experience and costing more money for the site. There's dozens of others ways and places to see numbers go up and get that satisfaction from it...
Super glad this is happening, thanks for doing it and shocked there will always be people complaining about any feature even the good ones. I get not wanting some changes (I'm one who grumped about classic mode and changing some tagging) but just can't please some people!
I really did mean to reply to that comment 2 years ago… I was just about to do it, really!
If I had to choose what gets purged between notifs and actual art, journals, etc. I'd just the notifs every times, especially if it's causing problems on the site.
since i joined i had quite a bit of notifications i guess its okay
not a really big deal after all LoL
I actually go through mine in batches, dont think ive ever let it pile up over a year though.
Oldest currently in subs is july last year lol
Notifications get cut down to 6 months? The earliest Notification I have at the moment is Feb 2025
Like of course you're not going to look through comment notifications or journals submissions notifications ect to find one from one or two or even three years ago and I had noticed from time to time that the numbers altered slightly
So its just notifications, no notes or journals we made or comments we wrote one a upload or two.
Just the notification that informs us it's there?
That is correct. The "content" was not affected; only the notifications that are older than the dates mentioned above were.
And obviously I try to delete useless notes from time to time but some have some important information like a artist's details on what they do and don't make ect
I guess I'm just a bit worried about certain things disappearing and then questioning myself what would be the point of making something if it's gonna just disappear after a month or ao
I don't think my small amount of notification purging helped but I did it anyways
Though something was weird about my notif-count, but thought "Oh, probably just the auto-purge kicking in." uwu
Also echoing a lot of the comments here but I really can't imagine saving notifications indefinitely. I'll let some fave/watch notifs pile up for a few days after an upload for the dopamine but I'll always erase them by the next week. If I really wanted to save one, I'd take a screenshot.
Unless your most recent notifications were older than the dates mentioned in the journal, they would not have been impacted.
I hope this helps!
Hopefully you can at some point upgrade the database to more efficiently store notification data in the first place.
edit: I'm not really into saving notifications myself, but figured it would be worth a mention.
I'm at 628,350
Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. Sorry for being a burden on the system but big number go up makes me happy.
I mean, not about whole-sale clearing. It has to be done.
But I like to leave a pic in my submission inbox to easily check new incoming and its usually a comm im very excited over.
Could you please at least consider *NOT* removing watches/faves? Even if it's an option that requires being subscribed? The rest I could handle, I think, but not those two.
... @ devs/admins, remove this comment if you wish, but I felt like I needed to type this while i could still bring myself to do so.
What makes the notifs different?
Obviously, this doesn't help with what was lost, but something I've learned in being on the internet for so long is that if I don't make a point to make a personal copy of anything I find incredibly important, I will use it. Today with FA, it was a mistake, in the future there will be ample warning, but there could be many other services that could loose important information without warning.
I really suggest making a point to make a copy of anything important to you to hold on to, so that no matter what happens you can take comfort in knowing you have a backup saved. Screen caps, saving web-pages, re-creating something in a document, anything that makes the information easy to save and access. You'll be glad you did.
It always effectively boils down to "Hey you should let the database constantly break down and destroy the site for everyone, because otherwise it's unfair on me."
If you're not currently getting help, I hope you'll at least consider it.
(There's also some people who like to save everything they get.)
"A reminder for why we need to clear old notifications from our database: The impact on our system is immense, and can cause site slowdowns, inefficient use of space, and query lockups. Currently, even after this accidental clearing, the notifications table still takes over a terabyte of space and has billions of rows populated. The notifications system was built with a smaller site in mind, and because of that we are now seeing the limits of scaling that system."
When this website was made back in 2005, they didn't exactly futureproof for becoming an absolute behemoth with tens of millions of uploads.
Well atleast me watcher one wasn't touched yet, i do like seeing it so i can see how long some have been following
Google Chrome, for example, has a page on how to use bookmarks here, with mobile instructions as well: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/188842?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop
Might resort to making a links-journal in the meantime so I don't forget stuff.
It's neat seeing staff talking with users in the comments.
okaaay
Honestly, I think putting a year's limit tops on notifications should be the norm. If it's costing the website terabytes worth of resources, that's just common sense.
That reminds me. I have to nuke mine. It's gotten too big from being off the site so much.
Super easy to soft through too
Mofo there's a big red button for that specific reason. Don't give me that.
Leilani goes to do that now.
I usually purge submission/favorite/journal notifications roughly monthly, so hopefully I'm not a big load on the DB myself, but I do hope the April 3rd update fixes the comments notifications, which I usually like to keep to remember those convos
I can sort of get it. Some people like to hoard numbers. Some people like a gallery that is just the stuff that the people they like upload. Some people like easy-reference links.
But at the same time...ai yi yi yi yi. There's so many better ways to do that...
The only time I let my numbers grow is faves/watchers between upload sessions, and even that's only 15-30 days, and that's just to see how a batch of uploads does in that time. I have yet to see a good excuse for the hoarding of anything, or the keeping of old uploads, that isn't solved by bookmarking or downloading. Just...wow.
If something is that important to you, screenshot, bookmark it, favorite it
And in the time it took for people to complain about it, they could've gone through a few dozen of said notifications, going through some 10 minutes a day won't kill you
For example, right now I have a clickable link to "5S" on my top bar -- this means I have five submissions that I can look at.
You can send a ticket of the "Feedback" type, which will reach the team and be added to our list.
I hope this helps! :3
I'm an animal and I'm just as susceptible to silly hoarding behavior as anypony else is and I don't want to diminish that, but I think the bigger reason I have trouble keeping up with clearing notifications is that I do want to keep a record of recent notifications, but once they get out of control I either need to delete them by paw page-by-page or clear all of them.
If there was a button on my notifications page that let me clear notifications older than one-to-two months, I would regularly press it. Or, maybe a way where I could pin a notification and nuke everything except pinned notifications?
I try not to be too bad about this, but I know my favorites at the very least are out of control, and literally it's just that every time I go look at the page to clear them I think "ugggh but all I can do is nuke them"
Though I do wonder if there's a way to preserve them for people who want them (like, once you hit X number of notifications, or the notifications hit a certain age, you just turn them into a number that increments instead of preserving all the tables that are associated with those notifications, and then when you go far back enough into your notifications it just says "excess notifications truncated" or something to that effect). And of course, clearing notifications yourself clears that number too.
Not sure it's necessarily worth spending the time to implement that logic but I figure I'd put the idea out there.
Yes, it's absolutely silly to hoard them. But I do think a lot of critters are going to hesitate to hit the nuke button and if they could be like "okay, I have this downloaded and it's on my hard drive, it *doesn't need to be on FA's servers" - I bet more critters would do it.
Heck, I would *LOVE*, absolutely adore being able to export submission notifications, because it would be easier for me to sort them locally - I hesitate to clear out the recent ones but like.. it would be much easier if I could open them up in a spreadsheet and sort them into categories and stuff.
If critters want to hoard stuff, fine - but it doesn't necessarily need to be hoarded on specifically FA's servers. X3
If I look at the submission gallery for those that have been posted 6 months ago and older and I save the link to these gallery pages, after the downtime will I still be able to see them or will they be gone alongside the numbers in the upper right corner?
As long it's long reasonable into the past, auto purging is fine. I do feel like notifications there is less of is probably fine to keep around for longer. I did kinda like the number going up which is why I never nuked mine haha.... <_<
Very much understood why it had to be done, and I know a lot of users are going to have their "but it was -convenient- that the Recycle Bin held my files" wake-up call with this. For me personally I'm a habitual notification clearer so it won't impact me at all, but I do sympathize with folks with other organizational means.