Oh they finally opened it? That's awesome! I've been wanting to try it out but I'm leery of sites that are closed beta.

Yepp, absolutely from coincidence right when FA went down haha. Well, can't blame them for using the opportunity.
I like closed betas because they will listen to your individual advice or suggestions more since there are so few people; on the other hand it's still up in the air if they will fail or become something great in the future.

Yeah, the problem with closed betas is that once the hype is over and they take it out of being closed, then people will just...not have any interest to really sign up. That's what happened with Weasyl and why it's a ghost town now.

It's a shame though, I liked Weasyl a lot, it had a lot of potential and the staff was super nice. If it wasn't so dead I would absolutely use it as a secondary gallery.
There was Nabyn.net as closed beta too, that one didn't live up to the expectations either :/

The biggest problem with Nabyn was that...it banned adult art of any kind. Like...whaaaatttttt. People ALREADY have dA for stuff like that.

Nuuuuuuu, when I talk to people, they love weasyl and it's "popular" to talk about, but what killed it was the massive butthurt from FA. :')

No, I've used Weasyl in the past and it has always been far more inactive. They shot themselves in the foot by keeping it closed beta for like three years so when it was finally accessible to everyone, the hype was dead and no one cared about it. Weasyl is not sustainable. That's why even the super popular artists who left FA forever for Weasyl have come back to FA.

And that's a shame because it has so many great features, a great design (apart from some layout issues) and the staff are all very friendly and responsive.

But in the end every furry art site's initial fault is the same, and this is true for Weasyl, FA, SoFurry and all the others: They are led by enthusiastic but non-professional people, who simply don't know how to run a big community site properly.

Actually, they had an official launch party and opening of registrations at the same con where the FA source used for the hack was distributed, so believe or not, it genuinely is coincidence. :)

Unless... they planned the attack! :-O JUST JOKING! I'm not for conspiracy theories. :P

I didn't know that, and it was really just a bad joke on my part xP I'm not accusing them of anything.

Many people thought they opened because of the FA hack until it was clarified. But even if they did, I wouldn1t blame them, it would have been the logical thing to do.

Where's my tinfoil hat?

yeah, I'm all discombobulated too. I hate hackers I mean honestly, why?

hate, jealousy, bragging rights? who knows why a person becomes an a-hole. :/

Not all hackers are bad. Actually most are not. Being a hacker only means you like to experiment with the limitations of systems, push possibilities, come up with clever solutions and do things others can't, it doesn't mean you have to abuse that knowledge for bad things.

When muggles say hackers, they usually mean black hats :P

Muggles. I'm crying. XD XD XD

I honestly doubt this was a hacker. It's more like a script kiddie level thing.

well, when I say hacker I mean, perhaps overly broadly, " those who do malicious harm to others with computers for the sake of doing malicious harm to others"

Sorry, as a friend of a few guys that showed me the difference between the two, I tend to try and point out the difference when it comes up.

God, I lost watchers too. :( Only about 10 or 11, but man 30, that's rough. How's that furrynetwork working out so far?

FN is nice! i like the surface a lot, reminds me of Artstation.com which I love!
it has its issues still but that's why its still in beta

I will probably use it to post my favorite artworks only, and have it as a portfolio of sorts, and keeping FA as my main hub.

Yeah, that sounds pretty cool! I think I'll definitely try it out. I checked out the main page and I'm pretty impressed!

Same, I lost around 50+. It really sucks that so many people have been so adversely affected.

I hope you get your watchers back.

Damn! I hope you get your watchers back as well!

It's very unfortunate that someone would do this. I feel like the person who did it was either just really salty about furries or just being a little shit to have messed with it that affected so many. \:

I'm betting it is a furry, probably someone pissed off at the administration. The code was passed out at BLFC, which is a furcon.

I was there bahah, I had a friend who said he saw one of the exact flash drives going around, but didn't pick it up because he thought someone forgot it. But I suppose that makes sense. Still no need to be so butt hurt to where it affects everyone.

It's a shame that no one seems to have spotted the person passing them out, just seen them laying around or snatched them up.

I think the distribution of the source and this hack were unrelated. If the person stealing the source wanted to hurt FA they could have nuked the whole thing when they stole the source as they had complete unlimited system access, yet they didn't. My theory is that the distribution of the source was rather a message telling FA to finally trash their ancient clusterfuck (as an ex dev called it) code and rewrite it from scratch, which would be the only proper approach. The code is ancient and crappy, it would be much less work to rewrite from scratch than trying to fix this mess.

The fact that somebody, looking at the source was able to find such a bad exploit that let them delete stuff only shows how bad the code is, and how much the devs neglect it (the security audit they did now should have been done long time ago). A well written code can be made open source and nobody will be able to exploit it, moreover, then many people can look at it and try to improve it, or report possible issues. Many serious systems, including encryption algorithms are actually open source for this very reason.

I agree, I don't necessarily think that they were the same person. Either way, the action and intent were malicious.

Indeed. But since it is very likely the attacker got one of those USB drives, this narrows down the search - given they reported to the police, and I hope they did.

Good Luck Akitary!
Starting to follow you righ now ♥

oh wow, senpai noticed me! D: Thank you! :3

OH MY 8V
What a mutual coincidence,
I already follow you, senpai on tumblr and twitter ♥

That is sad...but will still keep to watch you :)

thank you ^^

Those damn hackers.

i will noodlepunch them all! °^°

Noodle powers activate! *u*

i was at blfc when they said they were gonna. f a going down when they did was a surprise. anyway i'm on there two, but i'm just starting to post there.
its a whole new world there to me.

Does it have a filter?

if you mean SFW/NSFW, yes it has "General/Adult/Explicit", so it even allows you to only see mildly nude pictures if it's only the hardcore stuff you don't want in your life.

That works: but what I mean is to filter certain tags I wouldn't want to see (Cub, gore, scat, ect)

yes, they have that too :3

Pretty much EVERY site other than FA has that. :D

It's a damn pity too

Awesome