I'm no expert, but usually when loads of watches/faves/whatever are being lost in a very short timespan, it's usually due to mass-purge of accounts or some other, similar operation service-side. I wouldn't be too worried if I were you.

I also think it's the most probable explaination. I am actually just more emotionally unstable recently and these things happening don't really help me out.

I would also assume it's accounts being deleted or disabled. I can't imagine someone going through and manually un-favoriting hundreds of pieces of art.

The same as i answered above. With addition that i can actually imagine a person doing doing what you have described. Just out of spite. But again, I don't think it's actually the case.

PS as i was writing this reply i have just lost one watch. Maybe there's really a purging action.

I only had about 270 anyway, but 6 or 7 seem to have disappeared lately. I think it probably was someone closing their account.

Like those above already said, i assume it has a technical explanation. Why would anyone delete favs on your art? It's still as great as it has always been!

you do really nice art, so likely it's just a technical glitch or a purge of accounts like people said
keep up the good work

Noticed in the past watchers dropping once or twice but it's very rare, though I do always wonder why it happened or who it was exactly, since I sadly cannot manage to keep mental track of the name of all the watchers.

I sometimes nuke watcher notifications but I don't notice faves dropping off at all if they ever do, probably because I frequently nuke those notifications.

And I did get anxious about it sometimes too (had I done something wrong?) but I think it's better for me to not think too much about it because then I end up changing myself for no reason.

If people have been enjoying your work until now, they're not going to be simply stopping their enjoyment out of the blue, so you should just keep doing what you're doing. From time to time, I diverge from the main stuff that I imagine people like seeing from me, I think they just ignore stuff that doesn't interest them while they enjoy the rest of the stuff that's similar to what they already liked.

Anyway, hope you'll feel better soon. :D

You’re work is still awesome, so likely just the things mentioned above :)

There's a LOT of bot activity on sites like this one, and FA is no exception. Just because it's furry stuff doesn't mean it's not a valuable resource.

FA does allow bots? But if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page, you'll see a blurb saying, "Limit bot activity to periods with less than 10k registered users online." That's a problem, because there's never any less than 12k registered users online at any given time in a 24-hour period.

FA is popular!

So the bot farmers, criminals and spies had to up their game and shift from being a registered bot, to disguising their activity as a registered user. And users go around, watching artists and faving their work, right? So they trained their bots to do that.

Some of it is just art scrapers, but most of it is actual scammers, looking for holes in the accounts of other users. They're looking for the lovely gold in the "contact information" portion of people's profiles, knowing that if they can penetrate something like Twitter or Skype, there's a good chance passwords will be reused in other accounts. That gives them a way to steal email accounts, and penetrate banks, eBay, PayPal and Amazon accounts.

And no small amount of it is genuine, no-bullshit espionage.

There are a lot of furries who are current military, or have current security clearances because of their employment. I've personally seen some of those people lower their guard on this site, because "what kind of spies would be on a furry site"?

"Smart ones," I told them. "They know people like *you* are here."

So if you're seeing your fav count drop, it's probably those bot accounts getting purged.

I have never thought of that.

I have never got any notification of that.

Echoing what the others are saying re:purging, of course, but I would like to say that I'm continuing to enjoy the art you're uploading. It's definitely a highlight of my day when you upload, especially since when you upload, you do it in nice clusters.

It also helps that you seem to vary up the art itself depending on how detailed the piece is at any given time. Like... I still enjoy some of the older pieces where it almost seems like the characters have a "print" on their skin in the pattern of their fur. I think it really accentuates the forms. Though of course I also admire the fur detail. It's one of those things that clearly takes a fair amount of time to get to look right.

Glad to see i'm not the only one with this issue. I started losing some when i hit 4000+, still am.
I've been recovering since then, doing some drawings more often... It's nothing to worry.

My advice is follow your usual routine. Maybe Neer will look into it