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!