Sure gives some of the other sites a chance. Admit I haven't been on here or SoFurry in months, don't really like them as well as FA.

I don't think FA will die but we will see a lot of people cross posting to this site and SoFurry.

Yeah I'll admit I like the setup of FA better than on here so far, but the current FA situation really made me realize i should have some other furry based art sites as 2nd options. For when FA does decide to poop itself again. I don't think i'll ever abandon FA though, I invested too much time in that site/my account on there.

The main reason people still use FA is because most other people use it. In terms of features though, it's way behind the other sites.I haven't seen any serious additions to FA in years.. just things that break. The only reason I still use it is... well.. the amount of users!

I don't mind it here I just don't care for how slow traffic seems to be on here :X Also supposedly now FA is going to be having a purge of sorts now? :S This bothers me if they go through with this because there are many users on FA who have vast galleries. I foresee this being a problem and not to mention the extra backlog from not only so many people uploading as soon as FA comes back but then having people submitting even more if they have to re-upload their galleries/older submissions! :/

Growly @almightytora

So, @FurAffinity is gonna "prune" submission & journal notifications that are 90+ days old. Good idea for people who have no access to it.

BTW, the "pruning" won't happen immediately. So anyone who has stuff older than 90 days - start saving your submissions & reading journals!

https://twitter.com/almightytora/status/412484405043535875

https://twitter.com/almightytora/status/412486093921996800

Yeah, I think the same way. And it's the best site to migrate to.

I think you're completely right. FA has been running like crap for a long time and people are getting tired of it. Always down, always issues. I'm kinda happy for that though because it gives Weasyl a chance to expand and so far it seems to be a much better service.

I never had a problem with it, but there seem to be a lot of complaints about the moderation over on FA. Not to mention an incredible amount of drama that arises to due to favoritism and their watch system, and self moderation. I'm not saying that wouldn't happen here if Weasyl became the new furry hub, but this place seems to have a couple systems in place to reduce the amount of moderator abuse and has 'ferrets' which help control questionable posts.

But it's more than that, FA had promised to upgrade their site features for YEARS and none of the features have been implemented despite continuously asking for donation money, and it seems like many of the coders either can't or are incapable of implementing new features. Downtimes of this magnitude on a site of FA's magnitude for an entire week of being off-line for what is clearly a software/coding problem is pretty unacceptable. I think the only problem with FA is that so many people use it already, it's really difficult for artists to migrate their huge collections of works from one site to another. For me it took over 2 hours just to upload 70~ favorite pics from site to site.

Just my 2 cents.

No, I think this is just a fill-in while FA is down for renovations. :)

1. FA is so often down, or broken in ways we don't know about until it goes down
   
2. Incompetent admins. (Volunteer status is no excuse. If you don't have the skills, learn them or don't be an admin.)
   
3. Lack of useful features

Only reason I am still on FA is that I've yet to find a site where all the artists I watch post.

1: FA is down A LOT. Every time they try to do something do the site crashes within days.

2: Incompetent admins. There's two main problems I normally find with the staff. They play favorites or they don't have the skills.

3. Needs a major update. From what I've heard DA is just as old as FA. Besides all of the trolls, DA has a very nice system and ways to control people you watch (you can just watch the submissions, but you don't have to get notices about journals filled with drama and other crap). As many people as I watch, it would be REALLY nice to do something like that on FA. Then I don't have to get sucked into all of the drama.

Personally, I really like how Weasyl is set up. Its bright, inviting, and when you browse you can see what everyone is doing. Art, Characters, Journals, EVERYTHING! I havn't really tried the forums yet, but I'm hoping that it is more inviting than FA forums.

I think that once FA comes back online people will generally migrate back towards it...only because it is both familiar and of course there is the perception that the other sites will never be as busy as FA.

Frankly though I really hope Weasyl grows and becomes more feature-rich. I like this site a lot!

I don't know if it's the end of FA because it's just too large, but I do see it in phases of decline. Too many issues as mentioned are slowly attracting people to other sites, but maybe as a backup. Unless there's some type of mass migration, I don't think FA will go away for awhile.

Honestly I didn't expect Weasyl to be this good. I'm kind of sad that I didn't join earlier.

I seem to recall, just days before this, a few folks posting journals that asked, "What would you do if FA shuts down tomorrow?" ... Hope they're happy now =P

Judging from the forum posts I've seen, it seems that FA has used the extended downtime to really dig in and identify the fundamental flaws of their site's implementation. The giant notification table, inefficient queries, and so forth. Assuming what people above are claiming is actually true -- that FA admins "don't have skills" -- wouldn't it be a great directed study for some computer science student to optimize the site for college credit FREE to FA? I mean, I work for a Fortune 500 company, but we're not beneath giving interns and college students challenging little projects like that.

Then again, if FA admins "don't have the skills", then how have they found these root causes this past week? If you ask me, the technical admins probably have sufficient skills, just not sufficient time or motivation until everything goes belly-up. I think FA will soon require either (a) a completely new implementation, or (b) several more servers to distribute the load (easy enough on the web-end, but it would require clustering on the DB end, which is not something to be taken lightly). People point at dA as something that's been around just as long, but is so much more capable, but it's not a fair comparison. dA is a business, with full time staff, merchandise, and ample revenue; FA can't approach that.

I doubt this is the end of FA, since it's become the internet hub of the fandom. Still I'm disappointed the FA admins have promised so many things like a total site redesign and never delivered. I almost left FA when it was hacked and all the notes were reposted online. Though none of my notes were reposted, I was very disgusted with the slow "who cares" negligence of the admins at the time.

I like Weasyl a lot, I need to use it more.

And I've looked at other Furry art sites, but either were too adult-oriented, didn't accept photography, I didn't like the interface or only a few people I knew were there. FA is a lot like a online Anthrocon. Even though its a hassle to get around the place, most of my freinds and a lot of the well-known artists in the fandom are there.

I agree with WildBill it's crazy how much everyone accepts FA as the only source. This site is really the next best, but like he was saying there isn't enough people here. Once this site or another gains just as many people AND promises to deliver good results then that site might prevail. I really wish someone would do better, because FA sure seems be like pshhttt who cares attitude because they all know everyone will come crawling back.

As annoying as FA and FA staff are, I don't think any site will ever have the amount of traffic FA does simply because it's the "default" site for furries. When it goes down like this, sites like InkBunny and Weasyl are used as "backup FAs". If FA ever actually kicks the bucket, I foresee Weasyl being the replacement. InkBunny not so much. And this opinion isn't about layout design or user-friendliness, but rather circumstance of introduction. InkBunny was opened at a time when no one really needed anything other than FA, whereas Weasyl opened during the whole "police should handle this" drama. People got so fed up with FA that there was a mass-conversion to Weasyl- the shiniest of the new gallery sites. If popularity continues to grow every time FA breaks down, eventually we'll get more users deciding not to go back to FA- but that'll only happen once their Weasyl galleries are completely up to date.

The only thing I'm waiting for from Weasyl is their "group accounts". I think that'll definitely put them above FA when people compare the two and maybe bring more people over.

It should be a wake-up call for all the FA staff to actually do something about the site rather than continously patching the thing up...theyre either going to have to up their game or go down with the ship

You don't get to FA's size without weathering a few storms of angry users... They will persist, and folks will stay there. We'll lose a few, but as soon as FA is back up, people will crawl back to it because the people are just there. If every FA account instantly was on Weasyl, and everyone posted here 100% of the time, everyone would use weasyl. The problem is that you don't run a 700000 user database without money, and/or without serious equipment, or else you get serious downtime. I am liking weasyl more and more every day, but that's because it's a good site, and from what I've seen, it appears like it could handle volume without sacrificing quality, something FA does not do well.

Everyone says that then comes right back cause it still triple the size of any of the other sites.

i been wanting to people to leave FA because FA has horrible servers and is always going down.

People will always go back to FA because they'll have friends that are FA only.

I think its time to consider my options if the site keeps going down.

FA will be history in No-time! The big leaving has begun!!

FA will be history in No-time! The big leaving has begun!!