I know a lot of you here have left FurAffinity for good. I've never paid much attention to the personal drama on that site, and it's never directly affected me...

...until now. FA's recent brush with DDOS attacks made them buy a service called a CDN (Content Delivery Network), which hosts common large files (like the images) on a scalable Cloud-type service, so FA's servers don't have to do the brunt of the work pushing these files around. That's all good. But there are two problems with how FA uses this CDN that are problematic.

First is caching. The CDN acts kind of like your browser cache, but on a much larger scale. Each piece of data that goes over the web carries an expiration date. For things that could change at any time (the submission page with its comments, for example), this expiration date is usually set to "Now". The page doesn't ever get cached, and you see new content when you refresh. For things that don't change (like images), this expiration date can be weeks or months out. Your browser saves this data into its cache, and uses this locally saved version instead of loading a live version. FA has never quite grasped the implications of this concept. When they update an image (when a user uploads a new icon, or an artist uploads an edit to their artwork), FA just replaces the file and uses the exact same URL to point to it as it did before. Your browser doesn't realize there's new content for this file, since the cached content hasn't expired yet. This is why you always see FA users telling you to "Hit F5" to see these sorts of changes -- that manual refresh re-checks all content on the page, even if it hasn't expired. This wastes a LOT of bandwidth.

This effect is made worse by the CDN, because the CDN now also caches the old version, and hitting F5 doesn't cause the CDN to refresh. This is a big problem for people who want to upload large images. Your initial FA upload gets resized to a maximum of 1280 pixels in width or height. You can go back and change the submission file and replace it with the exact same file, and the full-resolution one will upload... but at this point, the old version is already cached in the CDN, and you have to wait about 12 hours for it to flush out.

This could all be avoided if FA changed the filename or even just changed the URL (like adding a "?version2" to the end) for each version uploaded -- or just let artists upload larger pictures to start with.

That was actually the more minor of the two problems. A newer, larger problem is image recompression.

At some point in the pipeline, some images are now being recompressed. They're taking the original JPG and re-saving it with lower compression. This does save some bandwidth... but the quality setting they use is super, SUPER low and turns crisp, colorful art into murky shit. Here's a magnified excerpt of one of my recent uploads:

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuff/WhatTheShitFA.png

The odd thing is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which files get this treatment. It doesn't seem to be based on filesize or image dimensions, as far as I can tell.

But, like the oversized-upload solution above, there is an obvious workaround. This JPG recompression only applies to JPG files. So, if an artist were to go to each affected image, hit "Change Submission File" and feed it a PNG version of the same image... well, that would circumvent not only the recompression issue (it's not a JPG), but also the caching issue (the filename is different).

And that's what I've done to the one picture that's been affected so far. I'll continue to do so for each reasonably-sized JPG image of mine they turn into a murky recompressed piece of shit. And if they deny this and make it impossible to distribute high-quality artwork, well, that'll be my cue to leave.

(And yeah, I'm posting this journal here and not on FA, since I'm not in the habit of poking hornet nests with sticks.)