After a week or so of showing signs that the spinning plate had lost speed and was beginning to wobble, after various other incidents (like the Denial of Service "attack" that took place and promises of transparency after extremely-questionable staff identities were revealed) we see that FurAffinity has taken yet another tumble from grace.

This time it's because the "content server is currently offline," so pretty much no images are rendering when you look through galleries, submissions or even shout pages. As I mentioned above, the site had been slowing down over the last 7 to 9 days, showing signs of stress and impending failure with bouts of high latency, failure to load images or outright dropping pages before they rendered. So surely there was some sort of indicator that this (whatever "this" happens to be in this case) was going wrong and somebody might have taken a preemptive look around to see if it could be avoided? It doesn't seem that way, though, because here we are.

Maybe this will be the poke in the eye to the community (which, I remind you, ponied up over $20,000 USD in donations in mid-October after the DDoS incident because Dragoneer trotted out his usual shtick that donations and money will fix all the problems that site is experiencing) that the administration of FurAffinity are corrupt liars, completely inept at technology, or both. They've had over a month and a half to do something, anything, to improve the site's infrastructure -- yet here we are, with an art gallery site that can't display anything. At all. For about the 5th time this year. Who knows how long it will be down this go around? Who wants to bet there will be yet another push of fundraising to buy "critically needed infrastructure" because they've burned out a hard drive array or some other excuse?

One of the finest photographers I followed on FA, a gent who went by the handle of woodland-walker, put the following shout on Dragoneer's page:

Not that you care, I'm sure.
But you've lost me as a user, if anybody asks about the site. I am now telling them to avoid it. Unless you do something instead of hiding on Twitter you are going to loose many more.

That was 5 hours ago. Since then, woodland-walker has deleted all his gallery submissions, his journals, his scraps, his favorites, everything. Bamf, he's in the wind. I have no idea where he's gone or how to get in touch with him. But hey, one hour ago Dragoneer responded to his shout with this:

I do care, actually. There's a LOT going on behind the scenes to improve. The timing of the holiday season and my job have not helped, but major fixes/improvements are on the way.

I checked the page of other folks who called Dragoneer out, and he only responded to one of them ("dharmavalerkin") with a generic "I do care, and deeply" statement that echos what he's put on W-W's page.

As I said, this is two months after a $20,000 USD cash infusion. Is this it? Is this going to be the final insult to the FA userbase that seals the deal and drives out the talented artists and the content-consuming (and, occasionally, paying) customers who follow those artists? I hope so, I truly do. It's time for the masses to leave behind this failure of a site and move to something that's stable, helmed by responsible adults and capable of supporting the needs of artists and consumers alike. I'd like to see that new center be Weasyl, but it could just as easily be deviantART or Tumblr or something else entirely. I don't care, all I want is the spark to be set and the flame to catch, because enough is enough.