Hi everyone!

This week we have a huge update – with too many things to mention in one blog post. You’ll have to experiment with the site to find them all!

As a significant milestone towards our final release, this has been a big step forward: we are proud to present you with the fruits of our labor over the past few weeks.

Multimedia Support

We now have built-in support for video, GIF, audio and Flash file types!

This is a big and exciting feature for us, and a significant upgrade from the previous art-only experience on Furry Network! We value contributions in many different formats; we’re not just an art site and we believe in supporting your creativity – whatever form it’s in.

We’re very excited to hear from you all what you think – as your feedback is going to help steer our content support in the right direction. As always we encourage bug reports, critique and suggestions via the ‘Feedback’ button on the left hand side of the site. (It shows up as a speech bubble with a camera icon in it on mobile – still works the same way though!)

Suggest Tags

By popular request, you can now suggest tags on all content types, including artwork, photos, stories and multimedia! This allows all users of the site to contribute to artists’ work, by tagging it for easier search, and makes it easier for artists to gain exposure for their work.

Of course,you’ll be able to turn this feature on or off – this will be coming (along with broader privacy controls) in a future update, once we’ve worked the kinks out.

Large Upload Support

We improved file uploads, adding better large file support to accommodate video and audio. You should now be able to upload files of up to 200MB in size, in one go.

Acceptable Upload Policy & Code of Conduct

We have put together our first draft of our Acceptable Upload Policy (what you can post on Furry Network), and our Code of Conduct (what behavior we expect of everyone on Furry Network). We have incorporated aspects from many other sites, including ones that our administration has experience in taking care of before, but like any first draft, we’re sure there’ll be a few rough edges (and edge cases)!

We welcome your input and feedback; we know the importance and value of a mature, accountable, well-executed administration and want everyone to have a good time, and we know how important transparency and accountability is to everyone, so we want to make sure we get this right. If you have questions you’d prefer to ask in private, you can send us email (varka@furrynetwork.com) or drop us a direct message on Twitter. We are always happy to get input and answer your questions/concerns – especially as these are very early days indeed for the site and its fledgling community.

Artwork to Photo Migration

You can now quickly and easily reclassify content, between ‘Artwork’ and ‘Photos’. This is our second most-requested feature, and one we’re happy to say has received quite a bit of polish to make it as easy to use and as smooth as possible.

You can change multiple submissions at once back and forth between Artwork and Photos – simply select several images (by clicking on them), then select the appropriate option from the dropdown for content type, as shown above, before hitting save. This should help a lot for cases where photos have been automatically imported into the wrong category.

Faster Messaging Updates

Messages you send to other users via the site are now automatically updated in real time – this should make holding a conversation smoother and more enjoyable!

For the more technically inclined, we implemented this using ‘web sockets’, which has given us a significant performance improvement over our earlier ‘polling’ method, which previously could take up to 30 seconds to complete.

Getting a Beta Key

We have given out a ton of beta keys over the past few weeks, and received lots of great feedback and plenty of excited notes of thanks from everyone. You all rock. We’ve also managed to work our way through the backlog of applicants, which now means that you should receive your beta key within 48 hours of applying for one via our homepage.

Simply fill out our ‘Request Beta Access’ form with your email address, make sure you got a confirmation email, and you should get a key automatically in the next 48 hours or so. Not getting a confirmation email, or didn’t get your key within that time period? Drop us a message on Twitter and we’ll give you a hand.

 

Full Changelog

 

Thank you everyone – and we hope you enjoy the site!

-Varka and the Furry Network team