Hello everyone!

We’ve just deployed a new release to Furry Network Beta – this time adding a number of much requested features and some Importer improvements!

Muting, Blocking & Privacy Options

You can now mute and block other characters in Content Settings, by entering their username and hitting enter. Solid controls for who you do (and don’t) want to hear from on Furry Network are a key part of our drive to empower everyone on the site – so we’re eager to hear feedback on it, to confirm it works well!  This was very popular also, garnering 34 votes on our support center.

We’re also working on adding some buttons to user profiles, to make it easier to mute and block them right from the character page, too – these aren’t live yet, but will likely make it into our next update:

 

By very popular request (a whopping 106 people made their voice heard), we’ve also added privacy options for your account – letting you block unregistered guests and search engines from viewing your profile or content.

These tools round out our Privacy and users control features – combined with our blacklisting  and blocking tools, all users now have the ability to take control of what they wish to see on Furry Network – and to handle a wide variety of issues on their own!

Zooming and Panning

Another popular feature request with 88 votes on our support center, zooming in was added to the “view full image” page. Simply pinch your touchscreen or use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out:

Delete a Character

You can now delete characters in the Your Characters section. This has been a much-requested feature, garnering a whopping 58 votes in our support center. It may seem simple, but correctly deleting a character is quite involved. Nevertheless, here it is!

Importer Improvements

We know that being able to easily import all your data is very important to many users – and are committed to making it as easy and magical (eg it ‘just works’ – like magic) as possible. As such, we’re working on some significant improvements to the tool.

Improvement 1: You can now reimport deleted items

Previously, if you imported an image and subsequently deleted it (Say, you decided that it wasn’t up to your standards and didn’t want to show it), you couldn’t change your mind and re-import it again. We’ve added the ability to ignore this constraint via a check box on the importer – so if you want to empty out your FN gallery and reimport everything (including deleted items), you can now do just that!

Improvement 2: Importer now more reliable

The importer for Furry Network was one of the first features of the site which we built, and a lot has changed since it was first built! As such, we felt it was time for a full rebuild of it – to make it more reliable, as well as to operate in a more sensible way, as the site nears launch.

Most of the importer has been rewritten and updated, and will now automatically order your submissions correctly in chronological order. No more images slightly out of order, with no way to change them!

Of course, we have plans for further improvements – the reliability and user friendliness of the importer is not where we want it to be, and we want it to be quick and easy for anyone to join Furry Network and bring a body of work along with them. As always, if you have issues with using the importer (or any other site feature, really) – please don’t hesitate to ask your question in our Support System! We also support private reports (which work a little like support tickets), if you don’t want to expose your usernames or would just prefer to get support in private.

 

Uploads over 100MB working again

There was a bug where file uploads of more than 100MB in size were not working correctly, stalling out during upload. This has now been fixed – and you can now submit images up to 32MB in size, and multimedia of up to 200MB per file. Of course, we’re looking to increase these limits (especially the multimedia limit) in the future; we’ve tested uploads of  up to 2GB in our testing environment and know that the system can do it!

 

 Full changelog

• Can now delete characters in Your Characters section.
• Muting of other characters in Content Settings
• Zoom feature for viewing submissions by scrolling mouse or pinching touchpad
• Privacy tools on edit character profile. Block guests so only logged in users can view your profile and content. Block search engines so search engines cannot index your profile and content.
• Now allow deleted items to be reimported
• Admin tools improvements
• Block users from deleting their own content that has been flagged until the ticket has been resolved
• Fixed bug with files over 100MB not uploading

 

What we’re working on

• HSTS Implementation (a security thing)
• Tags that are copied/pasted for submissions no longer string together as one word
• Admin can change submission rating
• Admin can temporarily block profile from public view
• Making home page more relevant for site’s launch
• Site Announcements user and admin interface
• Reworking the activity feed to split notifications out from content, add grid view for content, and generally make things more content-centric
• Reworking character profile page to incorporate ‘shouts’, along with other polish
• Reworking the home page user interface, to add a sidebar with commonly used categories/pages
• Block and mute buttons on character page
• Multiple account import support / ability to change username on import tool
• Preparing convention plans for Biggest Little Fur Con in Reno, Nevada (May 12-15 – more info on the event here; we’ll be making a full announcement shortly)
• Testing & trialling commissions system with real payments; building list of improvements & preparing for a limited feature launch
• Final improvements and polish to the site’s design prior to official launch!

 

Plans for the future

This is the most exciting month of Furry Network’s development for us – as it’s this month that we are nearing the point where we could launch the site for real, and open the floodgates with general availability – to sign up, without needing a beta key. Things have come so far in the last year, and we’re really stoked to make the most of the opportunity and to have a site everyone can enjoy!

As such, we will be making some big announcements over the coming weeks – we recommend following us on Twitter to ensure you get to see them first, though we will of course be posting regularly on this development blog, too.

Thanks to everyone for your support in making Furry Network awesome. We are stoked to see the level of enthusiasm you’ve all shown with this project, and we can’t wait to launch the site for real, and see what you do with it!

Thanks all – and enjoy the update!

– Varka and the Furry Network team