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You can vote for improvements you'd like to see, suggest your own, and report bugs here. With your help, we'll make Furry Network even better!

+769
Completed

Remove allowing Cub Pornography on the website.

Tartii 8 years ago updated by Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago 235 3 duplicates

Cub Pornography makes many, MANY users uncomfortable. I would go as far as to say a majority of users are not comfortable with it.

It also makes furrynetwork an illegal website to browse in some countries because of the strict regulations of anything remotely cp. By removing cub pornography FurryNetwork can become a highly viable website to compete with FA or other websites as a whole. Otherwise the website is just another inkbunny.

Please remove cub pornography being allowed so it is a place others, such as myself, feel comfortable doing business on. Blocking tags alone is not enough.

Answer
Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago

Update 2: We have decided to change our content policy, and ban cub porn from Furry Network. See full details and announcement here: https://blog.furrynetwork.com/2016/05/28/content-policy-changes-may-27-2016/



Update: We've temporarily closed this topic to additional comments, while we moderate some of the comments made to keep things civil.


Reminder to everyone - please be courteous, polite and constructive in your replies!


We know this is a hot-button topic right now, and we're eager to work towards a good solution. Please keep things civil!


If things spin out of control, we'll have to have to lock this topic (and/or issue warnings to people), and we don't want to do that. Thank you!

+566
Completed

Profile Page Improvements

Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago updated 8 years ago 130 2 duplicates

Hello everyone,


We're looking at different ways we can improve the profile pages on Furry Network, to try and meet people's needs better.


As we all know, your profile page is your "identity" on any site, and needs to represent you and what is important to you. The current profile page doesn't work well to fulfill that goal - most of the space is spent on "what small action did you perform on the site most recently" - and is too much social network, not enough art/creative site.


I'm working with our interface designer to come up with some mockups of an improved profile page, which has interchangeable modules you can embed on your profile page - and need your input:


Image 221


1) First of all - is this on the right track? Is this heading in the right direction?


The modules we're thinking of including are intended as 'feature blocks' you can use to set up your page however you'd like - so say you mainly write stories, you'd put the "featured stories" block near the top - if your page is heavily character/commission oriented you'd put one big image at the top (like a featured submission), and a description box below it with a bunch of Markdown formatted text in it. Note the edit button:

Image 222


This "edit button" would bring up the following interface for picking what to show:

Image 223



This leads into my next question:


2) Are these "modules" a good solution for the site, in particular to give flexible but not too complicated customization, to let users tailor the page to their needs?


3) What modules would be most important to include initially? Are these on the right track, or should we be considering something different? So far we have:


3A) A "Featured Artwork" module, where you can pick a folder to display, a sort order, and a number of rows/items to display. Eg if 1, it'd show one big image - if set to 1 row, it'd show 4 pictures... and so on.


3B) A "Featured Story" module, similar to A but for written submissions


3C) A "Journals" module, similar to B, but for posts/journals


3D) A "Markdown" module, which would basically be a big text box you put markdown in, and can customize to your heart's content


3E) A "Gallery/Favorites/Recent whatever" module, very similar to A, but which is automatically populated based on something directly on your profile - for example, your promoted artwork (think "Favorites" on other sites, long-term), or your most popular artwork in your gallery, or your most recent submissions or whatever.

3E) Has been split into two: a "Recent Artwork" gallery module, showing stuff you uploaded recently, and a "Favorites" gallery module, showing items you faved/promoted recently. (Assume there'll also be modules down the road for recent multimedia, audio and stories).


3F) A "Social" module, which can show your recent tweets on your profile page - like this:

Image 226





4) We're toying with the idea of putting all content a user creates into a single "Gallery" tab, and moving the split between the kinds of content on the left hand side along with the filtering / sorting options. In my opinion, this looks pretty busy - but what do you all think?


Image 224


There's a lot here in this one "Suggestion", but I think this is the best way we have (right now) to get a discussion going and some useful feedback on how we can refine this to better suit everyone's needs.


Please post your thoughts and suggestions - and be sure to reference the number of the item you're discussing, so it doesn't get too confusing. As always, be constructive! We want to make FN better and need your help.


Thanks!

Varka

Answer
Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago

This feature has been completed! :D


https://blog.furrynetwork.com/2016/07/26/july-site-update/


Check it out - you can now publish 'blocks' on your profile that do different things:



Let us know what you think - and thanks to everyone who helped make this happen!


+267
Completed

Ability to turn off endless scrolling

Brody-Bot 8 years ago updated by Argento Dragone 5 years ago 45 2 duplicates

Something in the settings that would allow you to browse artwork with pages, rather than autoloading/autoscrolling.


After one or two loads, everything slows down, and the website can't be interacted with until the new content loads. The more times it loads, the slower it gets. it would be faster and more convenient to have pages for browsing art work.


I have also had issues where content will not display while scrolling, or loading additional content.


If the feature exists, it's not intuitively located, as I can't find anything.

Answer

So I'm gonna mark this one as completed, even though we've entirely removed infinite scroll and replaced it with pagination across the board. 

+213
Fixed

Voting prone to anonymous tor abuse

cheesehead 8 years ago updated by Gaia Weylyn 8 years ago 16

Just thought you all should know. Several topics have been compromised with this exploit as well.

Answer
Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago

Well spotted! Login / registration is now required to vote.

+207
Completed

Actual Journals

Neotheta 8 years ago updated by Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago 25 1 duplicate

Regular posts currently imply for short text, and they vanish from the feed when more stuff comes up. Journals should be more like story submissions, stay on users page so new followers can read them too after years.

+ Ability to favorite and promote journals!

Answer
Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago

This has been completed! See full announcement here: https://blog.furrynetwork.com/2016/07/26/july-site-update/









+191
Planned - After Launch

Let us have animated icons

Introduction 8 years ago updated by Foolish 8 years ago 22 3 duplicates

It'd be nice to let us upload .gifs as icons. It's one of my favorite things about FA!

Answer

We've been floating some interesting ideas around for how we could make this feature even better - and welcome your thoughts.


Animated .GIF files tend to be quite large (1-2MB for any appreciable length), especially for the sort of resolutions that Furry Network demands for icons. However, technology has moved on a lot since animated GIFs - including HTML5 video, GIFV (GIF video), and WebM video formats - all of which have broad browser support now. What's more is resizing video is a 'solved problem' nowadays as well.


What if we kept the maximum file size of 1-2MB, but made the animated icons be a square *video*, with maximum length of (say) 15-20 seconds - with clear guidelines as to what's acceptable in an animated icon? There's a lot of possibilities that open up by having a more flexible, higher fidelity creative canvas for people to make their own icons - and it'd likely be relatively easy from a technical standpoint as well.


Some other considerations would be requiring a non-animated icon to be in place in order to upload an animated one, and a simple setting in preferences to disable animated icons site-wide while browsing it. For mobile or performance-limited devices we could automatically disable animated icons, in which case the regular one would be used instead.


For uploading, would we need to provide a cropping and trimming tool (a-la Twitter), or would it be reasonable to expect users to be able to produce a video of a given size/resolution/format, appropriate for upload? We could probably link to a few online converters / editing tools (eg a .GIF to video converter), or pull an off-the-shelf conversion tool and slot it into the upload system for this - but how important will it be that we make the animated icon upload user friendly? We'd want to encourage artists to make actual *animated icons*, rather than permit/encourage random videos or whatever be uploaded that have nothing to do with being an animated icon.


Your thoughts and feedback please - we think this could be really cool if done right!

+190
Planned - After Launch

Group Support

Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago updated by RyuuKishi 8 years ago 17 2 duplicates

It'd be awesome if you could create a group, and for other people with similar interests to join it and share content :D

Answer
Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago

Hey everyone -

Thanks for your great feedback and suggestions on this. We're probably going to hold off on implementing this until AFTER we launch the site, but I think it's going to be fairly high up on the priorities list. Looking forward to it!

+186
Under review

Public shoutouts to people on their character profiles (eg Shouts)

Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago updated by Digby (Community Manager) 7 years ago 44

Could there be a way to have 'Shouts' on Furry Network too?

Answer
Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago

Hey everyone,


We're not sure how this feature would be useful in the context of Furry Network, and we want to get more information as to how everyone intends to use it, so we can incorporate it sensibly into the broader site design.


Furry Network is a little different from other sites; I know that "Shouts" are a feature that originally started on Deviant Art, and have kind of been around for a long time on a bunch of different sites.


What purpose do shouts serve, and what do you want to use them for?

+177
Started

Get rid of the system that allows every user to see all of your activity

aaros 8 years ago updated by DeusExMoose 8 years ago 17 2 duplicates

When users watch you, they can see all of your activity, everything you comment on, everyone you watch, and to be honest this is way too inviting for stalkers.


If you are a content creator with a lot of followers, you probably have experienced at one point or another another user who is stalking you or is harassing you or for one reason or another, you would not feel very comfortable with them being able to instantly go to any comment you make. For some users like myself, I don't want to everyone to see realtime notifications for everyone I watch, everything I comment on, and so on.


My suggestion would be to associate this feature with some kind of mutual "friends" system where only your friends or people you approve can look at all your activity.

Answer
Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago

Hey all -


We're planning to build a 'first phase' solution to this item shortly, by adding a check box under your Privacy settings, to disable visibility of your actions.


We have some other changes coming shortly regarding user pages which should move the activity feed off to a tab (so it's no longer the first thing you see on someone's profile), and some refinements as to what kind of things get shown in there.


In the long run, we'd like to implement some more fine-grained visibility control to feed items - eg, have a dropdown for "Who can see my feed", with options Everyone/Only people I follow/Nobody - but we think that's best left until after user pages have been updated, and we have a better idea of how in-demand this feature is.


Thanks everyone for your great feedback - I'll let you all know when this feature makes it live!


Varka

+174
Under review

Additional Category: "Crafts" for fursuit builders, plushie makers, sculptors, etc

CanineHybrid 8 years ago updated by Xaron Alpua 5 years ago 19

TL;DR:

  • I feel there should be an artistic distinction between someone who crafted something and took a photo vs someone who took a photo of something crafted.
  • Artwork category is currently only for "flat art" yet the Photography category doesn't properly represent or classify our work either; it turns it into a photo of art instead of art itself.
  • And what happens to categorization when you have both concept art and a photo of the final result shown in the same image?



As I was importing my gallery, I realized I became stuck trying to sort my work into the two current categories, "Artwork" and "Photos"... and I realized that I am not alone!


Explanation:
I'll use fursuits primarily for my example to help explain why I feel this is needed and how I arrived at my conclusion. Many fursuit makers I have talked to have mentioned they feel stuck or dismissed when their work doesn't really have a home here- and arguably fursuits are one of the most important artistic aspects of the furry community! So I want to help make our voices and those of other physical multimedia be herd.


Of course the work we create is technically displayed as a photo out of necessity... but it's hardly considered "just photography". I would personally rather see the photos category of the site be reserved for anything from selfies to shots with artistic merit or focus on things like composition/mood/lighting and documentation of events or the natural world. I predict the majority of the photography category will be used for uploading photos taken at conventions, and that naturally means it will be displaying or capturing primarily other people's artwork and not necessarily your own.

And honestly? It just plain feels weird or dismissive to us as artists to call our fursuit work "photos" and not "art". And we would like to have acknowledgement that our hard work is considered such and not just another photo lost in a sea of random photos. As a side note, this also creates no real distinction between fursuit artists, fursuit wearers, and fursuit photographers if everything's simply tagged "fursuit" and found in the Photography category. It makes fursuit makers almost invisible on FN compared to other kinds of artists who create flat art or writers who make stories when they both have categories that focuses on their media. (Alternatively, there is also discussion about creating a better distinction from uploads of original artists work vs uploads of art created by others that was commissioned or photographed by the uploader... and I'd like to see it get more input: https://support.furrynetwork.com/topics/8-having-a-collections-feature/)


But by the same token they are still a kind of photo right? A photo is a photo after all. And therefore it was suggested that "Crafts" could be a sub-category of Photos since all crafts are probably going to have to be photo-based by its very nature. But what about something such as a traditional mural painting? Should those have to be uploaded to "Photos" too simply because that is also the only way to capture the art... yet how is that any different than a traditional painting that is able to be captured by a scanner and now that one is suddenly considered "artwork" instead?


My argument is just because the work has to be documented by a camera and the end result is a photo, it doesn't have to be the end-all of its categorization, as I think the subject and primarily the intention of the work needs to come into consideration as well.


...


Taking another look at my gallery sorting issue, I realized my second problem- I have several works that has concept art, WIP photos, and final photos all in the same image as an evolution or comparison of the before and after. It belongs in both categories by definition... and yet doesn't fit very well in either.


Alrighty, so what if we considered the idea of making crafts a sub-category of Artwork instead? Unfortunately this causes another issue... because Photos can be considered "Artwork" just as well as Multimedia is artwork, you could even make an argument for Stories to fall under there... so why wouldn't everything be a subcategory of artwork? What makes "Artwork" a unique, different category than the other ones already established? Well..

  • Multimedia is strictly defined by the file type
  • Stories can only be text (which is a media-specific category)
  • So the only difference between artwork and photo must be that currently FN uses the idea of "Flat Art" to define its Artwork category because it doesn't require a camera to showcase (but technically it still can, especially if one doesn't have access to a scanner for example)

Guess what? We don't make "flat art"... we make physical 3d art.

And if we're sculptors, we don't call ourselves photographers.


Not to mention, adding any kind of "sub-category" simply changes the entire structure that FN is centered around for its upload categories. It would feel rather out of place with the existing layout and very likely that the category would be completely overlooked... unless we just started adding subcategories left and right. But it seems the idea was to use tags to replace subcategories, or any pre-defined categories for that matter, like other art sites have. Sure there's less universal tags/formatting, but there is no issue of not being properly represented by a category either. And there's always community tags to fix any classification issues too. However in the case of Crafts, I think it's going to become necessary to have this additional sort of artistic representation for a site that revolves entirely around showcasing all types of artwork... else there will be way too much inconsistency with uploads like fursuits going to both categories chaotically.


---


And lastly my suggestion for helping uploaders understand the distinction between when to upload to crafts vs photos: If you crafted something yourself, it should be showcased in Crafts- concept art, WIP, and final production shots for documentation of your work as a whole presentation. Photos you took of your work in a non-documentation purpose, such as a photo of your work at a con, could be artist discretion for the category; it simply depends on the purpose of the image and if the artist wants to use it to supplement their craft project's documentation or just show a photo. Any crafts that were not created by the artist themselves that showcases the work should always be considered a photo, because the uploader is showcasing an image of the work and not representing the art for documentation of its... artistic essence?... as it were. It was not crafted by them, it was photographed by them. I feel there should be an artistic distinction between someone who crafted something and took a photo vs someone who took a photo of something crafted. (And same goes for everything uploaded in general honestly. People are usually decent about saying so, but there are ways to improve this.)


So simply put, if you crafted something it goes into Crafts.

If you took a photo of a work someone crafted, it goes in Photos.



In conclusion, I would like to propose that a new category named "Crafts" should be created to ensure that every kind of artwork the fandom creates can be properly represented on FN, while being easier for users to classify and browse/search through work they're interested in: fursuits, scluptures, plushies, clothing... they can all have a home that treats it separate from flat art yet does not risk degrading its artistic value simply because it's forced to be visually represented as a photo. Thanks for your consideration!

Answer
Varka (Spokesdragon) 8 years ago

Hey all -


A LOT of support for this in a short amount of time, wow! This wasn't something we'd thought of - so thanks for suggesting it (and voting for it)!


If we were to add a "Crafts" content type, which functioned identically to Photos, would that cover the majority of use cases? Or, once we add it, would we be recieving calls for another kind of media to be represented?


I agree that Artwork and Photos are mostly a non-technical distinction (ie, they're handled in much the same way, there's no real difference in file type for each) - but what other content types would be needed, if we were to 'do this properly'?


Of course, crafts covers a very wide swathe of content types - I'd almost say that Photography and Artwork would be a subset of "Crafts", to use a purist's viewpoint - but clearly a sensible distinction would be constructive.


What would the concequences of this be, on a wider scale?