I would back this only if I knew that some staff would be dedicated towards making sure it's not abused. Amazon and eBay both suffer from people abusing their review systems, and with how drama-filled the furry community is, I see little chance of it avoiding this fate without some dedicated effort.

I would also advise spelling out the rules of such a system VERY carefully. There have been some incidents between Asian furs and their commissioners that caused a lot of pain for both sides, simply due to intense culture clash, and could have been avoided if the rules were better stated.

Google and Apple app stores both have rules barring anything with pornography, and while you could sideload on Android rather easily, it's also a bit risky to have people open up their phone's security to allow such an app.

Honestly, I'd rather see the effort go towards other features.

I have to thumbs-down this one. If there's one thing that drives me (and many users) nuts, it's automatically being opted into something like that. I'm not so sure having the posts themselves echoed into site-side posts would be good, either. Maybe if they linked to the posts as announcements, I could understand it, but not in the manner suggested.

The problem with this is that, while it promotes privacy, it can also enable stalking. It's a double-edged blade that can cause problems both sides.

I can't say I don't support the privacy side, but I also can't truly support the other option on this one. Perhaps someone could suggest an alternative that could stop stalkers while allowing users to remain semi-private with their follows?

The two pieces of the site don't share user data. They're both built on completely different software, with the support area being "Powered by User Echo", while the main site is all custom-built. As such, they kinda need to have separate log-ins for the sake of security.

This is technologically impossible. As long as the file is uploaded, it has to be pulled down from a server to be displayed. That can easily be saved to a file, whether or not you want that to happen. Only something akin to a mobile app can have that functionality, and even then, it'd have to be a fully walled garden for that to work.

As they say: if you don't want your work to be stolen, don't put it on the public web. It's just how the internet works.

Yes. Netflix already uses it, as well. However, many people absolutely despise it from an idealistic standpoint, and the DRM only eliminates piracy from the more casual people wanting to take the media. Also, as with everything online, if someone really wants to grab the media, there's very little that can truly stop them.

I'll +1 this for the hope that they disallow people from promoting their own submissions. That just becomes exceptionally spammy.

While I will give a +1 for the sake of musicians... From a purely technical standpoint, for someone who really wants that music for free, disabling a download button won't stop them. It's trivial to rip any media stream from a web page—BandCamp and YouTube included—using a few custom-made tools. This is mostly due to the move to HTML5, which makes everything laughably easy to pull down.

The only way you could even remotely stop it is to implement DRM into the audio stream through Encrypted Media Extensions (W3C working draft spec can be found here). However, this would limit the choice of browsers someone could use to listen to that music, so it'll be a bit of a double-edged sword. Just an FYI.

SoFurry used to have this feature. No one liked it there, either.