User:Lamoxlamae/Yiffstar

Yiffstar (also known as Yiffy Story Archive) is a privately-funded non-commercial story archive of erotic furry fiction and artwork and adult furry community. A few of the features Yiffstar has include its own chat room, MUCK, filtered art gallery, literature gallery, forums, and oekaki board with the ease of only requiring a single username and account to access them all. This ease of use has made the site very popular, with over 15,000 artwork submissions on average every month and an average of 33,000 users visiting weekly.

The creation of Yiffstar was triggered by the demise of popular link archives like Gotfox.com and Mia's Main Index. Believing the problem that caused the downfall of these archives to be the unreliability of the links collected and the scatteredness of the content, Yiffstar was created in 2002 to actively preserve and encourage the growth of anthropomorphic fiction and art all in one place. . To help keep the dream of a more complete archive alive, Yiffstar is constantly updated, with old bugs being removed and new features being added all the time. . Yiffstar is currently owned by its primary programmer Toumal Rakesh and is hosted in Austria.

Art and Literature Galleries
Though both galleries focus on furry stories and artwork with adult or sexual content, non-sexually oriented fiction and artwork are also welcome. Submitted content is moderated by a crew of volunteer reviewers, checked to assure that the content is indeed furry, and then hosted on the main site with no censorship for specific content. There is also an Oekaki gallery being in the works as well that will follow the same submission guidelines as the Art and Literature galleries.

Art and Literature are grouped by content as either "Male/female", "Male/Male", "Female/Female", "Male solo", "Female Solo", or "Clean". Subcategories involving content within the stories such as types of characters involved, if Fetishes  are involved, and popular locations are also available allowing users to search more easily though the database. Recently an "opt-out" toggle to filter out keywords for things that a user may find repulsive has been added making things even easier to browse by simply removing from view anything that meets the "remove" criteria set by the user. A list of keywords is available from the sidebar and there is also the option of searching the database using random keywords pulled from the list.

Yiffstar uses a rating system in which users may vote on a scale between 1 and 5 as to the quality of a work and there is a comments box at the bottom of the work for visitors to leave their thoughts. If a user really likes a piece of work they may add it to their favorites list or they may watch the creator of the piece to see all their future work more easily.

Forums
Yiffstar features a highly active forum within the Furry community boasting over 12,000 registered users and over thrity two subforums with over 721,000 Posts in 38,000 Topics.

The most popular subforums include the "Games" for discussion of video and computer gaming with over 17,000 posts, "Endless Yiff Roleplay" for adult roleplaying with over 24,000 posts, "Furry Sexuality" with over 54,000 posts, and "The Yiffstar Village" for conversation about the Yiffstar Community with over 82,000 posts.

YiffChat
Yiffstar has its own web-based Chat room for live Roleplay and chat. Due to YiffChat's availability even through Firewalls, and because of its ease of use, it is very popular.

A few features that make YiffChat unique include in-chat optional gender symbol and a private message link and ignore button beside each screenname. Also, as of 3/3/07 YiffChat has 35 different public-access themed rooms. For the comfort of others, any private or adult activities are supposed to be taken to private messaging.

(editor's note: to be removed before page is posted- chat room names are superflus can can be looked up on reference page. Do NOT re-add! Thanks. :) )

YimuMuck
Yimu Island is Yiffstar's own MUCK, located on muck.yiffstar.com, port 8888. Themed on a subtropical fantasy island of about 100 square kilometers in size, Yimu Island has many locations including private beaches, deep forests, rolling plains, a bustling central city, Mt. Saramei and of course a good number of user-operated bars or locations. Bots and user-programmed rooms are allowed and available. It is nowhere near as large as FurryMUCK, though it is always growing.

Defunct Areas
As Yiffstar grows and improves, areas found to be too problematic, too buggy, or overly unused are occasionally altered or dropped. Here is a small listing of now defunct areas of the site.

YiffTalk
Yiffstar used to have its own voice-chat server based on the Teamspeak software named YiffTalk. It was created for furry voice chat, socializing and roleplay, however, as Yiffchat did not garner many users and was hard to moderate, the area was taken down.

Webhosting
Though artists used to be able to negotiate with Tourmal over webspace, this has been fully replaced by the Gallery features of the site in order to prevent complications with moderation and to further streamline the content of Yiffstar's featured galleries.

F.A.P
F.A.P was an image board in the spirit of 2chan. Adult furry art was posted in threads with specific topics, often grouping pictures of individual species of anthropomorphic creatures into a single thread. After awhile, F.A.P switched to a software that provided a filtered, "image only" view of pictures posted on the YiffStar Forums.

Unlike other 2chan-based boards, F.A.P did not have a DNP list, instead using the YiffStar Forums "Opt-in" list from its artist section. The majority of images were linked to via an automated thumbnailing system to make sure that the link target didn't suffer from excessive traffic draining. Images sometimes were uploaded as well as attachments if an artist had chosen to opt-in for their work to be attached. This open-ended posting and indexing approach was combined with no thread expiry, a friendly moderation style and a connection without any monthly traffic limit. F.A.P was planned to become a long-lived image board where art does not simply vanish after a set time.

Between difficulties in maintaining an up-to-date "OK to Post" list and a switch to a completely new forums structure to support YiffStar's constantly-growing userbase, F.A.P. was shut down.

Random Gay Furry Art
This is actually a small link on the sidebar. Clicking this link leads to a simple page that refreshes every thirty seconds with random images marked "male solo" or "male/male" from Yiffstar's Galleries. Sometimes the pictures that come up are of an erotic homosexual nature, sometimes they are simply pictures featuring males- it is fully random.

This section was removed in September 2007 due to bandwidth usage issues.