The Fur Days Seem To Be Over

[MadisonAvenueFurPrincess]

I was remembering the days of The Melody O'Hair Site and many other sites and how the posting of photos in the galleries used to shut down the bandwith of the Web Pages. I remember the "Mega Posters" of that day often uploading Dozens of Fur Photos every day. I have never collected Magazines, Newspaper Ads or the like, but I so miss these days. It seems Today that all We see on the free fur sites are the same 200 Photos floating around or sites that have not been touched in YEARS. I know that most of the people who are part of this Forum do not go back even 5 Years, I am pretty young myself but I remember the Golden Days of when at least 20 Fur Sites were updated regularly in the 1990's and no one charged 30 dollars per month to look at Fur.

[AKcoyote]

MadisonAFP,

 

While I will not argue your points, I will point out that maintaining a quality fur site is very time consuming and can be too expensive for one enthusiast. Many people who start a specialty website just get too burned out to keep at it. Even this website has been close to shutting down due to the stress it puts on the owner and staff.

[LordTheNightKnight]

MadisonAFP,

 

While I will not argue your points, I will point out that maintaining a quality fur site is very time consuming and can be too expensive for one enthusiast. Many people who start a specialty website just get too burned out to keep at it. Even this website has been close to shutting down due to the stress it puts on the owner and staff.

 

I can understand that.

[auzmink]

Like most things, enthusiastic amateurs get swamped in the rush and lose the will. The information available is also swamped by (thankfully) our persistent info hungry searchers.

 

I too liked the small old sites, but by g** I love this in depth expanded site.

 

I too wonder how many times we can ask the same questions, post the same pictures as both are finite numbers but at least we are here for others to find and realise 'ITS OK'

 

Auzmink

[White Fox]

Indeed these sites are "few and far between" as Madison mentions. I sometimes wonder if the fact that our and FFG's Galleries are so large that it discourages these folks. I do hope that is not the case, but it might be.

 

Just for the information of new members, you can find most of the sites that still exist if you click on our "links tab", and click on the catagory "Special Interest Sites". If anyone knows of others, please let us know. We would love to add to the list. If you have a site of your own for instance, we would like to know about it. But remember that if we get an error code when we go there we will not post the link.

 

Gotta go. Time way short again today

 

W

[Guest]

As to the over 15,000 pictures ... very few duplicates and some are intentional.

 

They are sourced from many corners of not only the Internet but peoples never seen before files they dutifully scan.

 

Most are of much better quality than you will find elsewhere, larger and many are of outstanding quality that any site of any type would be envious of.

 

I loaded an additional 50 or so last night, mostly from idsend.

 

I couldn't stay awake long enough to find so many pictures on my own. I have a hardly enough time to load the ones of my own that I do. I just thank all the members here who are out there gathering all that they do.

 

I'm just thankful to be in a position where I get to handle so many incredible pictures.

 

I could use some help by-the-way.

 

 

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[MadisonAvenueFurPrincess]

Thank you for you labor OFF!

[MrMockle]

I was remembering the days of The Melody O'Hair Site and many other sites and how the posting of photos in the galleries used to shut down the bandwith of the Web Pages. I remember the "Mega Posters" of that day often uploading Dozens of Fur Photos every day. I have never collected Magazines, Newspaper Ads or the like, but I so miss these days. It seems Today that all We see on the free fur sites are the same 200 Photos floating around or sites that have not been touched in YEARS. I know that most of the people who are part of this Forum do not go back even 5 Years, I am pretty young myself but I remember the Golden Days of when at least 20 Fur Sites were updated regularly in the 1990's and no one charged 30 dollars per month to look at Fur.

 

Madison,

 

I share some of your concern although some of your points have more obvious causes. I remember first browsing for fur websites around 1996 when the internet was in it's relative infancy and it seemed difficult to build and manage a website. A few founding sites were created which, like everything, had a life expectancy and most if not all have expired - sadly in some cases, as have their owners. Storage space and download limits also restricted the size and number of images that could be hosted and acquired through cyberspace, giving a greater impression of activity to users who marvelled at dial-up speeds when it took minutes to download an image to use as a desktop wallpaper. The younger members hear who are blessed with broadband capacity, gigabytes of diskspace and a seemingly endless list of webhosts making hosting your own site painless should really think themselves lucky for that. Those days weren't so halcyon or rose-tinted!

 

However you are right in that there seems to be few sites that are updated regularly and, more importantly for me, with fresh and original content produced by the owners/moderators. To run a successful pay site you usually have to cater for the lowest common denominator to make it truly profitable in the long term and before long you start to work for your membership rather than yourself, eventually enslaving yourself to your members and before long giving up through overfamiliarity, boredom or exhaustion. Although this downturn can also affect free sites, of which my own is a classic example. Even large photo collections suffer from problems too; the galleries here and in similar fur mega-sites suffer from an inability to search through the library of images. There are too many to sift through and such limited indexing and classification of the vast stock of photos to find specific ranges of images.

 

Sadly I don't see this situation improving. My best advice though is do what I did! I didn't find anything I really wanted online so I created my own website and images. Many of you can do the same relatively easily and cheaply even using communities like Flickr or Webshots rather than build a full site from scratch. There are men and women here with dozens, even hundreds of furs and yet no pics of their collections, modelled or on display? I'm not suggesting modelling them yourself but finding a suitable model isn't hard or too expensive to do; of course privacy is often an issue but if you wear furs in public and your friends and family know that you do, then surely a few pics wouldn't cause harm? At least you know that those images would be new and fresh - and you might just enjoy the experience behind or in front of the lens!

 

Just a few thoughts.

 

Regards,

Mr Mockle

[Guest]

One aspect of The Gallery we are working on is the Search function.

 

Right now for instance if you use the Search function and type in "Lynx Fur" you will get every Lynx Fur in the entire Gallery except for the Special Albums like Mr. Mockle and Fur Babe [haven't gotten that far yet].

 

We are working on the entire Gallery to do just that for all the pictures as well as cleaning up file names and the like.

 

All the pictures that are loaded now go through an edited for these functions.

 

The members who upload their pictures can help us greatly by simply NOT making very long file names and naming the fur type whenever possible on every picture.

 

The thing about computers is "Garbage in Garbage out" is what will always happen.

 

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