Earlier today YiffStar, known for touting themselves as a place where writers can have their work seen by thousands, switched over to their redesigned website "SoFurry" ([link]). No, this isn't me saying farewell to a mere name, this is me saying farewell to an entire website that, despite its broken things here and there, was the best place that I was aware of online to share furry writing.

People on FurAffinity really like artwork over stories, and that's okay - because YiffStar was more keyed in to searching and categorizing stories over artwork, so the two balanced each other out. Needless to say my artwork gets more views than my stories do here, and the opposite applied for YS.

SoFurry is broken. It is beyond broken. It is the supersized triple stack value meal of broken with a biggie side of extra fail, and frankly I am a mix of disheartened, disappointed, and crestfallen  over it. YS was a website and community that meant a lot to me because it was there that I decide to share my stories and work when I was first trying to help myself out of my cycle of depression and suicidal thoughts with the help of counseling. Through actions in my past I had bastardized how much I loved writing, but I was able to reclaim it as my personal hobby and started writing as a kind of therapy. I wrote about my dreams, my fantasies, and my wishes in life - and I felt better.

I shared those stories with a close personal friend of mine whom I confided in. He suggested that maybe I should join a website or two and post them to see if anybody else liked them, so I did. People on YiffStar liked them and my email Inbox and comments sections were peppered with warm supportive comments, "fan" comments if you want to call them that I guess, and other wishes. I took a facet of my life that made me feel miserable and made it into something that brightened my day through the art of writing and the new SoFurry has completely shit all over it.

I don't quite know where to begin with SF, because there is just so much wrong. The design is nice I suppose, it's kind of cluttered and skinny but it's okay, and that's where the hopeful positivity of my thoughts ended. I will start small; the forums are barren - there are no posts. They lost the databases and decided that axing the role play forums was a smart move. I don't RP as much as I used to several years ago but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy reading or browsing other people's RPs. There's also not an Edit button for any posts, nor is there a Quote button - that's BASIC forum functionality that's missing. BB Code no longer works nor does any kind of post formatting, profile information doesn't save nor display properly, and essentially any kind of tiny little thing we take for granted with how forums work are missing now.

And that brings me to how they have completely destroyed their catalog of searchable stories. Search is busted, first and foremost, as searching for the most common possible terms (ie "dragon") yields 0 results. The system of tags is no longer searchable, but it's still there, and the M/M M/F F/F Bi categorizations are completely gone. When you read a story that was part of a series there were links to all of the other chapters in that story, this feature is also missing.

Any kind of organization the website used to have that made browsing and finding stories easy has been stripped off of the website altogether, and by proxy they have lessened the importance of writing as a form of content on their website. Yes, I will admit that the original YiffStar search feature was kind of spotty but at least it worked.

YiffStar was a pretty meaningful community to me and was one of a handful of variables that helped me through a very dark time in my life, and I guess I just have resentment towards seeing it change from a oldish relic-looking website into some absolutely broken piece of Web 2.0 shit. Nothing lasts forever though; and it's always hard to kind of deal with it but much like the days of MSN Chat and MSN Groups, YiffStar will just have to join that collection of memories I dubbed "the ghosts of my Internet past".



- Draco