Hey there Fuzzies!

It's been a while! Rednef has been having a lot of fun while I’ve been hard at work alongside the Tech staff. But fret not, we have a big juicy update for all of you!

Announcement Page New Notification Type (Modern only)

We’ve been posting updates and banners more often which means there’s been way more journal posts. As a result, we’re finding there are times where journal content would overlap and Rednef and I have to decide who gets to post. We don’t want to cut any announcement time short, so for these cases we are introducing the new announcement page and announcement notifications!

https://d.facdn.net/media/journals/.....tification.png

The new page includes all announcement journals by our mascots, Fender (Site and Tech Updates) and Rednef (Community Events and Spotlight). Announcement journals are sorted in chronological order and any you haven’t seen or marked as read will be highlighted. We hope this makes it easier for you all to keep up-to-date and easily see any journals you may have missed, including community events, site updates, and more! On our end, this means we don’t have to wait to share exciting things as they come up. We don't expect the number of announcements per month to increase, mind you. This just gives us the flexibility to share information with you in a more timely fashion without being confined to rigid schedules.

https://d.facdn.net/media/journals/.....-highlight.png

External Link Filtering

We all know that not everyone online plays nice. Unfortunately there are people who try to use Fur Affinity as a tool to take advantage of others. To address potential phishing and scam attempts via links, we've implemented a new intermediate page that will alert the user when they're leaving the Fur Affinity website. This will ideally cut down on accidental link clicks or situations where a scammer might try to mask the actual intent of their website.

We’ve also noticed some scammers sending notes impersonating staff. If you ever get a note that says it’s from Fur Affinity, verify that the person you're talking to is an actual Fur Affinity staff account before following any instructions! Staff accounts will have this https://d.facdn.net/media/static/im.....min-shield.png shield icon before their name. We will NEVER ask you for your password or direct you off-site. If you encounter any suspicious activity, please open a Trouble Ticket to report it.

Comment Management (beta.furaffinity.net)

With recent adjustments to notifications and allowing for shouts to be hidden, we're adding the highly requested comment management page! This page will show ALL comments made by you, enabling you to delete or locate your comments at a glance. The comment management page is available for testing right now on the beta version of FA. You can access it via this link. Like other beta deployments, this is only available to FA+ members for testing at this time and it will go live for all users after testing is complete. If you want to give it a whirl before it’s officially released, sign up for FA+!

Bot and Third Party Activity

We understand that some people use bots and other third party software (such as art archivers, etc.) to interact with Fur Affinity. Due to the increase in traffic and the popularity of these solutions, we are updating our policy with regards to third party software. This section does NOT apply to individuals using software to interact with Fur Affinity in a more streamlined way like Postybirb and FABUI (these are not official Fur Affinity apps, but ones we currently permit).

We request that you follow these guidelines when using or developing third party bots and apps:
--Limit bot activity to periods with less than 15k users online.
--Keep your requests to once per second.
--Employ a proper exponential backoff scheme to mitigate overwhelming our services.
--During DDoS attacks, Cloudflare’s DDoS Mitigation may impact the use of third party software. We kindly ask that you do not use third party software while DDoS mitigation is underway.
--All third party apps interacting with Fur Affinity are the responsibility of their creators and are not supported in any way by the Fur Affinity Team. We will not take bug reports or handle issues with regard to how these tools interact with Fur Affinity.
--If your service interacts with Fur Affinity as a Machine-to-Machine service for the purposes of scraping or verification, we require that you seek permission to access our services by filing a Trouble Ticket in the Tech Category under “Access Requests” so we can identify your traffic pattern and ensure you retain access.
--We reserve the right at any time to revoke or block access based on perceived abuse patterns or unidentified, strenuous traffic. Please be respectful!

We’ve also received reports of users' scripts breaking as a result of Cloudflare blocks. We will be reaching out to those individuals who have submitted tickets to us shortly, and we apologize for the wait while we work on our internals to better support third party interactions in the future!

An Official Fur Affinity API and Closed Beta!

As part of the Developer Friendly Initiative, we will soon be releasing a consumer-facing API to interact with Fur Affinity programmatically. We will reach out to pre-selected individuals for testing soon, followed by an invite-only closed beta for interested parties, then a rolling release schedule from there. Anyone can apply to the API closed beta, and FA+ members will be able to join directly from the Discord once the beta goes live.

If you are interested in participating in the API closed beta when it is ready, please fill out this form: https://forms.gle/8XNUo61fK4VyQdHA6

We plan to offer a read-only API for the time being while we learn about the API’s impact on our database and begin tweaking to allow for writes in the future. We appreciate everyone’s understanding as we slowly implement new changes to a very old codebase!

Right now we are facilitating access to the API through Discord as a way to better collect feedback and let the community interact with the development team, but this will not be the case for the final release of the API! The final release of the API will allow you to interact with and register for the API directly through the site.

More changes!

Beyond these changes there are other smaller, but still important, adjustments to the website which you can view here.

Upcoming Downtime

We have a planned maintenance coming up for June 22, 2026 between 05:00:00 AM to 01:00:00 PM. This will allow us to make various improvements on our backend including upgrades to our database.

Thank you!

We have been very hard at work behind the scenes working on improving our Continuous Integration and Deployment Pipelines, as well as finally moving our version control to Git and creating reproducible environments for Fur Affinity. It’s been a lot of hard work from a small number of talented and dedicated community members that stepped up as staff, and we want to continue improving Fur Affinity for everyone. This also means that in the coming months, we’ll be able to begin supporting more developers and more volunteers as our codebase becomes more modernized and less fragile, so be on the lookout for recruitments! We are looking forward to working with the community and making something incredible together for everyone!

Reminder to keep comments on top and be excellent to each other!