Requiem for an Anthro Archive (from January 2019)

Originally posted on the former G+'s Furry Fandom Community, 23/1/2019 (4:54:51 p.m. EST)--thus finally bringing this feed into rerun territory for the first time. Updated with relevant hyperlinks and afterword; text otherwise remains almost unchanged.

In this edition of "The 404 Files"...

To paraphrase the contributors of "Keep Circulating the Tapes" on TV Tropes: The fandom was sweating for a while here. (But don't hold your breath just yet.)

VCL, the venerable Vixen Controlled Library, was the average fur's go-to in the early days of the Web (until FurAffinity and their competition came along). As of recent, the art site hosted almost 600,000 images -- fanworks verboten, quality and tastes variable -- from over 4,000 artists.

But as happens with any long-runner online, someone must pay the bills...or pull the plug.⊙ Several dozen furs on Twitter (at least that's how I found out what happened) got a taste of reality when reports surfaced of what seemed to be the unannounced end of a 24-year legacy. As related one "Yipes My Wife", its current (undisclosed) webmaster was mulling over closing it anytime soon; the upkeep was apparently not worth it. Not before he -- and a few others -- jumped on the backup bandwagon. (Thumbs up if you're familiar with FA's "Dragoneer", Inkbunny's "GreenReaper", and/or Jason Scott of TextFiles, who lent their voices to the discussion below.)

For the record: VCL disappeared from early on Monday morning till the middle of this Wednesday overnight. For this Captain, pinging us.vclart.net time and again in vain during this incident was nothing short of a kick in the gut. (That, combined with burnout from renewed conlang commitments, added to my reluctance to sign in to my feed on time.)

Not to mention whois.domaintools.com's entry for VCL shows a "clientHold" registration status for the domain, as well as an expiration date of January 19 -- last I checked. (Perhaps renewal negotiations played a part in it?) I even considered giving flayrah.com (a furry news site) a tip just in case.

The overreaction in the linked thread is understandable, as the anthro relic is fine and well (registration lock and all) like nothing happened. Between G+ and VCL, let's see which service on its last legs outlives the other; please place your bets.

Apparently, the outage resulted from a prolonged archiving sprint that seemed to overwhelm the aging site's servers, as "Yipes" related in a January 21 update at https://twitter.com/anfael_/status/1086765571608178688 (January 19). But at least he got what he could before it was too late -- a ~30GB package is truly a bargain in the modern age of multi-TB drives.

If the once-largest online anthro-art archive out there does go away for good anywhere, it'll be a shame. It's like Yerf in 2007 and FurNation a while later, all over again. (You'll relate a lot more if you were around at the time; I was but a beginner on DeviantArt.com.)

Were you a former VCL member, or a frequent visitor? Share your memories and thoughts in the comments.

Till then: We'll remember you, Ch'marr.

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From a 2017 anniversary bulletin by "elkit":

"Most people seem to forget that VCL is an art archive, not just an art website. It holds a lot of old art. I was surprised to find some of Kazekat's old art there. So VCL will be up for a long time, but at some point, it's gonna go. And I'm pretty sure a lot of furs will be sad."
--"mirai223"

"You'll never find a better [time capsule] for its period."
--"Splint"

And yes, "DataPacRat" did mention the storage bit too.

⊙ Or face the consequences, as happened during Tumblr's standoff with Apple over CP on the former's service a few months back. Which (in)famously led to the platform's adult-content ban in December 2018, in turn leading to a decline in popularity that factored into Verizon Media selling it off to WordPress' Automattic (for a pitiful US $3 million) the following August.

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Already turns out VCL did outlive the Plus by eleven months as of this writing -- another outage last November aside. Even so, it's now a shell of its once-popular self: The front page is still up, as are their Artist and Author directories and Search portal, but the "Recent Artists" section is empty, and the last upload (by one "Swift") occurred on October 20, 2019. Visiting any individual Artist page brings up this error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
DatabaseError: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
Is the server running locally and accepting
connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"?"

Thankfully, the art hasn't gone away for good yet, instead just hidden away in VCL's servers; for more information, please see "Talk:VCL" at WikiFur. Otherwise, IA's Wayback is your friend.

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Owing to the effects of the coronavirus (COVID-19) on the world as a whole, and the inevitable fact that stay-at-home is the order of the season, guess I must put up my own agenda to take advantage. Details next we meet, along with our next Notebook entry; until then, please stay safe, wipe everything down, don't get sick...and God bless.

Expect a couple resteems or more in the interim.