Yerf

From Free net encyclopedia

Yerf is an online art gallery dedicated to the collection of PG-rated (or tamer) furry art. It was originally called the Squeaky Clean Furry Archive, but changed ownership and names. The name is supposedly a vocalization made by foxes, a popular subject for furry artists. The site was originally created as a "clean" alternative to archives such as the VCL, which does not place content restrictions on its artists. While the content restrictions were part of the founding principles of the archive, After several Administrations, the archive instituted minimum quality standards for membership,when one would apply, and those standards have increased slowly over the years.

In January 2005, the Yerf server suffered a massive hard drive failure; attempts at data recovery failed due to an inoperable head crash, although over $2,500 was raised to cover potential costs in case it could be repaired. The site is down as of 27 December 2004 and is expected to remain that way for a while - no backups were made of the server prior to its failure, including the gallery software. Most of the art available before the crash can be viewed at archive.org.

As of the end of February 2005, all art that was on the archive has been recovered (from fans who had cached copies of the archive), caption data as of approximately October 2004 has been recovered (from archive.org), and a rewrite of the image-serving code is underway. The project can be tracked at the Yerf recoding project wiki.

As of August 2005, Yerf is being rebuilt around a new core, the Squeeky Clean Art Archive. Design goals for this software are to preserve the clean page layouts and simple navigation of the original layout, avoiding the design excesses of other larger archive sites.

As of 11 November 2005, most of the art from the original archive was reposted in a "read only" database, displaying artist names, then thumbnail pages in each artist's directory, of the art arranged chronologically, and then finally the image. Final page layouts and structure are TBD while work continues on the new gallery software.

After a year of downtime, Yerf reopened on 20 January, 2006.

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