| | | Just a quick announcement that we've added some new categories to the system in order to help break things up where things were getting crowded, and based on user feedback and needs.
We've split the Partial Fursuits category into Partials (Head + Paws) and Singles (Heads, Tails, Paws) in order to better separate the two notions. Partials will be for a combination of head plus at least paws if not more pieces like clothing and tail and the like. Singles will be for either individual items like a tail or paws or any combination of multiple suit items which does not include a head. So got a head with paws? Post that in Partials. Got paws and a tail? That will go into Singles. Got ears (headband) and a tail? That will also go into Singles.
Additionally we've split Clothing/Jewelry into General and Mature audience categories as some sellers have asked to have a specific Mature category for their clothing, jewelry and other apparel-related items.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback please let us know! We love to hear from you guys. =) | | |
| | A lot of folks have asked for name changes over the years, and we always wanted to provide that service, however time and effort and finding a clean way to do that had eluded us. Well no more! We can now change FurBuy usernames on request, however there is some administrative work involved so we will not be doing them completely for free or without restriction as name changes can be easily abused. We will perform name changes once per year for paid members of the site included as a service in their membership fee of US$18 while their membership is active - for all other users and for additional name changes for paid members, we will charge a one-time fee of $5 per name change. This is to help compensate for the time our admins spend reviewing the existing accounts, verifying that the change can happen and going into the system to do them. In order to prevent abuse of the name-change system, we will only permit each account one name change every 90 days. If you're interested in getting a name change, send e-mail to furbuy.com[at]gmail.com and include your current username and the username you'd like to change it to. One of our staff will instruct you how to proceed from there and if the name you'd like is available. | | |
| | Lately we've noticed in communications with some folks both new and old that there's an opinion that FurBuy does not permit YCH or that FurBuy is not a good venue for YCH auctions. On the contrary, we welcome YCH style auctions and would be happy to help you make them work within our system! We're writing this quick guide to help show how to approach YCH style auctions on FurBuy and alleviate the concerns that many folks have raised about how to handle YCH on FurBuy. Single Character YCH With single character YCH auctions, there's no need to do anything special - just create an auction in the Artwork : Commissions category as normal and feel free to add any ladder levels in the Auction Description (if you want ladder options). When pricing a single-character YCH please remember the spirit of YCH auctions are to offer a discounted price for a piece where you've already established the pose/concept that you as the artist want to do because it interests you and is easier to complete - this is important because that's the primary allure for bidders! Multi-Character YCH - Fixed Positions If you have a multiple character YCH with fixed positions (usually lettered or numbered in the concept art/WIP) where you want to auction each slot off, we advise creating a separate auction for each slot. When creating each auction, be sure to clearly label in the auction Title which slot that particular auction is for, and in the Description include any details regarding restrictions on gender, build or sexual interactions (if necessary) for that particular slot. If you'd like to link all of the auctions together, then after you've created them all you can go back in and Edit the descriptions to add links between them all for bidder convenience - or simply direct them to your Seller Page to see them all. Another great tip when doing multiple auctions for the same or similar pieces: create a template for your auctions in a text editor of your preference, then save it to your local disk, copy and paste the template for each description being careful to tweak the specifics for each different slot - this will save you a lot of time and potential frustration! Multi-Character YCH - Unassigned Positions In the case that you, the artist, will assign the positions at your leisure and every bidder has an equal chance of being placed anywhere in the scene at your discretion, you can make use of the Dutch Auction feature on FurBuy to make everything very simple! If you have 5 slots in your YCH then simply assign a Quantity value of 5 when creating your auction - bidders will bid against a pool and the top 5 bidders at the end of the auction will all pay the same price when it ends. Please note that this is ONLY to be used when all of the slots are equal - some artists create very large YCHs where some positions are smaller or more distant in the scene than others, so in this special case you may need to do a Dutch Auction for each level of significance of random slot in your YCH scene. We hope that this brief article has helped you strategize how you can leverage FurBuy to meet your YCH auction needs! Please feel free to share this article, and if you have any questions or comments please feel free to comment or contact us directly at furbuy.com[at]gmail.com | | |
| | | We will have a scheduled downtime starting at approximately 6pm on Sunday, September 29th lasting until approximately Noon on Tuesday, October 1st. This roughly 42 hour downtime will be necessary as we transfer our server machines and other rack gear from Seattle, Washington to San Jose, California and get them setup in their new home. Please also note that since our IP addresses will be changing, it may take an additional 24 to 72 hours for your ISP's DNS records to update to the new location of our servers.
Why the move? Our current colo host is raising their prices in addition to having a limited amount of space and bandwidth available for us to upgrade. Further, we have been hitting our bandwidth cap regularly and we're launching more new services soon, so we need a heavier pipeline and to add more servers. We have also teamed-up with a few other furry server projects and will be sharing our new full rack with them in order to help reduce overall costs while increasing our speed and stability. Additionally, we are in the process of moving our business from Washington to California and it would be nice to have our equipment closer to 'home'.
What happens with auctions during this time? Auctions will continue to run as normal. Any auctions closing during the downtime or within the 24 hours AFTER the downtime will have their time extended by 72 hours automatically. If you DO NOT want your auctions extended, please ensure that you do not have any auctions closing during this period. In general, we would strongly advise against running any auctions during or around the scheduled downtime period as some bidders may need extra time to get their local DNS cache updated after the servers come back online.
| | |
| | | Just wanted to make a quick journal to point out why this Beta is so important, as it may not have been made clear already to folks.
Basically this is the groundwork for a complete site refresh, the look and feel and features of the Beta sites will be incorporated into the auction and account side of the site in the coming months. So it's important that we get everyone's feedback about this new look and feel and if we've missed any useful features it will be easier to consider and accommodate them now than after we complete the refresh.
What is the refresh? Well, basically everything you already know about FurBuy is being completely rewritten from the ground-up. Every page, every feature, every design element will be revamped - even the database is going to be (carefully) re-written (without losing any existing data).
Why all this trouble? FurBuy was originally written and has been maintained for 13 years now using outdated technology from 1999. The language has grown and evolved (very nicely I might add) and the web frameworks have improved (also very nicely) and the amount of rich, robust HTML5 features available today is unprecedented in making modern, sleek, attractive and interactive web apps. There's no reason for FurBuy to continue lingering in outdated space and the new features mean faster and easier access to everything, for everyone. The outdated and no longer supported legacy code is also beginning to break in places, such as randomly missing POST form data in the old system - no longer an issue at all in our new web framework.
So if you haven't already, please come take a look and play around with the new Beta sites, and offer us your thoughts and feedback. We've setup a special Board on the forums just for discussion of Beta site features! | | |
| | Well, we promised to get this Beta moved to open testing by Feb 25th, and while we barely missed that target in the PST time zone, our friends in Alaska and Hawaii are still on-time. ;D The new Beta segments for Classifieds and Forums are now live! You can get to them respectively here: http://www.furbuy.com/classifieds/ http://www.furbuy.com/forums/ Please go take a gander, give them a whirl, and give us your feedback! Please note this is considered a LIVE site, we do not intend to wipe this data after Beta, so please keep it civil and on-topic! | | |
| | | Just a fair warning here, we're making a change on the site effective immediately regarding the failure to leave feedback for an auction. Auctions are archived 180 days after close, regardless of how they were closed. When an auction is archived, if any involved parties have not left feedback yet, then a feedback entry will be added by the system which states "User failed to provide feedback" and this entry will appear in your User Profile page.
We're adding this system in order to help foster a responsible community and promote leaving actual feedback on other users. Feedback and Ratings are a critical part of the site and community checks and balances and with new security improvements coming they are going to become even more vital to the smooth function of the site. It takes only a few seconds to leave a feedback (and will be even easier after the site refresh), so there's little reason not to do it.
As always, questions and comments are welcome! | | |
| | | We're damn close, folks. Forums are in the mix and you will be able to check them out real soon. =) Along with all the other new features and the new site design. We can't wait! We're looking at another 2-3 days of work to get a little more spit and polish on it, then it's all yours to Beta test. Woohoo! | | |
| | | So as part of the site redesign and revamp, we're considering doing Forums again. What do you all think? Would you like to see Forums on FurBuy again, and either way what are your thoughts about what they should or should not have? Reply and let us know! | | |
| | | Just wanted to leave a quick note about where things stand with the upcoming Beta of the new site design and segment (completely new feature set). In a nutshell, development has been going slower than planned - not due to slow development but due to "feature creep". We've decided to roll more and more new features and polish into this system before bringing it to Open Beta. Which is a good thing! The downside is that we need more time in order to implement it all.
We're already conducting internal beta testing and working on determining which of the feedback will be integrated prior to the Open Beta (public) of the new portion of the site. If you're interested in helping us do this private Beta testing and providing your feedback to help us improve the look, feel and functionality please contact :userjurann: via one of the instant messenger methods in his user profile here.
Our current timeline looks like we will attempt to move the Beta into Open Beta status for the public to try out and bang on sometime in the range of Feb 20-25 - so keep an eye out here and/or on our Twitter or LiveJournal for that information! | | |
| | *dusts off the old accounts and removes a few cobwebs* Well hello again, folks! Our account here has been restored, so without further adieu and after cleaning up some of the old kruft (rude shouts left on a defenseless account and a heap of notes people sent anyway), here's where we're at: What you've missed (current state of affairs): One of the biggest bits of news is that FurBuy now has two paid (yes, you heard right, paid) administrators to handle reviewing new accounts, dealing with disputes, handling communications with customers, etc. FurBuy also set many new records in 2012 including hitting a whopping 585 live auctions, having more than US$40,000 in combined sales volume at one time, and the final sales total for 2012 was over US$455,000 !!! There were also a number of big fixes and new features added to FurBuy in 2012, mostly minor and convenience items plus a lot of behind the scenes admin tools and features to help support our new paid admins. In addition, we welcome our newest member of the team to FurBuy, a web designer and developer: :kaboukie: - we've also brought in a PR and marketing expert (who is not a furry so not linked here) to review and propose changes to the existing site's wording, layout and convenience. What we still need: We're still looking for a dedicated furry Community Lead who will be the public face of FurBuy and help make fandom-conscious decisions about FurBuy's direction and who will help negotiate integration between FurBuy and other furry sites. We already have a large team of designers, developers and admins to implement features, update the site, make improvements and perform integration - so we need a positive, motivated individual who is close to the pulse of furry fandom and wants to bring FurBuy to everyone in an interactive and beneficial way! Plans for FurBuy 2013: We are currently working towards a new Beta site/segment that we hope to open in the next week or two - this is not only a redesign of the site/concept for FurBuy, but also a completely new portion of the site that does not have anything to do with auctions. And it's all on a new modern web framework with HTML5 interactive functionality - much faster and easier to use than the current site! We will explain this Beta in full detail once we decide it's ready to public testing, it's currently in alpha state and there are a few more features we want to get nailed down before going to public beta. After the new Beta is launched and we spend some time bug-fixing on it, we will then begin to convert the ENTIRE existing FurBuy system over to the new web framework and converting existing features into their more modern HTML5 counterparts - we plan to be doing this well into summertime as there is a LOT of work to be done. Many of the completely new features of FurBuy will be demonstrated in the new Beta market segment we're rolling out shortly: Watchlists, Multiple Images (with a cool HTML5 image browser), Improved Commenting, Private Messaging, Improved Login/Logout, Improved Page Flow, New Design and Themes. Meanwhile, our PR expert will be working hard to make sure all of the messaging on the site is clear, that FAQs are helpful, and that we have nice new pages to help out users of all aspects on the site. We're also planning to completely revamp the account system and make some very important underlying (behind the scenes) changes so that you can actually change your username without having to make a new account! Since we only permit one account per user, this is a pretty critical feature but one that's been almost impossible due to an existing limitation in our design - that will be removed as part of the revamp! (We will be placing some restrictions and drawbacks on name changes though, so users will not be able to just abuse that system.) Later in the year we hope to tackle adding two other very important new market segments to the system: Stores and Commissions. We will also be addressing SSL and Password Security in 2013, rejoice! We are also losing our office space in Washington, where we're currently doing business - so we will be dissolving the company in Washington and re-forming in California, as well as moving our servers down here into a much faster and more modern server hosting facility! Oh my~, 2013 will be busy! Follow Us on Twitter and LiveJournal: https://twitter.com/furbuy http://furbuy.livejournal.com/ | | |
| | So, now that recent drama issues have died down and we've had time to chew over the positive feedback that's come out of it, we are putting up a proposal for changes to the subscription (membership) system on FurBuy to better meet the requests of users from that exchange. As always, we'd like your feedback and opinions on this proposal, both good and bad. You can review the proposed changes and details at the following URL: http://www.furbuy.com/docs/newprices.shtml Also, please watch our new official Twitter for FurBuy: http://twitter.com/#!/furbuy The next big set of features we implement will likely be a new Message Center system which includes an Inbox, Outbox and the ability to send PMs to other users on the site, along with SMS support and the ability to redirect certain types of messages to any of the various formats (Pri E-mail, Sec E-mail, Inbox or SMS). Along with this, we will add the ability to "Watch" sellers and receive a notification whenever they post a new auction. We will likely post more about these features in the next couple weeks, once we've had time to develop the concepts a little further and put together a proposal for the community to review and give their feedback on. Thanks again for all your support, and don't hesitate to leave replies right here on this journal or contact us directly anytime. =) | | |
| | It has recently come to our attention quite dramatically that FurBuy appears to have "hidden fees" that are not well-communicated to user with no warning given that they have sales limits. These restrictions are likely no shock to those of you who already follow our LJ and FA accounts, since we announced them before, during and after they were implemented - however not everyone watches our journals and therefore they were not aware of the annual sales limits on free accounts. We apologize for not handling those features as well as we could have initially, including being more up-front that they are there. We are already making changes to the site in order to better communicate and explain the $900 per calendar year sales limitation on free accounts as well as pointing out more clearly that there is a subscription-based contributing membership system in place on FurBuy. This limit was not added to single-out any individuals or groups, but as a fair limitation for all users based on the total volume of sales per year. We hope to encourage those who are doing well selling on FurBuy to become contributing members, which removes all of the limitations imposed upon free accounts. Also, please note our new Twitter account, where we will also post links to updates such as this to help keep you better informed: http://twitter.com/furbuy/ As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns or feature requests, please don't hesitate to let us know! | | |
| | Okay, so, in the last few weeks we've gotten some new features up on the site! Mass Mailing Improvements As most of you know, we sent out a mass mailing a few weeks ago detailing the numbers for year end 2010 and some other useful information. There were also some ulterior motives for doing that, mainly identifying issues in the mass-mailer (which is why we hadn't used it in SO LONG) so we could correct them, but also in order to get a "bounce list" of addresses that were no longer working. We wrote a bounced mail handler that picks up all of the bounced mail we get back and invalidates any addresses with that e-mail address. What that means is that if both e-mail addresses on your account (or just the one if you only have one - get a second one in there for your security and convenience!) bounce, then your account will be DISABLED until you enter a valid e-mail address and validate it! Validation is simple, just login to your account and go to your My Account - Prefs page and click the "Verify" link next to each of your addresses. You will get an e-mail within a few minutes with a link and a code, you can use either one to validate your address, and then your account will be instantly restored to normal status if that was the reason it was disabled. If you can't remember your login info and can't use the Password Mailer because your e-mail addresses are no longer valid, please Contact Us and we'll help you restore your account. New Remote Site Linking System So we've had the ability for users to add their remote site usernames for a while now. But our selection was a bit limited, and that's because the way we did it initially was... well, wrong. So I've gone back and completely rewritten that part of the system to us a MUCH faster and more efficient method, while also making it much more flexible and adaptive for adding new sites and updating existing ones. The result of which is that we now allow you to link to many more sites, including InkBunny, WikiFur, Twitter and Facebook (for more details on linking to Facebook, please see the Linking to Facebook FAQ at: http://www.furbuy.com/cgi/viewfaq.cgi?id=59). We also want to know what OTHER sites you'd like to link your accounts to, or you might think other users would like to link to! If you have any ideas, feel free to comment here or Contact Us directly. =) My Account - Selling: Hide Auctions So a user-requested feature we've had on our list to do for some time now is finally completed! Sellers can now choose to Hide auctions in their My Account - Selling page that they no longer wish to see. And fear not if you hide one that you'd like to get back to, you can Unhide All Hidden Auctions if you change your mind or lose track of one of them. To hide an auction, simply select it using the checkbox on the right hand side, then click the "Hide Selected Auctions" button below. My Account - Bidding: Hide Auctions Just like above, we've added the same functionality to the Bidding page. Bidders can now hide auctions on the page that they are no longer interested in seeing, and restore the hidden ones just like on the Selling page. We have of course also been working on a number of other small issues and bugfixes. We need YOUR FEEDBACK in order to continue fixing bugs and adding new features, so if you have anything at all to say, we're all ears. =) Thanks again for supporting FurBuy! | | |
| | | kay, so after a long and arduous 16 hours here, we have finally gotten the servers back online, patched-up, and ready to go again. Last night right around 9pm we got hit with a massive DDoS attack that exploited a vulnerability in the DNS hosting portion of the machines. We patched it up with the latest secure version of the DNS service so this shouldn't be an issue again moving forward. While we were at it, we installed some more security layers, upgraded other portions of the servers, and did some routine disk checks. Amazingly it had been over 500 days since the last reboot of the main webserver - a testament to it's stability and reliability! ;D
PLEASE NOTE: All live auctions were extended by precisely 24 hours to account for the downtime and give your auction the amount of time you desired to be seen. If anyone would like the closing time reduced back to what it used to be, please let me know and I'll take care of it for you.
Thanks for your patience and support in this issue! | | |
| | | Just a quick notice that FurBuy is currently under a distributed denial of service attack and will not be available until our host has been able to identify and nullify the attack's sources. It may be over in 2 hours or over in 2 weeks, DDoS is often tricky to deal with and negate, and most of the time the attack stops when the attacker gets bored or gives up. Please note that we've brought down the database server (this is exactly the reason the database server is on a separate physical machine and why it has no web access) meaning your auctions will not be going anywhere or closing during this outage.
Once we're back up, we'll extend the auction close times by 24 hours per day we're down so the auctions will continue roughly where they left off. If for any reason you want your auction close time changed outside of this uniform action, please contact us and we'll make exception for your auctions. Thanks for your support, and our apologies while we attempt to work with our provider to get this attack dealt with. | | |
| | We're currently processing HUNDREDS of bounced e-mails that went out to the over 9,000 accounts on FurBuy in today's mass-mailed 2010 year end update. Part of that (once I spend hours here building the list of bounces, ugh) will be putting all of the bounced addresses through a processor which will determine which accounts to move to "Unverified" state. YOUR ACCOUNT MAY INADVERTENTLY GET DISABLED! Don't panic. =) Just send an e-mail to admin-team[at]furcen.org -OR- you can simply login to your account and update your e-mail address (if necessary) and then click the Verify link next to it in your My Account - Prefs page. You'll get a verification e-mail with a URL/code in it to use in order to confirm your account, which will automatically re-enable it. It's that simple. =) Any other questions or comments, just let us know! Thanks again for all your support and contributions once again, and we're looking forward to setting all new records in 2011! =D ~ Jurann, FurBuy Community Lead Pro Tem | | |
| | | Hey guys, just a quick note that I've corrected a bug in calculating the annual sales totals for determining if folks are at or over their free account sales cap for the calendar year. I've noticed a few folks got blocked after the turn of the year, and investigated and found and corrected things. Please try again, and let us know if you have any issues! Thanks,
~ Jurann | | |
| | | So we've just received a couple nasty e-mails from upset users who said they'd shun our system from their large amount of business because of our policies. I figured it would be a good opportunity to explain why we do what we do. So without further adieu:
Why Doesn't FurBuy Have Secure Login/SSL?
This is a pretty simple one: because high quality CA certificate ownership and hosting is very expensive. The CA's (Certificate Authorities) have a monopoly on the ability to reliably and accurately and safely host the security certificate validations for every major domain out there, and every browser knows who the CA's are and who to trust. Purchasing a security certificate costs about $500 per year (a little cheaper through less reliable companies) plus another $200 per year to have the certificate hosted on a CA server. The whole process is automated and costs the CA's pennies per day per certificate to run, however since they have a monopoly and the only places that typically have security certs are big businesses, they can charge exorbitant prices to offer and host these security certificates. Without them, your browser would go APESHIT on you and your visit to FurBuy, which would cause a lot of folks to not even use our site at all. Since we can't even cover the $400/mo to keep FurBuy hosted, there's no way we can also afford an additional $700 per year of overhead for a secure server cert from a CA.
Why do I have to prove who I say I am?!
So lately a lot of folks have signed up using "Full Names" that look a lot like fan names. Things like "Lupine Silverback" as a fabricated example. Some of you may not know it, but our admins screen EVERY new account that's made on the system, and if we find one that's questionable, we place it in a "Pending" status which notifies the user that their account information may need to be updated and until they either update it accordingly or contact us about it, they will still be able to login and browse the site, but unable to bid, post or comment until the account issue is corrected. 95% or more of our users never see any admin interaction like this because they fill out their account information clearly and without anything questionable. When there is something questionable, we just need confirmation that you are who you say you are. If you had your name legally changed to a fan/spiritual/therianthropic/mythical/fantastic/gaysplosive name that you love then that's great - we just need some proof of that through a scan or photo of a photo ID and everything will be hunky dory.
Why do we do these checks? Quite simply, because there's a lot of trolls and flamers and miserable sods in fandom who honestly have nothing better to do than spin-up a new account on FurBuy (or other furry sites) to harass and create drama. We take fraud very seriously, and we assume quite rightly that our buyers and sellers on FurBuy do as well, and we take these measures to attempt to protect users from harmful accounts proactively whenever possible. So we do a cursory screen on every new account by verifying that all of the data looks accurate and correct, in order to protect our community. We also need people's full legal names on file for legal purposes, should anything arise of that nature. Thankfully in 11 years we've never needed to tap people's accounts for those purposes. We hope things stay that way. =)
As always, if you have questions or comments don't be shy. We're here to help folks buy and sell safely and successfully online, that's why we've invested so much time and money into FurBuy. Please feel free to tap us on the shoulder anytime. ;)
P.S. If you're angry about something we've done, please realize we're just doing our jobs and trying to protect our community. If you can't send a polite e-mail because you're raging, please walk away and cool down for a bit and THEN contact us. We really dislike shelling out to run this service and spending a ton of our personal time working on it, but what we really can't tolerate is being harassed and put-down and attacked after all of that hard work and effort. If you have some issue and you can't manage to be polite and professional, then we have two words for you: fuck off. Thanks. =) | | |
| | | Just a quick note that we've raised the free account sales limit from US$400 to US$900 per calendar year, and we've removed any mention of US taxes from the site. We will be adding a Sales Tracking view to the My Account pages soon so you can see your data for sold items and also update the status - this was also something important for the upcoming Storefronts features. Also we're working on planning a Communications Center to keep you better updated about changes and choosing where various notifications get delivered to you. | | |
| | | So, whether it's the new restrictions we've enacted on the site, or maybe just the time of year, the number of auctions on FurBuy is getting down to the lowest it's been in over a year now. We're curious whether or not any of you folks have any suggestions or feedback about the site and how it's being run, because we never hear from you guys enough. Given that Thanksgiving is almost here, it's the time of year to hear from you guys about what you're thankful for concerning FurBuy, and what you'd be thankful to see in the near future. We're hoping that hearing from our audience and userbase will help inspire us to do a better job, build some new features, or just keep on doing a good job if that's what you're thinking.
So, how are we doing? What can we improve for you? What would encourage you to help us out by becoming a contributing member at $18 per year?
We have seen some sellers hitting the new barrier that limits free users to $400 in sales per calendar year, and we really apologize but we have to keep tightening the features until we reach a balance in income to keep the servers up and running. If it comes down to simply not being able to pay for itself somehow, FurBuy will have to go down. We don't want that, honestly, and we'd guess that none of you do either. But we've been having a hard time lately with the finances and floating a system that's really not bringing in much of what it needs to stay alive. We hope you guys understand.
Thanks, and Happy Holidays. | | |
| | | The restrictions we talked about previously are now in place. Free account holders are now limited to $400.00 in sales per calendar year on FurBuy. Along with this we are also now able to calculate the total sales volume by seller, by bidder, and for the entire system. You may be interested to know that so far in 2011 FurBuy has helped people sell over $236,000 in goods or services. That's nearly a quarter million bucks!
Now, it would be nice to get just a small fraction of that back from our loyal community in order to help pay for the site. It gives the admin team who normally pays for the site out of their pockets more money to spend on buying new art (hint hint) and gives us more motivation to continue bringing new improvements and features to you guys. So please dig a little and help support us buy purchasing a contributing membership, it's only $18 for a whole year (that's only $1.50 per month!) and helps us out a whole lot.
We also have no ad banners running for November, and we're still running our usual special - buy an ad banner now for next month and we'll give you the rest of this month FREE! Can't beat free advertising, folks! And it also helps us keep the site running and improving.
Also, we'd like to apologize for a little glitch earlier today. When we were implementing these new systems we accidentally flipped a bit that validated contributing members the wrong way, and was treating everyone as a free user. We've since corrected the issue and everything should be working as intended again.
As always, thank you guys for your support and loyalty! If you ever have questions, comments or ideas for the site, don't hesitate to contact us anytime. =) | | |
| | | Just wanted to give folks a bit of an early heads-up about upcoming changes sometime in the month of November. Due to a lack of financial support on the site, we will be scaling back the amount of free features made available to non-contributing sellers on the site. We're hoping that this will help encourage certain users who make heavy use of the site and do a large volume of sales to convert their accounts to contributing memberships.
Currently we are planning the following changes, these will ONLY affect free accounts: Number of free concurrent auctions will be reduced to 3 (down from 5), number of auctions per calendar month will be reduced to 6 (down from unlimited), number of art show auctions will be reduced to one at a time (down from 3), sales volume per calendar year will be limited to $400 determined by auction close prices (down from unlimited). We still want to support free users, but at the same time we want to ensure that those who are profiting well by using the site are also paying back into the system. The reasoning for the $400 per year limit is due to this amount being the US limit on money you can make before you are required to claim the sales on your taxes, and it's also a nice round number for which we can say, "If you made $400 from our site, then it's not a lot to ask you to buy a subscription at $18/yr, that's less than a 5% fee for what you've sold at that point."
We've got a TON more features planned, but it's hardly worth investing the time and effort when we also have to foot the vast majority of the bill to keep the site running. Feedback and support from our users is what really motivates and drives us to improve the system, and that loyalty and encouragement is rewarded with more features and expanded functionality on the system. Many of you have already contributed by becoming a member, but we need more support from your friends and fans and advertisements for your projects, websites and other artists. Thanks again for everyone's input and consideration, we're hoping for many years to come! | | |
| | One of our users has graciously offered to donate 75% of their auction to help foot the bill for FurBuy! Please take a look and help us out with your bids, or spread the word: http://www.furbuy.com/auctions/1019950.html Thanks again for everyone's support! | | |
| | | Unfortunately things are not going so well for FurBuy right now. Despite about 50 subscriptions expiring a couple months ago, only half a dozen or so renewed their subscriptions and outside of that we've maybe only had one or two in the last couple months. Several thousands of dollars of items and services are sold each month on FurBuy and only a fraction of that would pay the $400 per month server fees, however the vast majority of users are not subscribing or contributing to keeping the system running. So we are having to tighten down even harder on the amount of free features that non-members will receive on the site.
We are also not selling banner ad spots as well as we had hoped or needed, so we'd like some feedback from folks about the banner system to see how you think we could get more banners on the site. Lower prices? Easier submission system? What would get you to purchase an ad banner on FurBuy, or purchase a spot more frequently? So far we have no banners for December yet, and only a couple for November. So if you want to ensure a lot of views and clicks, sign-up for a banner right away! We're still offering "the rest of this month free" with all banner ads at the moment.
So how are we going to tighten things down? Well, if subscriptions don't pick up in the next month or two, we are going to reduce the number of concurrent free auctions to 3 per user (down from 5 right now) and we are also considering a limit of 6 free auctions per month and possibly also limiting free sales to $400 per year. We really hate having to make things harder for folks, and we're trying to be fair such that only the people who are really making a lot of money or posting a lot of auctions have to pay, but right now we're really hurting badly to pay for things and we need more folks to contribute and become members or purchase ad banners.
As always, your feedback is welcome and encouraged. We really don't hear from users enough (esp when there's not a problem with the site) so if you ever have a thought or a comment or a complaint about the site - or even praise, compliments keep our spirits high - please don't hesitate to let us know!
Thanks again for using FurBuy,
~ Jurann, FurBuy Community Lead Pro-Tem
P.S. - We're still looking for a new Community Lead, if you might be interested please PM me or send e-mail or contact me on IMs. | | |
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