SoFurry back online after six months downtime
Posted by Sonious (Tantroo McNally) on Sun 11 Jan 2026 - 12:37 — Edited as of Mon 12 Jan 2026 - 08:12
On January 10th SoFurry released a post indicating that they are back online for the first time since early July of 2025. During this downtime they had moved servers and finalized updating so that the new Beta version will now fully replace the original style of the site. The beta will remain in place until bugs are fleshed out with the public transition.
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About the author
Sonious (Tantroo McNally) — read stories — contact (login required)a project coordinator and Kangaroo from CheektRoowaga, NY, interested in video games, current events, politics, writing and finance
Furry since 2001.
Flayrah contributor since 2010.
Flayrah editor since 2017.
Runner of Non-Fiction furry YouTube channel "World in Rooview" started in 2017.
Comments
I'm very happy to see it finally back. But I was never a fan of the new site design. With it still being in beta, it's hard to know what is final and what will still change. I've come up with about 16 tickets I need to submit to them now. Many are suggestions but a few are bugs or missing options that would be easy to add.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Rakuen's first suggestion: stop nannying us by restricting cp
6 months is a bit of an excessive amount of time needed to move servers and upgrade. I reckon something else might have contributed to the downtime.
I hope there was no hardware failure or security faults somewhere in there that caused the website to stay offline for so long.
From what has been said it seems to be the fact that those running and responsible for the up time of the furry fan site are "over-employed" so they don't have much free time to work to resolve surprise issues. People offered money, but it wasn't a money issue.
Given the 50+ hours I have to dedicate to my own job, it can be quite a lift. People with skills to run a site like these are usually valuable to their employers, and as such it can be hard to really push things through with the fleeting spare time they have.
Shifting things so that the beta site could be handled by all users also probably needed to be handled, and was forced here.
Not really, they had a working site before the 6 month downtime but didn't want to save the old site and instead force the new site on people which had never been popular in all the years they were trying to push it.
Many are saying the longer downtime was a ploy so they could force the new SFX on people without blowback as after being staved for 6 months people would take anything, even a site they hated for years while it was in beta.
This is backed up by the staff censoring people, banning anyone who says anything bad about the site, blocking people on Sofurry servers on Discord, Bluesky, X and Reddit while taking all feedback that used to be public and locking it behind a report system that is fully private.
They gave one stat when SFX first went live saying "we hit 3000" which it hasn't managed to hit again since and has dropped to 2600 and then 1800 according to third party trackers. The fact the only numbers they gave are over 4 and half months old and they turned off live tracking points to them hiding the true numbers.
Keep in mind SF 2.0 managed 10k at it's peak.
The fact is even without banning people for criticizing the new SF they are losing numbers. The site is depressing to use, harder to navigate and slower at times than the old site.
Missing key features. All these years in beta both public and private for them to ignore every bit of feedback they didn't like to now scramble trying to change a site less people like.
They would've been better off keeping the old site running even at greater cost until they could make a replacement worthy of it.
If they wanted to change something they would've been better training the staff to do their jobs right rather than ignore trolling.
Toumal should be ashamed of himself as this is the same thing he did with SF 1.0 all those years ago, he forced a new site on people that no one wanted and it cost him.
He's done the same thing again only this time he's let people know he isn't listening.
The site is crap for what it is it. People mainly care about the 20 years of content rather then the new site. Missing key features and a UI that isn't fit for the job doomed the SFX to fail just like SF 1. If it wasn't for the historical content SFX wouldn't be getting a second look now.
The staff were told for years SF next and SFX was disliked and just ignored all negative feedback like they always do when they mess up and even removing comments they don't agree with. Toumal is worse than Dragoneer ever was. If Toumal really cared he would've kept the new site closer in design to SF 2 then fixed the core problems of Sofurry which is the useless staff and trolls that stalk the site. Toumal has done the same thing he did in the past and listened only to the "yes" men.
4 months online and the numbers still are going down and the only thing on the raise is the breakdowns. Toumal just bans people who say anything bad about SFX running the site like Nazi Germany. Flayrah really needs to do a full story on the new site, the people Toumal hurt and Toumal himself. Neer got called out for less.
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