Editorial: For the love of Flayrah; please keep it furry!
Author: Sonious
Yesterday, Flayrah published the first article tagged as opinion where the topic’s relation to the furry fandom was particularly light. Many might even say non-existent. It was a topic of personal interest to the author, who happens to be the main editor at this site.
In the past, when other furry sites made major decisions or policy changes, Flayrah would report on them, and people would give their opinions. In this tradition, I feel it necessary to examine these articles and why they could have been so poorly received, and consider Flayrah’s future.
Find the full article here: flayrah – furry food for thought
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This is nothing new. Flayrah (and WikiFur) have been including non-Furry content for years now, for no other reason than because GreenReaper thinks it’s “interesting.” He also believe all viewpoints are valid and should be included (even when people are outright making things up).
As a former supporter of Flayrah/Wikifur, I can understand why so many have left it in frustration over the years.
The problem is, if people who are interested in Flayrah as a source of furry content simply leave then they will have less say in the matter in trying to redirect the course when things do cross that line. Had I not have been a contributor there prior my words would probably not have been as effective as I think they would have. Particularly to the most important target reader, GreenReaper himself.
If people who go there for furry content leave entirely who is going to 1 vote these articles? Who is going to say “no”?
Luckily the userbase isn’t as massive as that on FA, so when this came about it was a pretty clear and decisive message that the owner crossed a line that the userbase would not follow in. In a 24 hour period this article became the most voted on 5 star article on the site, while all three articles that were discussed were highly voted on and 1 stared.
Before this article was written GreenReaper attributed the 1 star votes to “confurvatives” conspiring on LJ. After this, I feel he came out with a different and accurate perspective on the problem. A good article educates the reader, and sometimes the target audience is not the readership: In the comments on the offending articles you could already see the readers knew what the issue was. Rabbit’s article tried to do the same thing mine did, however it was an “artsy, passive aggressive” way to go about it and thus some actually treated it as a serious rebuttal article. There is enough confusion in this world and while I can be snarky, I don’t feel I should be using Flayrah to be so (well except maybe sometimes in the comments, but comments aren’t articles).
Some will leave, maybe someday come back, others such as myself will stick around to see what happens. Boundaries are pushed by those in power all the time. Sometimes these are successful, other times they are not so much. I am certain this is one of the later times.
I do believe GreenReaper has back peddled as a result of the clear response of the article. If he hasn’t he would probably hopefully take the splitting into major consideration. I don’t think any other user is going to start these kind of opinion articles, the fact that GreenReaper was the first to do so kind of speaks to the “unwritten rule” of Flayrah, and that “unwritten rule” is something I was always physically quite aware of.
I always ask myself “Okay, I care about this, but will those who read Flayrah care?”
Perhaps the course of events was in some percentage my fault. I hadn’t contributed an article prior to this one since April 7th. I typically don’t write review pieces as sadly I’m not much of a consumer, I take most of my extra cash and spend it towards my debt so when I get older I can buy more. On top of that I find my mind is quite full of entertainment and can find interesting thoughts no matter what I’m doing. So when I do write, they are editorials or fandom events.
There was a lack of these kind of pieces, and perhaps Green was worried that it was becoming just a review site so he put something in even if it broke the “unwritten rule”, or from what it sounded like in a conversation we had that he was looking too much into the demographics of furry fans and misconstruing what would interest them. While I’m a stats man myself, at the end of the day, there is more to a group then just numbers.
I’ll try to commit more, but right now my plate is quite bloated with work, trying to become more active with the local furries, trying to do a fiction project, and being part of a TF2 UGC team (which my skill in that has suffered greatly so depending on if we keep losing may drop it and go back to playing on pubs only).
However, just so you know I did go back to some of the comments you made and up-voted some of them, because as I said in the article, this action does prove some of the things you said despite how you said it. I hope this was a hiccup and not a sign of things to come, but I will say this: If Flayrah does try to push for more of these non-fur stories without giving a separate section of the site for them I would probably at that point consider resigning my name from the contributors list. Quite frankly, with how little I’ve done so lately I’m surprised I remained in there. He just asked me after a few of my articles were well received and I said sure.
Despite the heck I give you sometimes, I don’t think you’re a bad person. You just don’t care for trying to even coat your feelings about things in verbiage such as myself. You’re blunt and abrasive, while I tend to flesh things out to try and not ostracize people because I find that tends to make them less willing to take things one says seriously. Even though I increased the ratings on those past comments it was difficult even after re-reading them, because they come off as trying to illicit anger then actually point out something of importance. However, people are who they are, none of us are perfect.
As far as this issue, my hope is that the buck stops here.
It