Furry-Within

Hey, all. So, I'm going to sum up this post before even getting to the meat of it. Running the chat is expensive. We're going to use Discord instead.

For those who aren't aware, FW costs about $90 USD per month to maintain. The reason for those costs is that we need to hire a VPS (Virtual Private Server) to handle all of the software the site runs. And by "all of the software", I mean the AJAX chat. It uses a lot of RAM for a web application.

Here's the thing, though. We haven't been getting a lot of traffic. Right now, the site is being maintained by a very small handful of users, and we are exceptionally grateful for their generosity. But it's a bit ridiculous that the costs are so high when so few people use the services.

With that in mind, at the end of August, the AJAX chat will be disabled and the site will migrate to another hosting plan. In terms of the forums and its features, nothing will change. The main body of the site and the past 7 years or so of posts will not be affected by this, and you can use them as you can now. I have to look at costs, but I anticipate that the cost of running the site will drop from $90 USD to approximately $10 USD.

The chat we will be using is the Discord server. I'll be spending the next couple of days setting it up once again for use, adding in bots to manage users and add features, and doing general behind-the-scenes work. Right now, there's a single text channel and a couple of general voice channels that are available. I'll add some more in before too much longer.

To join the Discord server, click this link. https://discord.gg/9SshN8d
Discord works in your browser, or through the application which is available at https://discord.gg

Suggestions and comments are welcome.

End of an era. The chat has now finally closed, and I've begun the process of migrating the site to a more cost-effective hosting plan.

As a reminder, people are all welcome to join us on Discord. The program (unlike the AJAX) works on mobile and tablet, as well as in pretty much any modern web browser. There's voice chat, and I believe they're working on video chat soon. Links for Discord and the FW server are in the above post.