Acceptable Use Policy

SoFurry.com is a "furry" website, as such submissions should be mostly furry (or scaly, anthropomorphic, etc) in context.

We reserve the right to reject any submissions should we deem it in violation of our content rules. Please note that repeated, unrelenting attempts to submit rejected content may lead to account termination. It is self-evident that the upload of illegal content is forbidden. We reserve the right to reject submissions based on quality or other concerns.

Submissions

Artwork

Artwork would be considered hand or computer drawn 2D or 3D artwork and/or animations.

Hand art may be digitally scanned in or photographed to be posted in here.

Screen shots

We may remove screenshots of games or programs like SecondLife if the amount of actual contribution of the uploader is too small (i.e. stock models, no artistic value in pose, composition or editing, etc)

Stream announcements

Do not post stream announcements as art submissions. Instead, use the Events system, which has been designed for such announcements and is much better at drawing attention to your streaming event.

YCH auctions

YCH auctions are welcome in the art section as well as in the event section. YCH auctions must be tagged with the "YCH" tag. We kindly ask that you remove the auction image when the auction is over, and please post the final artwork on SoFurry as well.

Visual novels

Should you wish to add illustrations to your stories or cover art to your music, you may do so by uploading them to your gallery. When your illustrations are not furry related on their own, please give a corresponding statement in the illustration's description, telling us to what story or song it belongs to. Again, the majority of your gallery should be furry or furry-related.

Content

As will all of your submissions they must be tagged and rated properly as described below, they must also not include any content that is prohibited on the site.

Borderline submissions will be handled on a case-by-case basis. We encourage you to upload images in high quality and high resolution. Uploading of teasers or thumbnail-previews (with a link to a site with the full version) is ok if you're promoting a larger work, however we do not allow the upload of an entire gallery of thumbnails.

Stories

Stories are words that have been written down or typed up to convey a tale or experience that has been created or imagined. They may also be RPs that have been put together to create a cohesive tale.

Content

As will all of your submissions they must be tagged and rated properly as described below, they must also not include any content that is prohibited on the site.

Any stories have been cut down to only a fraction of their leigth as a preview need to be tagged properly as described below.

Music

Always observe copyright laws and don't upload commercial music. Voice-only submissions are accepted, please use the "Talk" or "Podcast" tags for these submissions.

Journals

Journals are your place to keep us up to date and are your way to voice opinions. Journals are not the place for insults or drama. Formatting and spelling might not be as as important as for story submissions but still you are encouraged to keep a reasonable level of quality. This is where you would also share your latest videos that you have found/created online.

Photography

The photography section is for your personal photos that you’ve taken yourself, which may or may not be furry. This is where you would also share any physical, sculpted, or crafted works.

Due to legal reasons, photos must not show any adult, suggestive, or explicit situations of any kind.

No photographs of people under the age of 18 are allowed. This includes photographs of underage users themselves. Be aware of the legal situation regarding photographing others, and respect their privacy.

Events

Events are subject to the same rules as other content on SoFurry. In addition, please make sure to remove events that have been canceled. Furry cons are welcome to post long events; however, if you are running an auction or similar event for a period longer than one week, please check with us first (through a ticket inquiry).

Live Streams

Stream announcements are welcome here on SoFurry! Please don't announce streams for commercial movies or similar however, as those can get us into trouble. Streaming such content may very well be legal in your jurisdiction and you are responsible for the content you stream, but formulate the announcement in such a fashion that no copyright infringement is suggested here on SoFurry. You may not use the event-system to advertise live streams that are actually ads for physical products or a company and have nothing to do with the sale of commissions. I.e. If you livestream a one-hour presentation going over what types of commissions you offer, but don't actually create any content over the the livestream, similar to an infomercial. That's not something our event system was intended for, post this as a journal, or get an ad slot instead.

Tagging

When submitting content the adding of tags is required. We encourage you to choose from predefined tags being provided to you during input. Nevertheless you are free to provide new tags. Keep in mind, that the purpose of tags is to improve searchability, therefore it is in your very own interest to choose tags carefully.

Please make sure that when you’re tagging content you are using that tags that are directly related to that submission rather then the series as a whole. We may also re-tag your submission to better fit into our content categorization system, or to correct incorrectly done tags.

Humans

Mature humans are allowed in submissions, as a mainly furry site we just ask that they not make of the vast majority of your content.

Any content that only contains humans must be tagged with the “Human Only” tag.

Content Levels

See more: Content Levels

All content on sofurry.com must be properly flagged according to its content level:

CLEAN: The picture or story is of non-adult nature, or contains only decent nudity. Without going into the age-rating crap so prevalent these days, let's just say "worksafe", or "I would show this to my semi-conservative parents".

ADULT: The picture or story contains depictions of sexual acts or other adult subject matter. This amounts to "NSFW" or "my parents would disown me if I showed them"

EXTREME: The picture or story contains extreme fetishes that go beyond regular clean sex or show potentially offensive stuff. This includes, but is not limited to: scat, watersports, snuff, castration, etc.

If in doubt, use the next-highest content level to be sure.

Paywalled Content

Subscription or Purchase walls

Any content that you post that will be a preview/censored for over a month, or that you don’t ever plan on posting in full, but have the full content posted on an external paid site (such as Patreon) fall into this category. This also includes content that you are selling externally through third party sites like Paypal or Amazon.

For this content you would need to have three tags added when you post it. “Advertisement”, the name of the service that you are using (Amazon, Patreon, etc), and “Preview Permanent”.

Delayed release

Any content that you post first to an external paid site (like Patreon) and post a teaser here, then after a set amount of time release the full version to the general public, would fall under this category. This content would be a teaser for up to a month, before having the full version released.

For this content you would need to have three tags added when you post it. “Advertisement”, the name of the service that you are using (Amazon, Patreon, etc), and “Preview Limited”. After you update it to the full version, you may remove the “Advertisement” and Preview Limited” tags. You may also mark that it is a major edit so that your watchers will receive an updated version in their watchlists.

Alternative releases

If you have content that you have both here on SoFurry and on an external paid site that;

1. Has no censoring or preview aspects added to it, and
2. Doesn’t have any major changes other than a different file type (.PSD vs .JPG), and/or alternate versions (clean vs messy).

would fall under this category.

As you are releasing a fully realized piece, you only need to tag the name of the service that you are using (Amazon, Patreon, etc).

Prohibited Content

Ask yourself if your submission is going to put SoFurry into trouble, and don't upload content that is likely to do so. Any submissions that are posted which included any prohibited content will be removed and the user who submitted the content will receive disciplinary action up to and including site removal.

Children and/or cub

Artwork containing depictions of child characters, human or otherwise, placed in sexual situations are not allowed. All submissions that have child characters depicted should fall under the All Ages content level.

All other content cannot contain underage humans in sexual situations.

Hate Speech/Racism

Any glorification or promotion of racism and/or hate-speech will not be tolerated in any way, in any form, anywhere on the site.

Swastikas

Due to laws in some of the countries that we operate in, depictions of nazi symbolism (swastika) are not allowed.

Advertisements

We want SoFurry to be an enjoyable place for everyone, and what few restrictions we put up are there to prevent the art or photo galleries from becoming filled with advertisements that have nothing to do with the creative talent of our users.

In general, advertisements for your furry products or projects are welcome on SoFurry, with a few rules to keep things enjoyable for everyone. SoFurry is non-profit and run by volunteers, supporting the creative spirit of the furry subculture and we reserve the right to take down submissions that could be regarded as an act of spamming.

Advertisement guidelines

You can upload up to three (3) advertisement submissions within a period of 12 hours. If you upload more within that period of time, we may put further such uploads on hold to prevent our front page to become cluttered with ads. If your furry project warrants multiple advertising uploads, this can still be done but they should be spread out over a longer period of time.

All advertisements need to carry the "Advertisement" tag. Any teaser or preview posts should be tagged as described above in the #Paywall Content section if applicable. Do’s

• Use Journals to advertise products with links to your sale (e.g., web shop, auction, etc.). You may also embed censored, incomplete, and/or teaser images into journals.

• Link to an advertisement-journal in the description of one or more of your submissions.

• Upload commission-pricesheets with samples and pricetags to the artwork section.

• Add pricing information and links to sales-offers to the description of your uncensored, non-teasing submissions. We do not wish to keep you from selling printed versions or digital downloads, but you should add the "Advertisement" tag if the submission is a teaser or otherwise not a full artwork/story/etc submission by itself.

Don’t

• Edit or resubmit submissions for the sole purpose of pushing them back to the frontpage. Note that the submission edit page offers you the choice to mark an edit as a “major revision”, thus pushing it back to the front page. It’s ok to do this if there are major changes in your submissions that warrant it.

Paid Advertisements

While SoFurry is free to use, we do offer paid advertisements as a way to help cover some of the costs of keeping the site and and running.

All of the paid advertisements must follow the policies in this document.

If you are interested in purchasing a slot, see the wiki page here.

Avatars & Banners

Avatars and banners may be uploaded onto the site to allow personalisation of you profile and help identify who you are to other users. You may also upload avatars to all of your characters in your profile.

Any avatars or banners that you upload must follow the copyright guidelines and have the correct content level selected. As with all uploads/submissions, avatars and banners must not contain any prohibited content.

Characters

SoFurry considers fan-art of popular characters a work of parody. However, you are not allowed to upload material on our servers that uses personal characters of another fur without their permission. NOTE: Commissions usually result in a "joint work" under US copyright, in which case both the artist and the character owner have the same rights, including distribution. If this is not what you want, make sure to clear this up before commissioning the artist! See the Copyright FAQs for more information.

Hate-art, i.e. art or stories that depicts another person's character in a negative light without their consent, is not allowed.

Age Restrictions/Underage Users

This service is offered as-is. We reserve the right to remove any user from areas we believe they may be too young to access. However, we refuse to accept responsibility for bringing up other people's children. If your child comes to this website without your supervision then it's your job to stop that. It is well within your power to do that, and if you feel that this is not so then please seek professional advice on how to fulfil your parental duties.

SoFurry supports ICRA tags, so any decent parental control software should work.

See the underage user page for all of the restrictions.

Freedom Of Speech

Your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of another's nose. In other words: You're free to express your opinions, especially in journals, but allegations, accusations and slander are not allowed. Anything that could be considered to place SoFurry in any legal trouble will also be removed.

Hotlinking

We believe in open access and the benefits of direct links. Hence, sofurry encourages deep-linking and hot-linking, as long as it is not abused (for example by other sites to reduce their own traffic costs at our expense) or endangers site operation.

External Links

You may link to pretty much anything in your journals, however we reserve the right to close comments on, or remove journal entries that cause excessive drama or otherwise disturb the normal operation of SoFurry. We will do our best to try and be fair, but ultimately this is a private site and thus it's our decision.

Appeal of Moderator Decisions

If you feel that a moderator has made an incorrect decision, you may be appeal their ruling. To do so you would need to submit a support ticket, the instructions to do so may be found here. In the subject line you will want to say that it’s an appeal, and then give us the reasoning to why you feel that it was an incorrect decision.

Copyright

By submitting content to sofurry.com you grant us the right to redistribute said work on our website while retaining all rights yourself. This is just so we can display your uploaded content, and you can revoke this at any time by removing your content from the site. You cannot upload content for which you can't grant such a permission, for example if said content was not created by or for you. Uploading "something I found on the web" will lead to your account being terminated. In short: Don't upload other people's art unless you have their expressed permission to do so, it's your character, or their license (copyleft, creative commons etc.) gives you that permission!

You can also upload submissions in private and grant viewing rights to individual users, in which case we of course only distribute the uploaded content to the users you indicated. In short, we're not claiming any ownership over your submissions and you can remove your submissions at any time without us retaining any rights.

License

SoFurry.com respects the freedom of artists to manage their creative license. SoFurry.com does not enforce a particular content license upon its users. Authors and artists are free to choose any license and express that in their submission. We advise you to choose your license carefully. There are licenses that you cannot revoke (e.g. copyleft). Also, we do allow users to upload other people's works if the accompanying license allows it.

If you are unsure about which license to use, please state in your submission description how you want your work to be used.

For example of the kind of licenses you can utilize, [click here].

Syndication, Interoperation

We at SoFurry.com do not exercise ownership over content submitted by users and we believe it is in everyone's best interest to be as open and cooperative with other sites as possible. That's why SoFurry.com is actively seeking cooperation with other sites, for example to enable users to share data they've uploaded on one site with another, to facilitate single-sign-on via OAuth, or syndicate content via RSS. We grant other websites permission to use data from our site in an automated fashion, as long as user's copyrights are not violated and our facilities are not unnecessarily stressed.

For example, indexing our data to build a search engine is okay, but downloading and serving whole images or stories from our site is not.

If in doubt, just contact Toumal before putting your data-sharing project online.

API Usage Terms

The SoFurry API gives users and application developers access to site functionality and content in a machine-readable manner, for example for mobile devices or stand-alone applications. All terms and conditions above apply. We reserve the right to revoke access to individual applications and/or users should they endanger site operations. If in doubt, contact Toumal or submit a ticket before going online with your application.

Browsing Statistics

By using SoFurry, you agree to let us collect anonymous statistics about how you use the site. If you do not wish us to do so, you may opt out (with no penalty or loss of functionality) by following the instructions at Privacy Policy#Browsing Statistics.

Updates to the AUP

While we do try to keep our users informed of any AUP changes, it is your responsibility to review the AUP for updates or any changes that may occur. You may find the last time this was updated in the Wiki history.