Acceptable Use Policy

Submission Content Rules

SoFurry.com is a "furry" website, as such submissions should be furry (or scaly, anthropomorphic, etc) in context, though exceptions are made as detailed further below.

Aside from proper title and description, 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.

We reserve the right to reject any submissions should we deem it in violation of our content rules. We may also re-tag your submission to better fit into our content categorization system. 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.

Artwork

SoFurry is a site for furry art. That said, humans are allowed in furry artwork. You may also upload artwork of humans as well as species close to humans (elves, orcs, etc) - but note that we are a furry site and the majority of your gallery should be focusing on furry art, or creatures generally associated with the furry fandom.

Human-only submissions must be tagged with the keyword "Human-only".

Realistic depictions of human childs in sexually explicit situations, glorification or promotion of racism and hate-speech are forbidden. Furthermore, depictions of nazi symbolism (swastika) are not allowed under any circumstances. Ask yourself if your submission is going to put SoFurry into trouble, and don't upload content that is likely to do so.

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)

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 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.

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.

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

Like artwork, stories should have furry context. Non-Furry stories are allowed but should not constitute the majority of your stories. Stories containing humans exclusively must be tagged with the keyword "Human-only". Readability is important for your story to be enjoyable. Therefore you should pay attention to a well formed structure, formatting and correct spelling.

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.

Photography

The photography section is for your personal photos, which may or may not be furry. However, due to legal reasons, photos must not show humans in adult or explicit situations. Users under the age of 18 are not allowed to upload photographs of themselves. Be aware of the legal situation regarding photographing others, and respect their privacy. Please also note our section on Advertisement submissions in the AUP.

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 (PM Toumal or a Mod on the staff roster). 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.

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, cub, etc.

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

Appeal of Moderator Decisions

Moderator decisions can be appealed, the final decision is for the site owner to make.

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 deleting your content. 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.

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.

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.

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. Likewise, all censored submissions need to be tagged with the "Censored" tag. If you disable the ability for users to add tags to your submissions, we may place your submission on hold until this is fixed.

The following overview shall help you estimate what is allowed and what not. Still we judge on a case by case base to allow you as much freedom as possible while ensuring a pleasant user experience.

What you CAN do

• Use the SoFurry Market (http://www.sofurry.com/market) to offer your services.

• 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.

• Advertise your livestreams using the event-system, including live production of artwork for payment.

• 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.

• Upload teasers that are censored. Note that the "Censored" tag is required. If you advertise a product with this submission, the "Advertisement" tag is also required.

What you can NOT do

• Upload more than three (3) submissions with price tags onto your uploaded images in quick succession. You are invited to instead link to a journal with that information instead or put it in the description, or spread out your uploads so they don't fill up the front page. The key word here is "multiple": You can post your new furry calendar in the art gallery that's up for sale for example, but if you post more than three such advertisement submissions in a row this is not ok. Wait a little and spread things out.

• 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.

• Use the event-system to advertise livestreams that are actually ads for physical products or a company and have nothing to do with the sale of commissions. For example, if you run a furry business creating bracelets and you livestream a one-hour product presentation, that's not something our event system was intended for. Post this as a journal, or get an ad slot.

• Advertise content or services that infringe the copyright of others. Do not upload event announcements for movie streams or other things that could cause trouble for the site.

Our moderators may place infringing submissions on hold for further review or delete them. Repeated violations of our AUP, especially if it looks like the violations were purposefully infringed upon, may result in sanctions being issued.

When in doubt, put your ad into a journal and/or contact a mod to check. We'll be happy to assist you with advertisement inquiries with regards to your project or services. While we do have commercial paid-for advertisement banners throughout the site, there are plenty of ways to advertise on SoFurry without incurring any costs. The goal of these rules is to keep the site pleasant for everyone, not to force you to purchase ad slots!

SoFurry is free to use and advertising neither covers costs of running SoFurry, nor do we aim to generate a revenue with paid ad-slots.

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].

Age Restrictions, Underage Users

This service is offered as-is. We reserve the right to remove any user from areas we believe he/she 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.

Freedom Of Speech, Links

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. 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.

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.

Syndication, Interoperation

We at SoFurry.com do not exercise ownership over content submitted by users and we believe it is in everyones 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 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.