Acceptable Use Policy

Submission Content Rules

SoFurry.com is a "furry" website, as such submissions should be furry (or scaly, anthropomorphic, etc) in context. Submissions shall be about furries and not only "by" furries. This is not a website about what people who happen to be furries do as general hobbies, or human pictures of themselves. Pictures of fursuits however are fine. Journals and music are excluded from this rule, since music can be perceived in many ways and the purpose of journals does not go well with such limitations.

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. As such, we require submissions to contain furry content. Humans are ok, but only if there's some form of furry content in the submission. Some examples:

OK: Anthropomorphic creatures, human-hybrid creatures (such as orcs), fursuits, etc.

ALSO OK: humans accompanied by anthro creatures or fursuits or other furry content.

NOT OK: Human-only pictures that have no relation to an otherwise furry series or story, or where no furry context is present. Also, objects or animals without furry context.

These are just examples. We cannot and do not want to go into everything that can be seen as furry or non-furry.

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)

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. Otherwise your illustrations might get deleted for lacking furry context.

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 require a furry context. Human only stories do not qualify as furry, but criteria for furry story writing are less strict than with artwork. They can be met when an animal shows human-like traits, like the ability to talk and think. Readability is important for your story to be enjoyable. Therefore you should pay attention to a well formed structure, formatting and correct spelling.

Music

Submissions of this kind do not require a furry context. UPDATE: Starting October 2011, 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, therefore journal-content is not limited to furry-related content matter. You can even provide short non-furry stories in your journals, if you want to. 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

NOTE: This applies to SoFurry 2.0 The photography section is for your personal photos, which may or may not be furry. However, due to legal reasons, photos must not be adult. Users under the age of 18 are not allowed to upload photographs of themselves. Be aware of the legal situation regarding photographing others, and note that they can have pictures of themselves taken down.

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 (duh...) while retaining all other rights yourself. This also means that you cannot upload content for which you can't grant such a license, 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, etc.) gives you that permission!

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

Advertisements

Advertisements for your own furry products are only allowed as long as they are complete works of art by themselves, for example a cover image for a comic. However, the upload of censored artwork with a "click here to buy the uncensored pic"-notice is not allowed, nor is uploading multiple advertisement submissions for the same service. We reserve the right to reject submissions that advertise such services and products. If you want to advertise on SoFurry, see Advertising on SoFurry

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.