The VCL servers (which are apparently hosted by hivelocity) seem to be experiencing intermittent database errors which render pages inaccessible. I have not been paying too much attention but the site is currently experiencing such an issue and experienced it before in September but was available in October. I strongly suggest that anyone with the ability to do so backup any irreplaceable artwork on VCL. There is a script in GitHub for archiving VCL galleries (including descriptions, which are nice to have). You may need to wait until the database is working again.

Who even is the webmaster to VCL? Like, is there really anyone to contact about that site to get stuff working again?

KynikossDragonn said:
Who even is the webmaster to VCL? Like, is there really anyone to contact about that site to get stuff working again?

Precisely. You could try contacting the hosting service and ask them to forward your complaint to the webmaster. Somebody is still paying big money (hundreds of dollars per month I am calculating correctly) to keep those servers running.

Wikifur seems to have this information.

SnowWolf said:
Wikifur seems to have this information.

The information doesn't seem accurate. None of the social media pages for VCL have been updated in years.

EDIT: VCL seems to be running on fumes at this point.

Before anyone freaks out too much, archive.org has a complete copy of the site, including all of the images, so if you want to go back and save them all from there, you can pretty easily.

Is it bad if I don't know what VCL is?

AoBird said:
Is it bad if I don't know what VCL is?

http://us.vclart.net/vcl/

Found it with search engine.

I will feel bad when it goes. While it wasn't my first experience with furrydom, it is what cemented my interest.

Honestly, whenever anyone mentions it, it amazes me that it's still around. Still looks like a relatively simple elaboration on the idea of an FTP server.

Seems like it was still working on November 1, if I read the archive.org results correctly.

the largest (hahaha, no) furry/anthropomorphic artwork and story library on the Internet.

So who's got the title of the largest artwork / story library now? Is that FA (something I also find a bit unbelievable that it's still running)?

AoBird said:
Is it bad if I don't know what VCL is?

It's basically one of the elder furry websites. When I was a pup back in the 90's, it was one of the biggest furry art sites -- back before deviantart. There were, for me, two major websites: Yerf -- which was the "squeaky clean" place that had minimum quality standards and it was kind of my dream to get 'good enough" to be accepted there. I don't think I ever got brave enough to apply though.

VCL was the other website, and anyone could make an account there, and any kind of artwork could be uploaded--including porn. It had a pretty awful system for trying to find new art though. But it was a place to store art that wasn't geocities or tripod or fortune city or all of the other fossils of the internet.

I noticed that it was acting strange a week or two ago. It'd be a shame if it disappeared since it hosts art from some of my favourite artists that you can't find on the more modern platforms.

KiraNoot said:
Before anyone freaks out too much, archive.org has a complete copy of the site, including all of the images, so if you want to go back and save them all from there, you can pretty easily.

I just checked that and it turns out to have lots of missing pages depending on the crawl. So no, that isn’t a good solution. Archive.org often has holes like that, hence why you shouldn’t rely on it unless you confirmed the archive yourself.

Haljkljavahlibrz said:
I noticed that it was acting strange a week or two ago. It'd be a shame if it disappeared since it hosts art from some of my favourite artists that you can't find on the more modern platforms.

The exact reason why it should have been mirrored years ago. It’s been having problems for years now.