Info
Furarchiver's About intro
Furarchiver is a web service that allows you to download content from Furaffinity by artist, including content that is no longer available on the site because the artist deleted it, or because the entire account was wiped. Furarchiver itself does not connect to Furaffinity directly, instead it piggybacks off another service that is difficult to reach and use.
And the About seems to go on to say that it is meant to act as a faster, more public-facing cache for an unrelated party's Tor hidden service.
Their network diagram as a visual explanation.
It's only accessible via Tor hidden service, and it's unknown how exactly it gets content from furaffinity. I do not know who runs the service or how you would be able to contact them if the service is down.
...
It looks like the backend is not actually monitored in any way, and outages spanning multiple weeks have happened multiple times since I've been running this archiver. Those outages are the prime reason for furarchiver to exist.
(they don't seem to understand the source dumping from FA)
Furarchiver does host content deleted from FurAffinity if they have it, and they won't delete it upon request.
Deleting content
We will not delete content from the cache or block certain artists from being downloaded ever, even if you're the owner and you request it. This would be completely meaningless because we physically can't remove the files from the backend because it's not our service. Furarchiver is merely a proxy service. It neither generates nor consumes content. Removing it from this cache would not make it unavailable to people at all. [References Streisand Effect]
The most elegant way out of this is to just forget about it and let it silently collect dust in your past. We completely understand that this will not feel very satisfactory.
TL;DR They have a massive partial backup of FA, they copy files from someone's Tor service that dumps from FA, and they give every indication they don't respect DMCA and won't process takedown requests.
Okay, now that that's out of the way...
The goal of this post is visibility and discussion of Furarchiver as an art source for e621, because that doesn't seem to have happened yet. Searching furarchiver in the forums brings up three threads with offhand mentions only, and searching it in our wikis has no results. Currently, source:*furarchiver* status:any returns just 40 posts. Needless to say, Furarchiver is not a whitelisted source. Doesn't look like much serious thought or effort has yet been devoted to Furarchiver on e621.
I learned about Furarchiver when another e621 forum thread mentioned it a few days ago. I tried it on one artist I was already looking into and found A LOT of deleted art that may not otherwise be available (and a lot of announcement-style temporary posts, like YCH ads, coms open). I was able to locally sort by filetype and dimension to find a few bvas posts, all publicly available. That single use may have already saved me an hour, because I don't think FA allows searching posts by file type or dimensions (that would save even more time). Personally, I don't want to upload FA's old crappy 1280 JPG downscales--maybe as exceptions--and sticking to this rule saves time and limits focus to higher quality media anyway. Sucks to suck.
My problem is the next artist I tried on Furarchiver also has a lot of deleted art, and of course one of those is higher quality than what is otherwise publicly available via SauceNAO and on e621. E621's uploading guidelines sometimes get paraphrased with "only publicly available art"... but after reading that again now, checking DNP, and checking CoC, none of them seem to actually say that. The closest thing is don't post "pay content," for services like Patreon.
- Acquiring art from a site like Furarchiver, that may only be available there, for upload to e621 seems a little skeevy.
- On the other hand, most normal e621 users aren't thinking about this and would merely appreciate our cataloging of this lost art.
- Original, public sources go offline permanently all the time, but that art is still fine to upload.
- Little is known about Furarchiver's source.
- With no transparency comes a lack of trust.
- Furarchiver's source could somehow be illicit or modify their data in some way, but this seems unlikely and impossible to prove.
- On balance, as an art source for e621, I think Furarchiver should be given the same amount of trust as third party boorus lacking decent DMCA enforcement (which is all of them?), but Furarchiver is probably cleaner than them in actuality.
- Obviously, art deleted from FurAffinity was deleted for a reason, and uploading that art to e621 has an increased likelihood of angering the artist or owner and may lead to a takedown of said art, all art owned by that person, or DNP of the artist.
- Source linking to Furarchiver seemed tricky at first, because you'll probably download the full zip for ease of use, but it's actually not that hard.
- Link to the gallery search to at least show the site: https://furarchiver.net/Artist/Gallery?artist=<artist name>
- Avoid linking to gallery pages because new art will just push everything back (e.g., page 5 becomes page 8 in 3 years)
- Direct link to the art: https://furarchiver.net/File/View?artist=<artist name>&filename=<the filename>
- Filenames seem to use FurAffinity's original naming (some names might be corrupted or truncated)
- Find downloaded files in the gallery by referencing the big number FurAffinity begins each filename with, because they seem to be unique and sequential.
- Bonus. Original FA filenames can probably be used to reconstruct the file's original FA direct URL (but not the post page): https://d.furaffinity.net/art/<artist name>/<big number>/<same big number>.<rest of the filename>
I was puzzling my way through this issue before I had typed anything, but I think I got it all during post composition.