To my understanding, Fluffybooru had been in a state of decline. Some people would claim it was the over-abundance of abuse. Some would claim that it was the excessive toxicity and negativity on the booru, and there is a definite history of the booru doing hate art as well as running off people who they dislike. Over time, many of the sites regulars had departed or became less active, with some of the notable departures including Aichi and Menthol (both of who were mods). Some would say that people just move on from fluffies, but the fairly negative nature of the fandom, as well the remnants of drama in the comments seem to suggest otherwise.
Then, in 2019, Hewmon gave the site up. From what I understand (though Hewmon can clarify this) he had lost interest in the subject, and no longer had interest in hosting the content. This left the future of the site in jeopardy. Guzziman, a longtime site regular offered to pay the bill and host the site, which is how Fluffybooru.org made the move to Fluffybooru.com, under Guzzi’s name in 2019.
Some people attribute this move to a request from people to have their content deleted. People were already departing from the booru and requesting their content to be deleted before, but at least one person I know was of the opinion that more deletions were made after the site change.
Fluffybooru initially had an official discord that Aichi created but, when Aichi left the fandom, he deleted the discord. Techi, who was made a mod, also made a new discord server to replace Aichi’s. At some point in 2019, an artist called Pawn joined the booru. He would later join the discord, and become one of its mods.
So, fast forward to December 2019 - January 2020. People have been leaving the booru and deleting content. There was new content coming in, but the site’s activity was a far departure from the old days. New content was trickling in, with some days going on without any new content. At this time, there was only four mods: Techi (technicolorcarnage), Deadweight, Soulvei/Crystal Leviathan and Wetfluff.
At the same time, there was a subreddit devoted entirely to Fluffyabuse. This subreddit got deleted, and some of its members banded around to create the Fluffycommunity subreddit, the idea being covering all fluffy content under one subreddit (there are other fluffy subreddits like Fluffyhugbox and Fluffysadbox but they are not related to this one)
Pawn, who was previously a mod on Techi’s discord, had a falling out with her. To put into perspective, Techi is very young SJW, and the server she ran also had a strict number of rulles (people had to have a Fluffybooru account to join, and porn wasn’t allowed) As such, Pawn decided to start his own Fluffy server, where people could post porn and didn’t need a Fluffybooru account. This is how we had two rivalling Fluffy discords on the booru.
So at the start of 2020, we have a decaying Fluffybooru that had more people leaving when it changed to Fluffybooru.com, and a new admin at the time (Guzziman), taking over from Hewmon. There were two discords, because drama from Techi’s discord made Pawn start his on. At the same time, there was a rising reddit scene thanks to the Fluffycommunity subreddit. This was the state of fluffy fandom for the first quarter of 2020
Around about February to March of 2020. the artist Fluffycommissions had returned from his hiatus and started a fairly popular CYOA. He had uploaded his contented anonymously, under his own account, and also with the help of Foxhoarder, who lives in another country, and uploaded some of his content on her own account. This included the CYOA, and work on a visual novel both Fox and him made.
Then, in April of 2020, all of his content deleted. Considering how some of the account was anonymous, or was posted from an entirely different IP, the deletions were done deliberately.
The blame was initially placed on Wetfluff. Although there were four mods on the booru, the only one doing active work was Wetfluff, as the other three were either too busy, or no longer had interest in fluffies. In addition, Wet was known for gatekeeping and being excessive in his modding. He would delete a fluffy pic if it was “not fluffy enough”, “looked too MLP”, “spoke perfect English”, “was a Mary Sue OC donut steel”, and so on. At the same time, he gave a free pass to stuff like Munstah Mummah who had some work with her OC but no fluffies in it. However, Wet was a fan of Fluffycommissions stuff, and himself was puzzled by rather sudden deletions. Guzziman himself got involved in the matter, and started the other three absent mods. All of them stated they were not on the booru in over a year.
It was later found out that the deletions were done by a rogue admin on the site. It wasn’t Wet or Guzziman who did it, nor was any of the other three mods - it was someone else entirely who had an account with admin privileges.
>>34418527
This is where Pawn comes in. Guzziman made the claim (though we don’t know how he found this out, and even Wet is unsure how he got this IP info) that the IPs of the rogue admin account could be traced to Pawn. It didn’t help that, just a month earlier, one of the mods on the fluffycommunity subreddit (that being a guy called Pope) mistakenly thought that Pawn was the owner of the booru. This, on top of Pawn’s tiff with Techi led her cronies to blame Pawn for the hacking. The thing was, Pawn didn’t seem to possess any technical knowledge to be capable of such an act. In addition, people have been known to dupe and fake IPs. Pawns name was cleared, but in the process, the three inactive mods lost their privilege and, in a state of fairness, Guzziman removed ads to both of the discord servers.
(on a site note, the mod who thought Pawn owned the booru, Pope, is no longer with the subreddit)
Following this event, Wetfluff mentioned that Guzziman was starting to lose interest in the booru.
If the rogue hacker incident caused the dominos to fall, the fallout from the discovery by Click youtuber was the straw that broke the camel’s break. At some point in June or July, some youtube called the Click discovered the fluffycommunity subreddit. So far, he made four videos on the booru.
As a result of the Click covering the topic, a lot of people started joining the subreddit. Most of the Click’s fanbase consisted of edgy, impressionable 13+ kid were edgy kids who were more interested in creating Jellenheimer OCs and Mary Sue OCs. However, there has been some really talented fluffy writers and artists that can be found on the subreddit. Around about the same time, the booru was starting to get a bit more traffic. According to wetfluff, this saw the increase of anon comments on the booru, as well as harassments on Wet and Guzzi,
However, I should point out that it was clear that Guzziman lacked coding knowledge. Wet mentioned that both guzz and him didn’t know how to turn off anon comments.
Whatever the case, whether it was his inability to control the situation, or a premeditated movie, Guzzi burnt all bridges and pulled the plug on the booru on the 30th of September, 2020.
To put a final word on the subject, there is a lot of blame and hate levelled at the Click, since his videos on the fandom had cast it in a more public view, and had opened the floodgates to a much younger and rwodier audience. However, I’m not going to blame the Click. Even if the Click did not discover the fluffycommunity subreddit, and with it the booru and its fandom, someone else would have. The booru had been a ticking time bomb, and its sordid nature was going to lend itself to destruction the moment it would be discovered by the public eye. Not too long after the Click stopped doing videos about the FluffyCommunity, two other people on youtube did so. And it may happen again.
In my opinion, the real cause of the booru was the rogue admin incident in April, which may have affected Guzziman’s own interest in hosting the booru. The booru’s culture of toxicity and negativity certainly didn’t help, as various parties took advantage of the incident to push forward certain agendas. It could even be argued that Guzziman was not forthcoming on why he suspected Pawn, and later absolved him of the blame. The Click incident and redditors did play a part, but it was more chaos after that one incident.
Whatever the case, the booru is now gone.
- Anonymous
