The policy was updated this morning. Of note is a new section concerning Reserve Price and bids that should have always been there, and a new section concerning contributions. These do not change the effect to any users, they are just there for added clarification.

We are also proud to announce the Grand Opening of a new sister site to FurBuy called The Merchants' Guild which features items of interest to LARP, SCA, Re-Enactment and other medieval fanciers. Your FurBuy accounts will also work there for the purposes of bidding and selling, so you don't even need to sign up a second account or keep track of it. Please take a look and spread the word!

We've added a checkbox to the New Auction Form which allows you to flag an auction as being a "Long-Term Completion". Use this flag if there is any question as to whether or not you will be able to complete/deliver the auction within 42 days of auctions close time (this assumes 14 days to receive payment from bidder, then 28 days to complete and deliver the item to the bidder). This will warn users clearly that such auctions will take longer to complete and potentially push past the Paypal dispute deadline of 45 days.

Due to some complaints and some features we've been wanting to give you for a long time anyway, we have overhauled the entire Feedback Reminder system. Reminders will now be sent 28 and 58 days after auction close for sellers and sent 42 and 72 days after close for bidders, as opposed to the old system of sending reminders to both at 30 and 60 days. This allows more time for bidders to actually receive their items and leave feedback on their own, while also giving bidders a 42-day warning so they have 3 days to resolve issues before the Paypal dispute deadline. Further, auctions marked as Long-Term Completion will NOT send the initial 28 and 42 day reminders.

We've started tracking a new piece of data we're calling Feedback Rate. When auctions are archived 180 days after close, we now check to see the feedback state on those auctions and record whether or not you missed your opportunity to leave feedback. The rate is a percentage of possible feedback that you have left - a high percentage means you are a responsible user who leaves feedback and a low rate warns users to beware that you're not a reliable user for feedback. Please note that everyone is starting with a clean slate - so if you've been a slacker with feedback in the past, your record's clean for now but make sure you get on top of that feedback from now on! ;)

June 16-18 FurBuy will be down and/or spotty as part of a scheduled downtime. We are turning the system over to the new owners, PanDimMar LLC, and moving the servers to the new colo facility where they will live from now on and be much better treated. Don't worry, the same folks who have been running FurBuy will continue to deliver fantastic service and features, we're just part of a bigger family now. =) More news on that in the coming days!

Any auctions set to close between 12:01 AM on June 16 through 11:59 PM on June 18 will be extended by 72 hours (that's 3 days). If you do not want your auctions extended, or would prefer to shorten them, please let us know and we can alter them however you wish. Alternately, if your auctions are not closing in that time-frame but close to it, we can also extend yours but you must Contact Us. The site will likely only actually be down for a few hours on Tuesday, June 16 however the DNS information may take up to 3 days to propagate throughout the internet to your part of the network, hence the spottiness. If you cannot access FurBuy by 11:59 PM Pacific Time on June 18, please contact us and let us know.

Time are rough lately, seems everyone is painfully aware of that. Today we're communicating a painful truth to the community and all FurBuy users. The primary financier of FurBuy for the last ten years can no longer afford to continue paying for the site out of their own pocket. FurBuy will officially close on May 15th, 2009 unless the funds can be generated to convert FurBuy into a self-supporting company able to generate the money necessary each month for full hosting.

In the short term this will be facilitated by a number of artists and sellers on FurBuy contributing a portion of the sales from special support auctions over the next few weeks. You do not need to post an auction in order to donate to the cause, nor do you have to have been specially contacted in order to contribute by running a support auction. However, if you're interested in supporting FurBuy's move forward into the next decade, please Contact Us directly. Our short-term goal is to generate one-thousand US dollars in support funds by April 30, 2009 in order to convert FurBuy Internet Systems into an LLC and support the cost of operation for a couple months while the long-term systems are setup. In return we will be offering 12-month Contributing Memberships and a special Early Supporter title to anyone who generates $25 or more of support for the cause. Any support funds sent will also be returned in full should we not be able to generate enough support to meet this goal.

The long-term support model to pay for FurBuy currently involves two strategies: Contributing Memberships and Ad Banners. For years we've considered these options and feared having to implement them, thanks to a very gracious patron we have not had to seriously consider and implement these programs. But times change, so we are planning to sell Contributing Memberships for somewhere between $1-2 per month in 12-month (annual) blocks. These Contributing Memberships will offer users extended features or more use of existing features, while all current features will remain 100% free to all users. The current Ad Banner strategy we're considering is similar to FA's: two left-side "block" ads on the main page for $5/mo and one footer "banner" ad across the whole site and all pages for $10/mo. We're tentatively going to set the cap to a maximum of 16 "block" ads and 8 "footer" ads per month.

This is it for FurBuy. It either begins supporting and paying for itself, or it's the end. This is not an action born of spite or frustration or anger, but an eventuality that has been avoided for many years which has finally become a necessity. If the $1,000 is not raised by April 30, 2009 (or very, very close to that amount with a clear indicator that more will be coming in May) we will be shutting down the system on May 15, 2009. This site was built by the community, for the community, and will now live or die based on community support. It's all up to you now, loyal and talented FurBuy users. If you have any further questions or comments, see our LiveJournal Community or Contact Us. Thanks for your support and consideration all these years, we'd love to continue serving you for years to come.

We're considering starting up two new programs to help keep FurBuy running, please head over to our LJ community and read the post about these two features and add your comments. This is very important to the future of FurBuy's success.

Users may now link to their YiffStar, DeviantArt and LiveJournal accounts by logging into My Account - Prefs and adding their usernames in the appropriate boxes of the Remote Site Usernames section. Let people find your artwork, journals, communities and more! Please let us know if you run into any difficulties with these new features.

Due to some DNS issues with Network Solutions we had a brief outage of around 8-10 hours. Some internet users may be impacted for longer as DNS issues can take time to unwrinkle as well. In response, as is our usual action with any kind of outage of this nature, we have moved the auction close times back by 24 hours on all live auctions. If you are a seller and want your auction close times restored to their previous setting, please Contact Us right away and we can update them. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you again for using FurBuy!