Heyo everyone! It's been a while since the last update - we hope everyone had a good start into the new year!

Since the last update there has been further continuous improvement on SFX and we've started to collect some very valuable feedback from the first few selected users to make everything for you as smooth as possible once we start the public beta soon. There have also been a lot of changes to the infrastructure running SFX which, just like the site itself, has seen a lot of improvements. We want SFX to be faster, more reliable and especially, more enjoyable to use (anyone ever tried to use the current site on a phone screen? ;) ).

This is also one of the reasons why it has taken so long to get to this point, but we're excited to say that we plan to release SFX for public beta sometime this year. We don't have an exact date yet, but we will keep you updated as we get closer to that goal. Not everything will be perfect right away when that day comes (it's a beta, after all), but we've been working hard to get it as close to our initial goal as possible.

For now, you are already able to try out the new SFX from a visitor's perspective on https://sofurrybeta.com . We also encourage everyone to leave a comment here about what they like or don't like about the new site so far - we're creating this site for you all!

With that intro out of the way, let's get to the actual update and talk about the things that have changed during the past few months. Hopefully you'll be as excited about them as we were with implementing them!

Starting out with the change that (we think) will be very welcomed:

Advanced search filters

In previous site updates (as well as in the feature request section of the forum), many furs have requested a more powerful and refined search - and we agree!

Today we're happy to show you our advanced search, which adds custom filters that can be used to better specify what you're looking for, finally being able to find that one story again that you can only remember a sentence from.







Currently, you can define custom search filters for upload titles, author names, descriptions and content, whereas you can define if your query should match a value or not.


This, however, is only the beginning. We also plan to add date ranges to custom filters, so you even get the ability to search within specific time frames. Let us know if there are any other custom filter options you'd like us to add!


And, for anyone that prefers not messing around with UI options and wants to write a query in text, you can also do that! SFX will translate any custom filters specified in your text search (like “husky, author:Terra") to their respective UI element so you can easily tweak your search, or just copy-paste a more complex search query that you can reuse.

User profile filters

Continuing with more filters - this time on the user gallery!

We've added quick content filter buttons to user galleries so you can more easily browse through what interests you most from a creator's work.

And, of course, SFX will only display filter options for which the creator actually has content on their page, making you also see instantly what type of content they mainly upload.

UI improvements

During development, we have focused on making features work first before we made them look nice. As such, there have been plenty of pages that looked not too modern or exciting, and broke on mobile. Now that we've started rounding off the corners of our initial work a bit, we have redesigned some pages that were long overdue.

This also included the navbar and user menu, which didn't really work too well on mobile. We have redesigned the navbar specifically with phones in mind, and while it still needs some minor tweaks, we hope you'll like the much more mobile friendly menus.

Improved image delivery

We have already noticed that some creators love the ability to upload high-res content to SFX. As such, many views that include multiple images (such as the submission page, showing the user header) take significantly longer to load with larger high-res content even when the target display's resolution is greatly lower of what the site displays

To improve loading times and data usage, we have improved our image delivery to serve pre-sized content that is more suited for the actual displayed resolution, and switched to deliver most images in next-gen image formats, allowing for a greater reduction in data that the browser has to download and thus making everything more snappy. You can let us know how well it works for you by trying it out and looking at some submissions on https://sofurrybeta.com !

Experimental Passkey implementation (WebAuthn)

The web is moving fast, and attack vectors for account theft are getting larger and larger. Using a combination of username/email and password has been the standard for many years, but is increasingly easy to abuse (for example with a bit of social engineering). Adding a second factor to logins (2FA) certainly makes the process more secure, but it always comes at the cost of being somewhat annoying and inconvenient. Passkeys try to solve exactly that issue.

Passkeys are secure credentials, stored directly on your device using trusted hardware components (Trusted Platform Module, Yubikey, Secure Enclave, etc.) that can authenticate you with SoFurry. This means that you no longer need a username/email and password to log in - all you need is your device with a valid passkey. No need for password managers, and completely immune to any phishing attempts - all while being as secure as 2FA.

This feature currently only works on Apple devices (MacOS, iOS, iPadOS), but we're working on supporting all operating systems that support secure passkey authentication.

While we would have many more changes to talk about, these are the most major updates that we think everyone will benefit from. Please let us know what you think - any feedback is appreciated!

We hope that you like the progress and state of SFX so far! We can't wait to finally release it to all of you - we're already incredibly excited for all the things that furs will create and share.

Until the next update!