My first suggestion is to
bring back the Flayrah rabbit! That was one of my favorite parts of the old site, no joke, and I am prepared to stage protests until it returns.
(In all seriousness, though, the site's current theme seems not just "clean," but rather bland, and I think it might be a good idea to use a more distinctive aesthetic - like FA, or like the old Flayrah for that matter. Rabbits should be included, of course. Prominently. Everywhere. You can't have flayrah without a rabbit around.)
Let's see, I guess I'll address your questions one by one:
* What, in general, do you think would help Flayrah succeed as a furry news/information portal?Ack! Too general! See specific thoughts below.
* What should we write about? Do we focus solely on the fandom, or include topics (like animals) which are not strictly "furry"?Hmm... personally, I think there should be a very strong focus on the fandom itself, or at least on anthros in general. Articles about animals could be included, I think, but they would need to be carefully selected; just the fact that a story is about an animal that some people have as their fursona shouldn't be a reason in itself to post the link. For example, the only story on Flayrah right now under
the "rabbit" tag is an article about the expenses of owning various pets, which doesn't really strike me as something that belongs on Flayrah.
* Are reviews and guides important to you? How do you feel about opinion pieces? Photo-based stories?Well, none of these things are
important to me, per se, but I think they *might* be cool to include. That depends purely, though, on their professionalism. In my view, it would be really cool to include full-fledged reviews of furry novels, links to major fursuit tutorials, considered opinion pieces about ongoing issues in the fandom (i.e.
not drama), and/or thoughtful photo essays. I would
not be interested in reading AC post-mortems, checklists for what to bring to FC, user-created rants, or someone's blurry pictures of the fursuit parade.
* Am I right to include stories initially aired by other news sites, like the BBC, or would you prefer we stick to original content - even if it means less news?No, definitely include the outside content - that's quite useful. Furries tend to be very interested in how outsiders and the media portray them, so articles like this form a valuable spark for discussion. Once Flayrah regains its userbase, folks will hopefully see that Flayrah has posted an interesting article and then click through to see what others are saying about it (thus helping to build the site's community). Limiting yourself to original content would be counterproductive, plus it wouldn't really make sense for a site that bills itself as a "furry news portal" (i.e. aggregator).
* Lastly, should we reject posts written with a promotional motive, or keep them as long as they're not written like ads?I think that promos are broadly okay, as long as they're informational in nature and not blatant advertising. However, I feel that 1) the number of "promos" any one person/event can do should be limited and 2) said promos should be rejected if they're not of potential interest to the
whole readerbase. I don't know if Flayrah still does this now, but I remember that years ago, the staff for some of the smaller cons would just post their newsletters directly to Flayrah - which was very annoying, because there's no reason for anyone not attending to care.
Thanks for bringing Flayrah back to life, GreenReaper!
