About Yiffer.xyz

Content policy

At Yiffer.xyz we strive to only host content which is publicly available, and we will remove any content from artists who ask us to do so. As the primary site for furry comics, we believe that artists gain significant amounts of followers through our website, as we display links to any profile we can find in the artist page. We have a soft quality requirement, meaning that not just any comic will be accepted. Censored comics, comics in foreign languages, or poorly drawn comics will all be rejected. Underage content is not allowed.

Technology

The current tech stack is quite an exciting one. We're running fully on the edge via Cloudflare. Front and back-ends are written in combination in Remix.js, hosted on Cloudflare Pages. This means all page loads are server-side rendered at blazing speeds. Our database is Cloudflare D1 SQL, an edge database. File storage is Cloudflare R2. Naturally, all of this is served via Cloudflare's CDN. This tech stack is a dream to work with!

In addition to the main parts described above, we have a small permanent server where image processing happens when things are uploaded, as that's harder to do on the edge. This is a simple Express/NodeJS server.

History

Yiffer.xyz has had three versions.

First version: 2016-2020

The first version was a simple site build with Angular.js (v1.6), with api (Express/NodeJS), database (MySQL) and file storage all hosted on a single VM, without containers or redundancy. Not very reliable, these decisions were result of the site being a side project where the developer was "learning by doing", not having any prior web dev experience.

Screenshots from v1

Unfortunately, no screenshots of the mod panel were saved.

V1 landing page

Second version: 2020-2025

The second version was a complete rewrite, and included more features. Our advertising system was introduced here, and the mod panel was massively extended. This version also included a change in visual profile, going from gray-and-pink to something very close to today's version, with green and blue hues.

This front-end was built with Vue.js (Vue 2), with the api still Express/NodeJS and database still MySQL, but now hosted on Google Cloud. File storage was moved to Google Cloud too. Moreover, the site was containerized via Docker, and the front-end was split into three parts each hosted as their own web app via subdomains: The main site, the advertising part, and the mod panel.

Screenshots from v2

Main site, light mode

Third version: 2025-present

The third version is once again a complete rewrite, with the tech stack described above. New in v3 is the whole contributions system; previously, the only option for contributing by users was to suggest comics via name+links, and to suggest tag changes to comics - only a tiny part of how users can contribute today. A new minimal landing page was introduced to make helpful links easier to spot, instead of going directly to the comic browse page of previous versions. V3 also introduced a new rating system, going from ratings of 1-10, to 1-3 stars. The reasoning behind this is that most people either rated things 8, 9, 10, or 1. Bookmarking comics was also introduced in v3. Once again the mod panel was upgraded, from usable to delightful and powerful. About two thirds of development time has gone into the mod panel, because in the end, mods are the backbone of this site.

The reason for this rewrite was to make further development as enjoyable and rapid as possible with brand new scalable technology. It also to cuts costs, as Google Cloud Platform (and all competitors such as AWS and Azure) is expensive.