If you visit more than one furry art site, it's pretty easy to see
that some of them are more popular than others. Furbitron attempts to
quantify this, by looking at the number of submissions over time for
several art sites.
How Furbitron works
Once every 24 hours, Furbitron looks at the latest submissions on
each art site it supports. If the art site provides an API, Furbitron
uses that. If not, Furbitron just fetches the main page of the art
site and parses data out of the HTML.
Furbitron records the submission ID and the date and time of the latest submissions. Once the data is collected, Furbitron generates updated graphs and statistics for each art site.
Data from before Furbitron started actively monitoring an art site is from querying the art site's API for a particular series of dates, or from looking up a series of past submissions and parsing data out of the HTML, or (for e621 only) from a database dump provided by the art site.
Data from Furbitron's active monitoring, starting for most sites in late September, 2021, is shown on the graphs as "live". Data from before that time was mostly collected in mid-September, 2021, and is shown on the graphs as "history".
Note: Furbitron doesn't currently have any way to account
for deleted submissions. For example, some artists will post a new
submission with a "now streaming" image when they are about to stream,
and then delete the submission when they're done streaming. Or, an
artist might post new submissions for a work in progress, and then
delete them after they post the finished work. These drive up the
submission IDs, but they don't mean that the art site actually has
that many submissions on it.
Questions and Answers
Why doesn't Furbitron
support a certain art site?
There are already analytics packages for "big" platforms like Twitter.
Also, finding just the furry art on all of Twitter, or another
big platform, is a non-trivial problem.
Furbitron will not support InkBunny.
If there's an art site you think Furbitron should monitor, feel
free to suggest it.
Can art sites game Furbitron's
monitoring?
Yes, although they probably won't.
An art site could just not use certain submission numbers - for example, if it assigned only even numbers to new submissions, it would instantly appear to Furbitron to have twice as many submissions as it actually does.
If someone posts a large number of new submissions to an art site,
and then immediately deletes them, it will still increase the
submission count seen by Furbitron.
I work for or volunteer for
one of the art sites Furbitron monitors. How do I stop or change
Furbitron's monitoring?
Send Furbitron a note, private message, or direct message from your
owner, staff, moderator, or administrator account on the art site.
Furbitron has a user account on all of the art sites it monitors - see
Furbitron's contact page for a list.
You can also send email - see Furbitron's
contact page - but requests that come in via
email will be deferred until Furbitron also gets a message on the art
site. (Email is easy to fake.)
How accurate are
Furbitron's numbers?
This is difficult to answer for Buzzly, FurAffinity, FurryNetwork,
and Weasyl; those four sites do not publish their idea of how many
submissions the site currently has.
Furiffic publishes an approximate number of submissions they claim to have at the end of the "Latest submissions" bar on their front page. As of early November, 2021, they claimed approximately 124,810 submissions, and the latest submission ID seen by Furbitron was about 205,000. This implies that only about 60.9% of the possible submission IDs are actually used. In other words, Furbitron probably over-estimates the number of submissions on Furiffic by about 64%.
FurryNetwork does not publish their idea of how many submissions the site currently has, so it isn't possible to determine how many of the possible submission IDs are actually used.
FurryNetwork uses four separate submission ID sequences: artwork, photos, writing, and multimedia. (All the other sites Furbitron monitors use only one submission ID sequence for all types of submissions.) Furbitron only monitors the artwork submissions on FurryNetwork. As of early November, 2021, artwork submission IDs made up about 93.6% of the total submission IDs on FurryNetwork. In other words, Furbitron may under-estimate the total number of submissions on FurryNetwork by about 6.8%.
SoFurry publishes the number of submissions they claim to have at the bottom right corner of their front page. As of early November, 2021, they claimed approximately 1,146,080 submissions, and the latest submission ID seen by Furbitron was about 1,718,920. This implies that only about 66.7% of the possible submission IDs are actually used. In other words, Furbitron probably over-estimates the number of submissions on SoFurry by about 50%.
e621 publishes the number of submissions they claim to have at the bottom of their front page. As of early November, 2021, they claimed approximately 2,562,750 submissions, and the latest submission ID seen by Furbitron was about 3,008,660. This implies that only about 85.2% of the possible submission IDs are actually used. In other words, Furbitron probably over-estimates the number of submissions on e621 by about 17%.
e621 also publishes a dump of their database every day. As of mid-October, 2021, the database dump showed approximately 2,528,690 active submissions, and the latest submission ID in the dump was about 2,971,460. This implies that only about 85.1% of the possible submission IDs are actually used, which is comparable to the percentage found above.
In theory, it would be possible for Furbitron to request
every single submission ID on all of the sites it monitors,
and note how many of those correspond to valid submissions. This
has not been implemented, because it would take a long time for
some sites. If Furbitron requested one submission ID per second,
continuously, this would take about a day and a half for Furiffic,
up to 17 months (!) for FurAffinity.
Why does Furbitron look
terrible on my phone?
Furbitron is designed to look good on a reasonably-sized screen in
landscape. This includes some newer phones and tablets.
There are no plans to make Furbitron look good on small or portrait
screens.
Can I get the source code
for Furbitron?
No.
Can I get the data that
Furbitron collects?
Probably not. Asking is free, though.
e621 publishes a dump of their database every day; links to it are
available on e621. If you can't find the link,
ask us for it.
Who owns Furbitron?
Furbitron is privately owned and operated by one person, who has been
in the fandom for a couple of decades now. That person is not
affiliated with any of the art sites Furbitron monitors, or any other
furry art site, in any paid or volunteer capacity.
Furbitron is privately funded by its owner.
Furbitron is not owned by or affiliated with any company that
does audience metrics for broadcast TV, satellite TV, cable TV,
broadcast radio, satellite radio, or web sites.
What user data does
Furbitron collect?
Furbitron does not use cookies.
Furbitron does not have advertising.
Furbitron does have web server logs, which include the IP addresses of all visitors. These are stored on the server, and normally not reviewed in detail, unless there is a problem. The web server logs are deleted after 30 days.
Furbitron is hosted in the United States, in the state of Illinois.
What software does
Furbitron use?
Server:
Apache on
Linux.
HTTPS: Let's Encrypt TLS certificate.
Markup: Based on the "Start Page Template" from w3schools. Uses w3.css.
Every day: Vixie cron, bash, perl, Firefox, and gnuplot.
Development, maintenance, and changes:
vim,
HTML Tidy,
wget,
lynx, and
micro_httpd.
Change log
2021-12-20
Changed stats script to correctly include 7, 31, and 365.25 days
of data in the past-week, past-month, and past-year measurement
periods. It had been using only 6, 30, and 364.25 days of data. The
all-time measurement period was already computed correctly.
Changed FurAffinity scraper to correctly deal with the times of recent submissions. FurAffinity, by default, apparently uses a fixed offset from UTC, which does not change with daylight savings time.
Removed the "Furiffic history" label from the "all except FA, past
month" graph, as there is now more than one month of live data
available for Furiffic.
2022-02-12
Added support for Buzzly.art. Shout out to
Deer Spangle,
who provided valuable insight into Buzzly's GraphQL API. This made
Buzzly support happen much more quickly than it otherwise would have.
2022-06-03
Removed live querying of Furiffic. Furiffic announced in March 2022
that they would shut down on 2022-06-01, and they did. Furbitron will
still display the last available data for Furiffic in the graphs and
statistics, but that data will no longer be updated.