Could the VCL, once a key furry art site, reverse its trend towards irrelevance?

On newly-reinstalled forums, site admin Ch'marr declared that he had:

[…] enough motivation collected to bring VCL back to stability, and perhaps some level of functionality to keep it a useful and enjoyable place to play around with. Certainly not to it's former "splendour", but that's not the goal.

While the VCL's main page still sports several broken links, it now includes a Twitter feed:

Signaling a slow crawl back to stability, if not relevance :) More information to follow soon.

Despite recent downtime, furry community site Fur Affinity grew significantly in 2009, according to figures released by The Dragoneer this month.

Over 120,000 users joined the site; almost double that were active during the year, making over a million submissions. Users also made over 400,000 posts on their personal journals, garnering 3.5 million comments.

Fur Affinity's success has come at a cost for other sites, who have found traffic stagnating. The VCL in particular has lost ground, while Yiffstar recently relaunched itself as SoFurry in an attempt to attract new users. Fur Affinity also plans to move to a new layout.

For a site as large as FA, reported annual operating costs are relatively small at $14,231.76; donations and advertisements raised $13,943.79.

The Vixen Controlled Library's Sweden "Master" mirror is going to shut down according to system admin Ch'marr in a post to the VCL Livejournal community. This is due to their Sweden host, Linkoping University, asking them to ether remove erotic material or shut down. Blame politics and public relations issues. The US Mirror will still be up, but slow, until they can ether get expanded bandwith for it or a new mirror. "Can anyone lend a T1?"

Ch'marr, administrator of the popular VCL art archive has resigned, citing burnout, and other personal reasons. According to him, Ross Reddick--also known as Sibe--will be taking over the administrative duties of the archive. The full details are available here.

A recently-created furry portal called Fur Central has caused a few eyebrows to be lifted recently within the Furry community. The proprietor of the site has created a half-joking, half-serious list that he posts about once a week called "The Worst of the VCL." This hand-picked list profiles the thumbnails and description entries from various VCL artists. In the inaugral posting of the "Worst of the VCL" the author explains, "I've decided to start a new weekly feature ... for something that's been driving me nuts for a long, long time: bad art in the VCL. ... starting now, every week I will point out my picks for the 10 worst images from the VCL's recent uploads."