I spent the better part of the weekend surfing around some of the best known artist archives on the World Wide Web. My trip ended with the Yerf archive, which is considered by some to be the premiere archive on the Internet due to its selective nature and supposedly rigid quality control standards. But after spending some time examining the Recent Uploads section on Yerf, I found myself wondering:
What makes Yerf so great? It's like a refrigerator for developing furry artists.
Just to make sure I wasn't having a knee-jerk reaction to a slow weekend of uploads I took the time to go back several weeks. The more I perused this archive the more my sense of dismay and disappointment grew. This didn't seem like an elite archive where the "best of the best" came to show us what hard work and dedication can do. This seems like a place that is very loosely administered and often used for bragging rights. I found frequent, flagrant violations of the much-touted Uploading Guidelines and a general atmosphere of "we're better than you." Not to mention artwork that, to me, falls far below the caliber the site purports to host.