Help

The new furarchiver is designed to be easy to use, and without cluttering the screen

General page layout

Every page has three static components. These are a menu on top for quick navigation, a footer at the bottom that gives a brief overview on the current site status, and a list of your monitored artists on the bottom left.

The footer

The footer shows three important pieces of information.

First, the backend status. If it's offline, all downloads from it will be paused. During that time you will still be able to search for artists and view the gallery. You can also download existing content from the cache, but you will not be able to perform scans for new content.

Second, the download queue. This is the number of all files that still have to be downloaded from the backend. These are the combined tasks from everyone, and not just yours.

The downloader will pick files at random from the queue. There is no way to prioritize downloads. This also means you do not have to wait for your artist to begin downloading if other users are using the archiver too.

Third, the downloader status. The downloader status usually reflects the backend status. If the backend is online, the downloader is online, and if the backend is offline, the downloader is paused. The administrator also has the ability to stop the downloader, in which case it will be shown as "disabled by admin".

Searching artists

You can search for artists from the main page. Searching for an artist always works and will not contact the backend. It will show you the artist overview.

Artist overview

This page is displayed whenever you search for an artist. It shows what furarchiver already knows about said artist, and it offers a few actions you can take based on the result.

Viewing the gallery

This option is only available if the artist has at least one file in the cache. Clicking on "Open Gallery" on the artist overview will navigate you to the artists gallery. It's a simple grid layout of all images from said artist that you can scroll through. You can click on an image to enlarge it, and from there you can download individual files.
The gallery will only show images at the moment. Because of this, it's possible that the gallery is empty if an artist has files in the cache but none of them are suited for displaying.

You do not need to reload the gallery for artists that are being cached. Downloaded images will automatically be inserted at the top.

When you enlarge an image you can use the left and right arrow keys to go to the previous (left) and next (right) image. Note that the gallery is sorted from newest to oldest file, so going left means going to newer images. The gallery view will automatically scroll to keep the currently enlarged image in the center of the window.

Downloading files

The artist overview, the gallery, and the monitor offer options to download the zip for this artist. The zip contains all files from the cache, including those not shown in the gallery. You can exclude the descriptions if you don't want them.

Monitoring artists

The overview and gallery allow you to monitor artists. Monitored artists are shown in the lower left corner, and Furarchiver will notify you (if you enabled this) when an artist has completely been cached. This feature is available on all furarchiver pages at all times. You can click on the artist name to get additional options as well as some details for failed downloads.

Note: Monitoring an artist that has no pending downloads will immediately report this artist as complete. Monitoring will not start a new caching operation. You will not get notified if you close furarchiver.

The monitor is purely handled in your browser. If you delete your cookies or use furarchiver in a private browser window you will lose your monitoring list when you close the tab.

Searching for new content

Once every 24 hours an artist can be searched for new content from the artist overview. This will contact the backend and enumerate all files, then add the files that are not yet in the cache to the download list.

Performing a scan will automatically add the artist to your monitoring list.

Common problems

A common problem is that furarchiver is not accepting your artist. This is because artists on FA can change how their name is displayed to the point where it no longer properly matches the actual user name. The most reliable way to get the artist name is to extract it from an existing image you have, or to visit the artists profile and grab it from the address bar of your browser.
When grabbing it from an FA file name, it will be the characters between but not including the first . and _. In general, the file name format is as follows:
number.artist_originalname.ext
A valid artist name only consists of lowercase a-z, 0-9, and the symbols -.~
A few early FA usernames violate this naming scheme. If you have trouble with such an artist, contact us.

Corrupt downloads

If downloads fail because they're reported as faulty, it can have multiple reasons, the two most common reasons are that the file is already corrupted in the backend, or that it is empty. In either case, there's nothing furarchiver can do to fix this. Downloads are attempted at most 10 times before files are skipped.

Backend is offline

This is a fairly common issue and nothing that we can do about. Furarchiver tries to contact the backend every 30 seconds and will automatically start and stop downloads.

Downloads from the backend happen purely on the server in this new version of furarchiver. Fiddling with your browser settings, reloading the website, or clearing your browser cache will not fix the problem.