I created this mirror, unprompted, because VCL is important to the history of the furry community. It was one of the first furry art sites, if not the first. Many of the most famous of furry artists began there. This archive connects our community with our history - dating back right to ancient era of the 1990s.

The site's demise was not hard to see coming - the breakdown of the account creation system, the increasing frequency of database and web server errors, the disappearance of Ch'Marr. Before the end I crawled the entire site with a bot that archived the image files, though not their descriptions, so that when the inevitable happened I would be able to preserve it. Once it became clear VCL wasn't coming back I put my plan into action and combined this archive with a recovery from the Wayback Machine, so that each collection could fill in any holes from the other and provide a complete recovery of the site.

It is important to state that this is not an 'archival-grade' exact copy of VCL. There have been substantial changes made in the process for the purpose of format conversion, size reduction and ease of access. Duplicated images have been de-duplicated, duplicated artists consolidated, and a very small number of files have been removed at the artist's request. It intends to preserve all of the content, but it does not preserve the exact files.

I'm paying for this hosting out of my own pocket, so I've taken a quite aggressive approach to optimisation. You're going to find most lossless image formats converted to WebP and many JPEG files converted to AVIF. Do not fear the lossy compression: I am exceptionally good at this, and used only the best deblocking filters. Promotion of these new and more-efficient image formats is something of a personal interest and a secondary purpose of this site. Unfortunately not all files convert so easily: There were old WordPerfect documents in here, and data of even more obscure origin.

This site contains some embedded metadata which identifies it to web filters as adult content. I'm not going to go through 400,000 pictures and judge an appropriate rating for them all, so everything gets the flag.

For contact, seek the raven of sociopolitical ramifications or else Qybat at batchats.