It started in July.
Every few days, almost always at just about 12 minutes past 6 in the morning, somebody creates a new account on FurAffinity. That’s probably normal. Except, in this case, the account doesn’t post anything. It doesn’t follow anyone. It doesn’t have any followers. It doesn’t favorite any art. It just sits there, silent. The name is written in all caps. There is, almost always, no avatar. There are never any details.
That’s also probably normal, right? Lots of FA accounts must be empty.
But, that same day, whoever created that account also creates one on SoFurry. And on DeviantArt. And on e621. And, almost but not always, on Reddit, Inkbunny, and Twitter. Sometimes they create an account on Telegram and Mastodon. I first noticed this back in September, when I saw a user named “JARDSKJALFTI.” Then I kept looking. Here is what I’ve found.
I was not expecting to have this mystery solved at all, to be honest. Nor was I expecting to have it solved so quickly. Nor was I expecting this to explode on Cohost the way it did.
Anyway. I started writing a followup post more or less immediately, because at the time I wrote the post on Sunday, I had already found another block of names—what I referred to as the “Werewolf Era” in a comment. To sum up the additional info, briefly:
Before that (WERWOLFSGRINSEN, WERWOLFSHEILER, WERWOLFSGERUCH, etc.), came a series of names that were just a series of German words (ZORNIGKEIT, WINZIGKEIT, HERZHAFTIGKEIT, etc…) that are formulaic enough that an offhand mention of a name that was the German word for “facetiousness” was enough to identify that, too.
The names that I was able to turn up go back to early February, 2020. To my knowledge, to the extent they have any activity, it’s either a short Twitter follow list (like @WERWOLFSHUNGER) or a few posts on Reddit. Very rarely anything more than that. The first names lack avatars, even.
The further back in time things go, the less likely it is for an account to be present on all possible sites. The more recent accounts, I’ve discovered, are also sometimes present on Pinterest and Steam. I believe this probably started on SoFurry or DeviantArt. The earliest three accounts (URKNAUGG, WROKKKNAUGG, and WRUKKNARGG) I know of only exist on SF, DeviantArt, Twitter, and FurAffinity.
I still don’t know what is going on. But I think the who is now clear.
I would venture to say that the three most common explanations presented in the comments and by my friends were either: 1. some kind of spam or laying the groundwork for a botnet of some kind, 2. an ARG, or 3. a set of accounts created for some unknown but mental-health related issue (for example, paranoia about being followed).
The statement “I have to upload something today at this exact time,” for example, could be encoding something important about the image timestamp (pointing towards option 2) or it could be compulsive (pointing to option 3).
(2) is the option that I’m willing to throw out. My opinion, based on everything I know now, is closer to (1) or a benign (1A) which is that this is some kind of experiment or pet project, the precise scope of which may just be personal edification. I have done much stupider things, so it’s not like I’m going to judge.
But I say experiment or tech project for three reasons.
First is that the account creation process is automated. There were a couple of comments to the effect that the account creation might be scheduled but still manual. It’s possible that was true earlier on. Looking at the timestamps, though, the accounts are set up and then configured in a matter of seconds, the same way each time.
Two is that the accounts aren’t being used. I stopped count at about 80 names, across 500-odd profiles. Of those, maybe 5% have any kind of activity, almost exclusively on Reddit. Out of 74 SoFurry profiles, the sum total of activity is a single shout. The 96 InkBunny and FurryNetwork profiles don’t seem to have ever been used. Only three of the 61 e621 accounts have comments or favorites associated with them.
At the same time, they’re also not being abandoned. In those instances where the accounts do have activity, it often postdates the account creation by months—a year, in a couple of cases. So it’s not simply that they’re being used once and then discarded. They are being kept around and actively maintained. It does not look, to me, like an attempt to evade being blocked, or for that matter followed.
Three is the growing number of other sites that have become part of the automated account creation process over time, and the increasingly streamlined nature of the automation. @WINZIGKEIT, on Twitter, has the bio “Test…” and the display name “SCHWITZIGKEIT.” The latter name, however, seems only to have been created on Reddit.
There is, otherwise, a mechanical regularity. When the DeviantArt profiles have a location listed, it is either Chile or the United States. There is no pattern to which, temporally, but if Chile is listed, there is almost always a birthday given. If the United States is listed, there is never a birthday given.
So. I don’t know what is going on, although I am no longer convinced it’s a hacking collective. But I think I do know who. In the comments of the last post, @drakegator identifies the artist as Dakota-Bear, based on the art style. I agree that the art style is a dead ringer; Dakota-Bear also happens to live in Chile.
So. Massive thanks to Drake Gator for that steer. I consider the circumstantial evidence they provided to be pretty compelling. The user’s FA profile went dark about ten years ago, and I don’t know what they’ve been doing since. Getting better at scripting, apparently. Based on their Reddit posts, I guess they seem to be doing okay, or at least no more weird than I am.
Thank you all for your help and your ideas. I have received some anonymous feedback through the ask box, which I have been kind of tapdancing around based on the nature of that feedback, so, if you are still reading this: I am not ignoring you, I just don’t have a way to reply to you >.>
But in any case, modulo any more startling news or a capsbear-themed ARG actually materializing, that would seem to be that, an odd corner of the Internet that had me briefly startled but is probably (?) nothing to worry about.
…Say, do any of you want to try dredging Lake Michigan for an abandoned lifeboat prototype?
