Been thinking about websites from the old days of the internet. If there's a site that I think deserved to crash and burn and fall off hard, Y!Gallery is one of them.
The mods were unprofessional and rude AF who threw their weight around, their TOS of what art is acceptable was needlessly complicated, and then there's that shitty ass arbitrary ban they had on anthro/furry art.
The furry fandom makes up a huge portion of M/M art alone. Why did they ban such a massive demographic from their site, a demographic that has always been largely made up of LGBTQ people? Because they were becoming more prominent on there over the anime human characters, and by their logic anthro characters didn't count as "yaoi". I'm not joking. That's seriously why they banned any further furry art on there at the time.
Despite there being many furry focused yaoi manga and doujin existing from Japan long before their site came to be, furries somehow could never fall into the "yaoi" category! They were clearly just pissed the furry content was becoming more popular over human characters and they didn't like that one bit! And claiming it's because they just didn't like furry art in general wouldn't be a stretch, too, because the stigma surrounding the furry fandom back then was at its worst around that time. It was just a bunch of catty, cliquish fujoshi mods who couldn't stand the idea of furry art being more popular on their site.
Their ban on furry art went on for about three years and was conveniently lifted just around the time the site's founder allegedly embezzled funds and they were hurting for the needed extra site traffic and donations. Oh but I'm sure they lifted the ban out of the goodness of their hearts! But they still had strict rules on what kind of furry art was acceptable to upload, so take one step forward but three steps back.
But the furry art ban was only the tip of the iceberg for why this site sucked ass through a straw. The mods were some of the biggest power tripping pricks you could find back in the day. It wasn't enough to even maybe vaguely violate their needlessly complicated and confusing as shit guidelines. If you even sneezed in their direction they would suspend or even outright ban your ass. Complete with leaving a shitty snarky disclaimer on why you were unfairly banned at the top of your now locked account, because they also had to make an example out of others. If you look hard enough you can still find some horror stories from artists who used to be there.
Then there's their other shitty and confusing rules of what they found to be acceptable art to upload on their site. It wasn't enough for a biological female character to not be featured prominently or in a NSFW way. Your dudes could not look too feminine. Sorry femme bois, gtfo!
If the Hellaverse existed back then characters like Angel Dust and Stolas would have been enemies #1 to that site's TOS.
The cherry on top of it all: If you weren't comfortable publicly displaying your exact age, the mods would demand you scan and show them your ID, forcing you to dox yourself. If you didn't cough it up, they would ban you until you did. They were a site doing this kind of invasive shit long before internet "safety" laws forced platforms to do it.
It was no shock in the slightest bit when the site inevitably crashed and burned. It was eventually resurrected, and their more strict guidelines were eventually loosened up. But it's a zombified shell of what it used to be, and there are now far superior places like AO3.
