[CONTEXT: For the uninitiated, Herpy (2005 – 2016) was a furry community and art aggreation website that catered to scalies (furries with reptilian characters). It contained a massive curated gallery of art as well as a message board. The website was owned and hosted by the Bad Dragon company and was used by the founder of the company to announce and ultimately launch the business. Herpy’s gallery was initially meant to be a reference archive for furry artists and as such it contained a large amount of veterinary and scientific photographs of reptilian genitals. Because of these two key things the website developed a very negative reputation and unsubstantiated rumors have circulated about it both back when it was online and for long after it’s demise.]
When I dusted off this old website and brought it back to life I knew from the beginning that my first journal entry was going to be my “origin story”, there was no way around that. I felt that I could not just jump into telling personal stories without laying the groundwork to establish the role I once played in the furry fandom. But, as I began this undertaking I also knew deep down what the second post was going to have to be, and this is it. This post is about Herpy, “the website for reptile lovers”.
Before I say anything else I just want to iterate: I am not writing this post as a means to absolve or accuse anyone of anything. This post is more akin to a tell-all straight from the horse’s mouth.
Some time in early 2016 the website formerly located at herpy.net was shut down for good. Not a lot of positive things were said about Herpy while it was alive and even in death the website isn’t remembered too fondly. Actually, due to the website no longer existing I’d go as far as to say worse things have been said about Herpy than when it was still around for the simple truth that absolutely nothing can be fact-checked anymore. You would think that such a popular website would’ve been archived, but all records of Herpy have been voluntarily excluded from Internet Archive and archival systems such as archive.today did not exist when Herpy was operational. The website is literally gone without a trace. What is known about Herpy today is made up of stories of varying legitimacy told by people who were probably never there accompanied by second- and third-hand screenshots that were designed to push a specific narrative, and none of it can be corroborated.
The goal of this journal isn’t to waste your time while I spin my tires attempting to justify any perceived wrongdoings that Herpy is allegedly responsible for. I don’t care about that. My aim is to dispel some of the nastier rumors and hopefully end the game of “telephone” that’s been played with this website posthumously. Herpy isn’t going to be magically transformed into a do-no-evil haven by the end of this post but my hope is you’ll at least understand what actually transpired there and the original context for the things people keep bringing up regarding it.
My authority to dispel the aforementioned rumors is simple. Regretfully, I was the community administrator of Herpy from 2008 – 2011, though my name remained associated with the project and my account retained its admin rank until its death in 2016. I was barely 19 years old when Varka, the owner, recognized me as an easy mark and put me in charge. I genuinely had no idea what I was doing nor was I aware of how close my proximal distance now was to some extremely questionable people.
However, I can feel I am already starting to stray from the point of this post and we’re only a few paragraphs in, but please stick with me. The process of writing this entire post required me to revisit some extremely dark places. I met some truly awful people and some of the things I went through scarred me for life and took significant intervention from professionals to undo at great cost. All I ask for is your patience and compassion as I try to convey to you this story. What you’re reading right now is the third time in a decade that I’ve tried to write this post.
Herpy was created, hosted, and owned by Varka, the founder of Bad Dragon. Varka was something of a complicated celebrity within the furry fandom in the late 2000’s into the 2010’s because prior to Bad Dragon launching there really wasn’t a company dedicated to creating furry-centric sex toys with a penchant for quality materials. Bad Dragon was immediately successful and made Varka and his business partners extremely wealthy virtually overnight. But the thing with Varka is he had a very “troublesome” history regarding his online presence and the people he associated with. Because Herpy was an arm of Bad Dragon all the people out there who wanted to take him down by any means would constantly use the website as ammunition against him in their attempts to prove his ties to alleged bestiality rings.
I believe I joined Herpy just before 2007 ended, so I wasn’t properly active until 2008 was underway. Prior to that, to the best of my knowledge Herpy launched some time in 2005. It was supposedly born from a Yahoo group for people interested in the sexology of extinct animals, namely dinosaurs, though it also focused on descendants of dinosaurs such as crocodilians. The name of the website (“Herpy”) was taken from “herpetology”, or the study of reptiles. I am unfamiliar with the Yahoo group that preceded Herpy and all attempts to find some remnant of its existence have proved fruitless. Because of this, I know nothing about the group or its staff but I assume Ethos (gallery admin) was likely involved and had a similar role. Varka also almost certainly had to be there too because he’s the person who bought the herpy.net domain and provided all the hosting. I remember there being a vanishingly small handful of users on the message boards who spoke as if they’d been there for a very long time so I’d imagine they were holdovers from the Yahoo group too.
Herpy existed for about three years with Varka as the community admin. What little administrative crossover I did get to see showed Varka as someone who was mostly absent and saw Herpy as a personal launching pad of sorts for his grandiose ideas. I got the impression that to Varka the website was a means to an end, not something to actually befriend or manage. I got a vibe of ulterior motives from him, though you could likely just say “everyone knows that”.
Bad Dragon opened in 2008 several months after Varka posted a thread on the message boards titled “Animal Toys ;-)”. This is one of the few things from Herpy that has actually been properly archived by someone. As far as I know the screenshots of the thread are not doctored or cropped to omit context. In the thread Varka expresses his interest in sex toys modeled after “exotic genitalia” (i.e. animals). In our present day exotic sex toys are a dime a dozen, they are seemingly not taboo at all, but you have to understand that back in 2008 this was a big thing. At the time the only company serving this kind of clientele was Zetacreations, which was formerly known as Zoo Fur / Zeta Paws and I believe they changed their name to try and distance themselves from their extremely well documented poor customer service and product quality; their toys were made out of vinyl which is not body safe and is a substance prone to deterioration. Varka’s plans were to make toys out of silicone which was extremely expensive and at the time was something normally reserved only for the larger and more well established adult novelty companies. (Where Varka allegedly got the money to do this is another story, and not within the scope of this post.)
Launching his company took all of Varka’s free time so he asked me if I was willing to take the reins of Herpy. Outside of the community I’d been making something of a name for myself as a writer of fantasy stories so to me the offer seemed like a good deal. I accepted and immediately took Varka’s place as community admin. Varka, whose reputation within Herpy was wearing pretty thin, basically left altogether to focus on Bad Dragon. He maybe posted two or three more times after the change over.
Being handed Herpy was akin to being given a package from the Unabomber, I just didn’t know it at the time. I took the role because I was starstruck, not necessarily from Varka but from the fandom as a whole. At the time the stories I was writing were seeing significant traction on Yiffstar (known today as SoFurry), an accomplishment that I’m sure played a role in Varka noticing me as a potential candidate to take over his website. I was 19 years old and just a year prior I’d attempted to take my own life because I felt that these personal fantasies of mine were wrong, yet now I was being celebrated, coddled, and more worryingly encouraged by a crowd of soothsayers who just wanted to get their rocks off. I was aware of none of that, I just relished in the validation.
I can’t speak for the website’s first three years of operation or whatever happened on the Yahoo group but under my watch there was never any zoophilic content hosted on Herpy. Ever. If there was a Bible to put my hand on right now I’d swear upon it, and if you’re going to be dismissive and secular about matters then that’s a statement I would swear on the lives of my parents and the graves of my grandparents. I’m that serious about it. Any time somebody posted photos or videos of actual bestiality, which did happen extremely rarely (once every couple of years or less), that person was permabanned, their email address was added to the autoban list, and their IP address less the fourth number (to create a simple range) was added to the site-wide blocklist to ensure they could not re-register with different credentials. Even if somebody posted a story but said it was a firsthand account we treated it in the exact same manner. We did not lend any consideration to appeals for bans given out for posting this kind of content.
Despite this, Herpy still had its reputation for a reason and that was because we did allow artistic & literary works that featured zoophilic relations. The justification for this at the time was that this was a “victimless” transaction, no animals or people were being harmed. We also allowed users to openly talk about their own personal fantasies regarding large reptiles and dinosaurs while also having a conversation about how and why acting on these urges in real life was a very bad idea. Myself, the moderators, and many of the community’s more established users were generally more than happy to explain the biology of reptiles and exactly why they are incompatible with mammalian/human mating habits. We were collectively very well read on reptilian anatomy and behavior; after all, this was the forum “for reptile lovers”. Some of us (not me) even had proper degrees from places of higher education in the field.
Today however I do not agree with the original logic behind permitting artistic depictions of bestiality. I understand now, and have for a very long time, that even merely allowing that kind of content and conversation still helps to normalize and possibly even glamorize the act. The argument we used at the time (“it’s victimless”) is verbatim the exact same defense people who consume lolicon media (hentai of underaged chracters) use. I get it now, but at a time when I wasn’t even old enough to buy alcohol this bullshit declaration made sense to me and I ran with it as policy.
I don’t really know what I’d do differently if I could go back in time, it’s a no-win situation. By merely existing we were in essence acting against the very message that I wanted the website to represent. My only real excuse is that it wasn’t my website, it existed long before I showed up and I was just the fall guy in the end. But like I said, that’s just an excuse. I guess if I could actually go back in time the correct answer would’ve been to never get involved in the first place and just let Herpy die on its own.
The year 2011 was unkind to me, to put it lightly. The complete story of what transpired in that window of twelve months is beyond the scope of this journal but the takeaway is that it defeated me completely. I gave up on Herpy. A close friend, whom I’d met through Herpy ironically enough, stayed in touch with me after he’d requested his account be deleted from the website. He saw through the facade and knew who I really was. More importantly however, he recognized that I was in serious trouble. As the calendar flipped to 2012 he was the anchor who kept me grounded while I tried focusing on rebuilding my life. I began the process of winding down my involvement in the furry fandom and as a result of this I brought on several moderators to supervise Herpy in my planned absence. Valcyrie was essentially my second-in-command and under her watch the exact same moderation principles that I’d put together continued to be carried out.
In 2012 I moved far away from my hometown to try and start over. I cleaned out my savings, rented a small apartment, and got a job at a bookstore. Though, I was not in a very healthy state of mind and I did not thrive in this situation. I wound up burning through everything I had. 2013 passed. 2014 came and went. 2015 did the same. I went from job to job failing to hold onto anything permanent. On New Year’s Eve 2015 I finally called my father, whom I hadn’t spoken to in years by that point, and broke down. Despite all the shit I’d put him and the rest of my family through he left with his truck and platform trailer as soon as the call ended and drove all the way to where I lived to help me pile as much of what I could onto it and drove it, and me, back to my hometown.
At no point during any of this mess was Herpy even remotely on my radar.
Near the end of 2015 Valcyrie noticed I was completely gone and my lack of any activity at all was worrisome. She reached out to check on me and I brought up the idea of her officially taking my place on Herpy, a role she was more than willing to accept. I trusted Valcyrie, and still do to this day. She is one of the most driven and compassionate people I’ve ever known, demonstrating that not everyone who was associated with Herpy was a bad apple. By this point in time literally nobody used or cared about the “fantasy” parts of the site anymore, they were a wasteland of inactivity with years-old threads languishing on the first page of results. Herpy had shifted to an otherkin and role-playing community for dragon fans in my absence, a completely legitimate community with absolutely zero investment in anything that could be construed as unsavory.
I spoke to Varka about handing the keys over to someone else and his response was that he and “his IT team” would “review Herpy and see what needed to be done to bring the website up to spec and have it running smoothly” (paraphrasing). A few days later, the website vanished. No reason was provided to me or anyone else. Varka’s public-facing reason however, which was used as Herpy’s landing page for a few months, was that there was “offensive content” that he didn’t agree with and wasn’t aware of because “the moderators were supposed to be dealing with it and they weren’t”. I’m paraphrasing here, but given everything I’ve written so far you know that statement is absolute bullshit. People openly called Varka out on it, too.
My personal take on the situation is that Valcyrie was a known defector of Bad Dragon and did not like Varka at all. She wasn’t the easy mark that I was all those years ago. With me wanting to leave the picture for good Varka realized that Herpy had run its course; he’d pumped it full of banner ads for Bad Dragon this whole time and by 2016 his business was booming. He didn’t need Herpy anymore and surely all the finger pointing and hearsay that was violently circling the website wasn’t worth dealing with. So, he killed Herpy and tried to sweep the whole thing under the rug by blaming the alleged “offensive content” on me and all the other moderators who worked around the clock to prevent exactly that kind of content from ever appearing on Herpy in the first place.
And that’s it, Herpy was gone. That should’ve been the end of this headache, but it wasn’t. Today things have sort of waned as nobody really seems to give a shit anymore but for a long while people would still dredge up Herpy as ammo to use against Varka and his companies. The only piece of evidence they really have is the “Animal Toys” thread I talked about earlier but all that really proves is that he’s kind of a gross person. That thread is the only capture of the website that actually preserves context, everything else floating around out there are screenshots that were very deliberate in what they show and were curated to tell a specific narrative that didn’t exist. Take for example the thread that was titled “Sex with alligators”. Surely you’ve seen the screenshot of that one, but just the title though as no actual content from this thread was archived because had that been done everyone would’ve seen that the entire discussion was people responding to the poster with information about how impractical and dangerous that is. Everyone was discouraging him. But including all of those posts wouldn’t fit the narrative that Varka is some evil mastermind who hosted a bestiality website. The thread was literally titled “Sex with alligators” and that’s all you’re shown, the assumption is you’re going to fill in the blanks with a much darker reality than what was really there because the verbose language creates a very easily replicated kneejerk reaction. The person or people who made those screenshots were very much aware of this.
The people who did all that cherry picking did a grave disservice to people like me because that kind of shit absolutely destroyed my reputation and invaded my personal life. These meticulously fabricated and untrue stories ruined the lives of normal people because so many assholes out there just want to see Varka fall no matter the cost and don’t give a shit about who they step on in order to achieve that goal. Who cares about collateral damage anyways? Varka got himself tangled up in a lot of stupid shit that paints himself in a very unkind light. There was no need to invent a narrative that he was stupid enough to run a bestiality website on the clearnet. If you can look at the litany of underhanded things this guy has supposedly done and be willing to handwave it all away unless he also ran a zoo website you might actually be retarded. “Activists” in the furry fandom have the stupidest priorities, I swear to god.
I’m not trying to defend Varka, by the way. He threw me under the bus the absolute nanosecond it became convenient to do so. I’m standing up for myself here. I realized I made a grave error in my youth and you know what? I got the hell out of there. I tried to make the best of of a bad situation because I felt this obligation to Herpy but I realized a long time ago when I was just starting the process of healing that so many of the bad things that happened to me could’ve been prevented by just telling someone “no”.
Immediately following the demise of the .net version of Herpy a secondary iteration of it came online at the domain herpy.nu. This was a forum that was created and hosted by Valcyrie in an effort to keep the community of dragonkin that had made the website their home together. I did not really play a role in the management of this forum, however I did have an administrative account on it because Valcyrie’s Herpy ran on phpBB software which was something I had a significant amount of experience with. I joined on in order to help her and the other mods learn how to use the software and after a few weeks of popping in every once in a while to answer questions and such I faded into the background once again.
After about a year, the forums at the .nu domain were taken offline as the ever present menace known as “entropy” (aka Discord) was eating away at online communities. There was a companion Discord server open alongside the forums but naturally the Discord sapped all of the activity from the website because most of the users wanted to role play and you could do that a lot more efficiently on Discord than you could on a message board. I was also a member of the Discord server, though I mostly only spectated. I quietly left around the same time I left Valcyrie’s forums, with no fanfare or anything like that. Just there one day, gone the next.
In the years that followed I started going through counseling and whatnot to help me work through the things I’d experienced and in that time I also started going to church and getting more involved with my community in an effort to find a more productive use of my time. It was a process, and I know for a while I was always on edge about certain topics and always looking over my shoulder online because there were occasions where people with bad intentions would approach and harass me to try and extort “dirt” on Varka and threaten to dox me or whatever.
I knew all of these people were full of hot air and were nothing to worry about; I was more concerned with “the experts” (Something Awful, lulz.net, Kiwi Farms, et. al.) though who’d eventually notice all the noise and start snooping around. I have had run-ins with several of them and managed to stay relatively damage invisible because, as you can probably guess, I never actually was up to any heinous shit. Every time someone looked into me they found a bunch of furry porn stories and that’s it. Part of me was always concerned with how far some of these places would go however to try and extract any sort of information. That’s what kept me up at night.
I also did not have a lot of trust in Varka and his team. Herpy was offline, yes, but it was also completely absent from every archival system out there. The only people at this point who had access to Herpy’s forum database were the Bad Dragon people. Not me, not Ethos, not anyone. I quickly developed this very profound (ir)rational paranoia that Varka could possibly “invent evidence” that painted me or anyone else in a negative light in order to keep the heat off of him should the need ever arise. He’d already demonstrated a willingness to outright lie on the farewell message that was briefly hosted on the website, so what was stopping him from directly modifying the database – bypassing all of the checks that put the “post last edited by (moderator) on (date)” message on modified posts – to rewrite or outright fabricate fake posts that looked real because they’d been created in a nonstandard manner using the site’s original MySQL data? It’s a difficult and very time consuming process but someone with the right level of database administrative know-how could hammer something like that out, especially if there were high stakes and an imperative to do so. If Varka or someone on his behalf did that and anonymously leaked them online there would be absolutely no way to refute or disprove the contents of the screenshots because it would effectively be my word versus an alleged screenshot of something I posted. No one would be able to tell it wasn’t real. I don’t think I can properly convey to you the very real fear I had about this scenario. It lasted for literal years.
Ethos, the guy who manned the Herpy gallery, felt slighted by Varka when everything fell apart in 2016. I really haven’t mentioned him much in this post, but he was probably the smartest guy involved with the website. Part of me always sort of felt like he was actually the “main guy” but just didn’t know enough about website hosting and all that crap to run the site himself so he was tethered to Varka out of necessity. When Herpy shut down Ethos lost all of his work. That gallery was his baby. He took that move very, very personally.
Unbeknownst to me Ethos was apparently a very “well connected” person in the online world. For a while he’d been suspicious of Varka because when Herpy first opened there was a specific problem with actual zoophiles showing up on the website and these were not people from the Yahoo group; Ethos did not recognize them. He put in a ridiculous amount of work tracing ledes and determined that at one point in time Varka, under a completely different pseudonym, maintained a presence on BeastForum. Unlike Herpy, that was an actual bestiality website. Ethos was able to figure this all out because while combing through what I can only imagine were hundreds if not thousands of archived links and samples of posts he found a very peculiar forum signature: “join my website: herpy.net”.
“My website”. Whoever had that message in their signature obviously had to be the person who called the shots, right? There were only two administrators at that time, and it wasn’t Ethos. He looked into the username of this person, whom he did not recognize at first, and went down a rabbit hole of posts about dragonkin stuff and personal anecdotes that gave a definite geographic location. I don’t think I need to elaborate on this any further, it’s obvious who the owner of that account was.
I remember Ethos showed me this massive write-up he’d made that walked you through every single step of the process he followed and included a lengthy foreword very similar to what I’ve written here about us not allowing zoo content on Herpy and working on various solutions to prevent that from being posted. It all clicked for me in an instant. The pieces fell into place.
It scared the absolute shit out of me. This whole time, this whole fucking time, the problem was right in front of us and we didn’t even know it. I panicked, and the very last thing I said to Ethos the last time he and I ever spoke was that he could never release that document because even though he went out of his way to also go into very fine detail regarding how everyone else on the site wasn’t involved with “that” I was terrified that this was going to be the powder keg that fucked everything up. I was just getting back on my feet again. I started having these flashbacks of being collateral damage again but a hundred times worse because we weren’t dealing with petty rumors and doctored screenshots, this was real. The day I decided to vanish from the furry fandom completely? This was the sole reason why.
I realize what I did was stupid, and I regret that. In the moment it felt like a matter of self-preservation. Perhaps someday that dissertation will see the light of day. I have no way of contacting Ethos anymore however, so I guess that’s where things end.
I don’t really have much else to say on this subject. I’d like to take a second to express my deepest apologies to Ethos, Valcyrie, and everyone else who worked with me on Herpy. We all thought it was a grand old time when it was happening and none of us knew what was hidden just beneath the surface. You all deserved so much better than what I was able to do in my dysfunctional capacity, and I am sorry. I truly am.
Hopefully my next post here won’t have to be as long, and maybe there can be some levity to it.