The Therian Guide

The Therian Guide
Author(s)	DustWolf LycanTheory
Website	http://www.therian-guide.com
Status	Active
Launch date	May 23, 2010
Genre	kintype-specific

The Therian Guide is a website for therians, containing information on therianthropy. It contains a general introduction to therianthropy, articles about discovering that one is a therian and discovering one's theriotype, articles on shifting, FAQs, and a forum. The website was originally created by Euipoi.

History

The site was created on May 23, 2010, with the original forum being rebooted on May 15th, 2014.

Upon its reopening, the administrators were BlackWolf and DustWolf, although later BlackWolf left the community and DustWolf stepped down to be Tech Support, and LycanTheory and Calico were assigned as administrators.

On January 30th, 2016, Euipoi gave ownership of the site to DustWolf, who later shared ownership of the site with LycanTheory. The Therian Guide is currently the only online Therian community, owned by more than one person.

Guide

The Therian-Guide (www.therian-guide.com) is a website resource, with information regarding therianthropy, the basic concepts and frequently asked questions. The website was originally authored entirely by Euipoi, but has since seen revisions and corrections by the Therian Guide community, to bring it more in line with the common understanding of therianthropy.

The community staff have also looked to outside sources for criticism and additional information of the Guide.

Community

The Therian-Guide community (forums.therian-guide.com) is a forum platform with a live chat feature. It features a lively community of over a thousand different members. The community maintains a friendly, family-like atmosphere. To protect the privacy of the community members, a somewhat long-winded registration and introduction scheme is used, not every new user is granted access, but anyone seriously interested in therianthropy is more than welcome.

The forums do not allow children under the age of 13 to join. Members from 13 to 16 years old are given the same kind of access as older members, however they are visually marked to set them apart from the older members. This is a mechanism used to minimize drama.

The forums feature a positive reward system, that offers perks to active community contributors. Helpful long-term contributors are awarded stats to set them apart visually. The most helpful contributors have access to physical merchandise they can get free of charge.

Controversy

The administrators of The Therian Guide have installed the Private Message Log plugin for MyBB, written by Starpaul20, that allows administrators to view private messages sent on their board. The version of this plugin used on The Therian Guide has been modified to remove the default warning, "Any messages sent through this form will be logged and viewable to board administrators. Do not include any private information, financial information, or passwords in any messages sent", keeping only the second sentence: "Do not include any private information, financial information, or passwords in any messages sent". Naia Ōkami has accused The Therian Guide administrator DustWolf of using this function on at least one occasion to read Ōkami's PMs without a valid administrative reason to do so. Their evidence for this claim is a screenshot of server logs showing that a user with an IP matching DustWolf's country of origin visited their website, Kinmunity from the pmlog view page of the Therian Guide admin panel, indicating that DustWolf followed a link to Kinmunity that was contained in one of Ōkami's PMs.

On May 17, 2017, Naia Ōkami publicly accused LycanTheory of being a practicing zoosexual, who responded, in part, by threatening physical violence against Ōkami and arguing in favor of zoosexuality.