(Some) cons are growing too big, too fast.

Furry Weekend Atlanta (FWA) has had its biggest year yet now, with roughly 17,700 attendents this year. A select few furcons are growing at a rapid pace, and I’m getting increasingly concerned that nobody - either anyone running the con, people on the floor supporting the con, or even congoers themselves - is aware of the strain this is putting on the cons themselves, the community as a whole, and the growing public health risks that large cons present in general.

This is going to be a ranty, rambly post y’all, just so you know. There are many thoughts, many of which are disjoint from each other. I just want to collect everything into one place, that I may update over time (or just make long posts collecting a new batch of thoughts). And as a disclaimer, I am not at all familiar with con operations or the backend of any conventions beyond things I’ve heard from the occasionial con-ops folks on Bluesky and the Fediverse. I don’t have experience running anything like this, but I feel like it doesn’t take that kind of knowledge to realize the problems here.

Furcon Growth

I’ll leave a lot of the raw numbers and speculation up to Soatok’s great blog post from last year, where FWA had doubled in size between 2022 and 2024. The “too long; didn’t read” that’s relevant to me and my thoughts is the doubling rate - cons are growing too big, too fast, at a rate that I highly doubt is sustainable. Soatok had speculated that FWA would double in size in three years going off of a decade of growth, which includes the dip caused by COVID-19. While three data points is hardly anything to work off of, one con gaining ten thousand attendees in the span of three years raises some orange flags when it comes to how well they’re handling things. Nobody likes spending half of their con experience waiting in registration lines, or for the elevators, or for goddamn stairs.

So people rightfully complain about the lovingly named “line-con” and “elevator-con” that routinely happens at these large-scale furcons.

And yet, when people DO complain about line-con and elevator-con, especially when it comes to Furry Weekend Atlanta, folks bring up that the same and location and venue hosts Dragoncon - a week-long nerd convention covering all sorts of things that draws in roughly 70,000 people from all over. Surely Dragoncon is even worse than FWA in those aspects, right? Well, I don’t know if Dragoncon suffers from line-con and elevator-con (I imagine they do, but to what extent I don’t know), but here’s the thing: They have hundreds of volunteers to help make the convention happen. Allegedly around 1,500 people, per their website. I don’t know how many volunteers cons like FWA have to make things happen, but I have a pretty strong suspicion that it’s nowhere near enough.

Volunteer - and Staff - Burnout

I occasionally read some thread of ex-volunteers who got burnt out because of how much was asked of them at a con. At how much work they had to take on, or how many areas they were responsible for that they weren’t expecting. At how they loved making things happen, but volunteering was so much work that they couldn’t actually enjoy being at the convention itself. That’s how you burn people out from volunteering. I don’t know what all causes this burnout at various cons - it could just be understaffing, it could also be a lack of training or unclear direction from higher-ups - but whatever is going on is simply unsustainable, even without considering the rapid growth.

(aside: at least regarding specifically FWA, someone who was assisting a disabled person only ever got reliable information from actual con-staff; volunteers were not consistent sources of info. If you manage FWA, get your volunteer training up to snuff, because that’s unacceptable.)

I don’t think it would matter if huge conventions like AnthroCon, Furry Weekend Atlanta, or Midwest FurFest keep growing at the rates they are. They’re already big enough where their operations are getting strained, and the few people they have to make things happen are finding it difficult to keep volunteering because they spend their entire time working or recovering from the stress of being on the floor.

Hell, even people on the backend are struggling, as evidenced by FWA releasing a new virtual check-in system that promised to cut down on waiting in lines for all sorts of things. It failed miserably at that task, so it ended up being a massive “fuck you” to everyone who has struggles standing in lines. Imagine being on the (almost certainly miniscule) team that was responsible for setting that up. I can’t imagine seeing something that you’ve worked on - or partnered with - fail so miserably that it genuinely would’ve been better to have not tried. I have a gut feeling that this idea won’t be tried by any other furry megacon any time soon, after how poorly Furry Weekend Atlanta implemented it.

Perhaps it would have been better for a smaller con to give that system a try first, or to implement the virtual queue system in a more limited capacity to see what breaks it.

For conventions that keep burning out their volunteers, we live in an age where people can easily talk about their burnout, how bad it is, and how long it’s been a problem. People can talk about how they were brought on to help advise operations, but were dismissed because they suggested the bare minimum of changes to help things out. And so anyone who might otherwise volunteer for the convention, because it’s local to them and they want to help make it run, could see the stories of how things truly are from the view of people who do help out a convention, and they end up never volunteering as a result.

This creates an endless cycle of struggling to bring on volunteers, burning out the ones you do have over the years, their stories reaching people who might become volunteers, and then people end up not helping… which I’m certain you can see where this is going, because I’ve been beating this dead horse for this entire section.

We (the royal We) are not prepared to handle these kinds of conventions if we don’t change our attitude about managing them. We cannot have conventions with 17,000 attendees if they can’t be run like a convention with 17,000 attendees.

More conventions?

In Soatok’s excellent blog post, he mentions that there just isn’t the supply of additional conventions to - in my words - even out the load that large cons get. While I agree that more cons and more local events equals more better (and more accessible, more on that later), I don’t think that’s the right angle to view how to manage the strain of megacons on the community.

I doubt that any number of new cons or local events will slow down the growth of these large cons because - even ones as “small” as Anthro New England with “only” 5,000 attendees (or my local convention, Furlandia, which has also grown to around 5000 attendees) - are quickly becoming hot spots to go to. They’re places for folks to meet with friends from around the nation, or even around the globe. People who can’t go are experiencing FOMO in greater numbers because they can’t make it - for any number of reasons. Artists who rely on big conventions are finding it harder and harder to get in and make sales that they might’ve been able to rely on in years past. It’s less about the convention itself, and more about it being a large social gathering. It’s less celebration, and more destination.

(I’m going to be real, I’m not entirely sure what I mean by that, but hopefully you know what I mean by that. If you don’t, then we’re both lost.)

Even trying to spin up more virtual events - either general VR cons like Furality, or more “tailored” virtual events such as a massive TTRPG table session - might not help, because those aren’t the hot spots to meet folks in person. It might create more opportunities for folks in a general region to meet up, but it won’t diminish the scale that these megacons have to offer for people far and wide.

Whatever the hell Anthrocon is doing

This is going to be brief, but Anthrocon, in what I can only assume is an attempt to shrink the size of their growing fursuit parade, has decided to ban “poodling”, or showing any skin on your suit. They’ve also limited the number of handlers allowed in the parade, despite uh. Fursuit vision being VERY limited, and everyone realistically benefiting from more handlers involved.

I personally have no skin in this game, as I don’t even own a partial of any kind (though stay tuned for when I eventually build a custom synth head), but it’s sparked a lot of backlash for both how vague their new rules are, as well as outright banning a way for people to try and keep cool during a parade. That takes place in the middle of summer. Outside. Where it will be Very Hot.

There are some other… questionable changes - no flags, for one, which one can assume is to try and keep political flags out (or specifically Palestinian flags to show support) but is so vague that it could just be any flag they dislike - but those have nothing to do with the sheer size of the parade.

What I’ve heard some conventions do is to simply nix the fursuit parade, and greatly expand their block parties and group photos. It’s presumably easier to manage a larger block party than a parade, same with large-scale photos of every fursuiter who wants to be in it. Parades are difficult to handle - trust me, I’ve marched in plenty, they’re VERY difficult logistically - but they also bring in good press for Anthrocon. Some have suspected that them banning poodling is to try and appease to non-furries, which might be true, but also it might not be. We don’t know the decisions made, who all was involved in them, why they were made, how their logistics and con-ops changed to suit things, etc. Nobody can - or should - perscribe any meaning to their actions other than “hey that’s kinda fucked up.”

What’s next?

Ultimately, I don’t think there’s really a way to “solve” the problem of cons getting big. It’s not that megacons exist - there is definitely space for them in furry. It’s that they’re growing too fast, putting more strain on con-ops that they were already dealing with. We’ve seen how room lotteries work out when people all queue up for the site and immediately crash it. We’ve seen how poorly FWA’s virtual queue rolled out - to the point where people spent more time working with the queue system than if they just. Stood in a line. We’ve seen volunteers with insufficient knowledge - not even a “Hey, this is outside the con’s purview, but this is something the hotel/convention center handles, they’ll know this.”

Hell, even virtual conventions like Furality routinely break VRChat’s backend - not necessarily because their con is too big, but rather because the backend systems they rely on can’t handle the load that they bring on. VRChat brings in a ton of money from Furality year after year, but fails to make sure their backend - both their own systems, as well as the systems they themselves rely on - can handle the load that this growing virtual con brings.

I suppose that’s ultimately what my frustrations and concerns boil down to. The people and systems that “make the magic happen” are getting overloaded year after year. They’re both trying to do what they can, yet also occasionally making nonsensical choices to try and improve things - or actively do things that make the con experience worse in some way.

I don’t know, this is all rambly and ranty and I have absolutely no experience on any relevant front. This is me just shitting stuff out and hoping I’m at least kind of on to something, and that maybe. Just maybe. Folks who have actual influence with con-ops are able to make meaningful changes to improve the experience for their rapidly growing conventions.