ZooVille

ZooVille Forum

New ZooVille logo
Forum home page as of Dec. 2025
Type of site	Community forum
Available in	6 languages
Founder(s)	ZTHorse
Industry	The Zoophile Community
URL	zoovilleforum.net
IPv6 support	No
User count	292,700+ (Dec. 2025)
Launched	February 19, 2019
Current status	Active

ZooVille is a zoophilia-focused online forum that opened on February 19, 2019 and is currently the largest public social web site for zoophiles in the world, with over 292,700 registered users as of December 20, 2025.

Origin

ZooVille's creation was instigated by the Beastforum announcement in January 2019 that it was preparing to shutdown operation. The primary founder is known as ZTHorse, with assistance from several other active posters at Beastforum who felt the need for a public zoophile forum to remain on the open web. The nascent moderation team soon opened private chat rooms on Beastforum to invite prominent users into the initial funding phase and to begin circulating the news of a safe space for zoophiles who were seeking a replacement forum to the membership there at-large. As that stage, it was identified using the working codename "Project Exodus."

Light theme forum logo

Project Exodus was considered to be complete once the initial startup funding goal had been achieved, domain name was registered (originally zooville.org, now zoovilleforum.net) and the web server brought online.

Social structure

The ZooVille moderation team holds that the high amount of censorship and strict rules that had been imposed at Beastforum were a source of harm to the social growth of the zoo community. They decided to recreate the basic category structure from Beastforum but made targeted modifications to allow for more freedom of expression, and intentionally relaxed the amount of moderation on "colorful" speech and divisive topics.

ZooVille promotes itself as a free speech commons, with tolerance for the open discussion of politics, religion and other polarizing, intersectional topics. Open dialog is welcomed by the moderation team, and encourages feedback and suggestions for policy modification directly from users.

User-created content policies

ZooVille's content posting policies are objectively more stringent than had been enforced at Beastforum, with strict guidelines and an anti-abuse policy regarding user-posted content.

The forum is friendly to content creators and permits the posting of multimedia content without any access restrictions beyond user registration. They previously allowed the direct monetization of zoophilic content by creators via cryptocurrencies, subject to the guidelines of their respective legal jurisdiction.

Assets and funding

ZooVille Forum is operated as a non-profit website, with operations funded through voluntary donations via cryptocurrency that are auditable by members and augmented via a single ad space. This provides transparency over the operating expenditures and informs the user base about the economics of operating the site.

There is no paywalled "VIP" members area or any exclusive sections of the site. The honorary title of "ZooVille Philanthropist" is given to those who donate at least US$50, but does not confer any special privileges beyond simple recognition.

Academic research participation

ZooVille is currently collaborating with researchers from two universities to produce research studies into zoophilia. Their first academic partner was Northwestern University, announced on June 17, 2020 and spearheaded by Michael J. Bailey, Ph.D. That was followed on September 16, 2020 by the launch of a study conducted by the University of Saskatchewan, headed by Alexandra Zidenberg under the oversight of professor Dr. Mark Olver.

September 2019 data leak

When the site first launched, it used the well-known vBulletin 5 forum software. When the site fell victim several months later to a then-undisclosed security exploit (known as a "zero-day" attack), the vBulletin user database became exposed and was exfiltrated by an unknown attacker. The same fate was suffered by many vBulletin-based web sites during the same time period, consistently resulting in similar data exposures. Later analysis concluded that the attack wasn't targeted towards ZooVille specifically, and to-date no extortion demands or other attempts to leverage the data have been directed at the moderation team. Those first eight months of operation using vBulletin from February to September 2019 have since been dubbed by several community members as the "ZooVille v1.0" phase (a reference to software versioning and more specifically early, untested releases).

Shortly after the security breach, ZooVille switched to using the Xenforo forum software. In the interests of member security, no records from the original database were migrated and all previous members were required to re-register using an encrypted email service. Other measures to increase overall security were also put into place at this time, including purging user IP addresses from the server logs on a regular basis, in the hopes of minimizing the attack surface surrounding user identity in the event of another data loss event.

External links

• Official website