I have some con drama stories to tell regarding a smaller furry con called Furpocalypse. Nothing that really compares to Rainfurrest 2015, but things I wanted to share anyway.
Furpocalypse 2014
Furpocalypse started out as FurFright in 2003, hosted during Halloween weekend in various places around Connecticut, but spent the last years of its existence at the Crowne Plaza (which would later become the Radisson, and most recently the Red Lion Inn) in Cromwell, Connecticut. A few months after the end of FurFright 2013 they announced that the convention wouldn't be coming back in 2014 due to staff going through personal problems. According to a conversion I had with a current staff member the founders (Belic Bear and Ky'gra Lion) were going through a divorce and didn't want to be around each other.
Fast forward to the beginning of 2014, former FurFright staff members announce that FurFright would be coming back to the Crowne Plaza as Furpocalypse. Most people were happy to see it coming back, but a small number of furries were mad they were going on without the original founders under a new name, and planned a protest. So on the first night of the convention, about 4 people stood outside holding up signs complaining about the name and staff change. The convention went on as planned, and the only thing the protests accomplished was making the 7chan Anthrocon raid look like the Rodney King riots in comparison.
As an aside, I should mention that Belic returned to Furpocalypse as director of registration a few years later, while Ky'gra went on to found TinyPawsCon, which is notable for inviting hack "journalist" and public murrsuiter Dog Patch Press to be a guest of honor in 2018 despite advertising itself as a family friendly, all ages convention.
Furpocalypse 2017
One of changes that came about with the rebranding was different yearly themes. During the FurFright days they stuck with a generic zombie horror theme pretty much every year, but from 2014 on they changed up every year's theme while staying horror based.
For 2017 they announced that the theme would be haunted sanitarium. A fairly standard horror scenario. But some furries, being the reactionary creatures they are, decided to complain that the theme was offensive to people with mental illness, despite the fact that the theme would only affect the con book and con t-shirt designs. To be fair, this wasn't the majority opinion. Most people understood that the haunted psych ward trope comes from a time when psych wards were horrific places. To power level a bit, I've checked myself into a psych ward twice and the worst thing I had to deal with was an older patient who had no concept of personal space. The people who were taking offense to a decades old horror trope were loud enough that from 2018 on the convention decided to put a sight horror spin on more generic themes.
Furpocalypse 2019
And now, for a refreshing change of pace, a convention that was a disaster due to hotel management being incompetent. Furpocalypse, in its later years, gained a reputation for being a dirty convention. Not due to the attendees, though there would occasionally be your standard run in with a furry who had less than ideal personal grooming standards. This was due to lax hotel upkeep, and in 2019 they brought that standard to a new low.
For starters, a number of people who booked rooms with 2 queen sized beds were downgraded to rooms with a single king sized bed, due to these rooms having a black mold infestation. The real issue is that the people who had their rooms downgraded weren't informed until they checked in. But that's only the start of the problems with the rooms. Some were saunas due to broken air conditioners, and at least one air conditioner was useless due to our old friend black mold. Some rooms had mushrooms growing in the bathrooms. One room had a cockroach hanging out on the door. The worst room had a leak in the roof, right over the room's one bed, making it completely useless.
The leaky roof didn't end with that one room. Most notably, they had to move the con ops desk because the roof was leaking over it, and they had to cancel the Friday night movie at the pool due to the roof leaking over the projector screen. The pool was also useless, due to, you guessed it, a colony of black mold at the bottom of it.
So how did it get so bad? I'm assuming it's because 2019 was the last year Furpocalypse would be in Cromwell. Hotel management, knowing the convention was moving to Stamford in 2020, most likely decided that, since they already had their money and the convention wasn't coming back, they didn't care that the hotel was a giant health code violation. Predictably, people demanded refunds and the hotel for review bombed by angry attendees on Google. As of now, Furpocalypse 2020 has yet to be cancelled due to coronavirus, and the Red Lion in Cromwell has been out of business since January 2020, when the Connecticut Department of Revenue and Services revoked their sales and use tax license.