LinovaA

Contents of this Update:
1. Introduction 2. Site analytics 3. Abbreviated financial report 4. Loligeddon feedback survey 5. Commentary from Tay       ----------------------------------- 1. Introduction   I hope the information in this community update is both useful and interesting to those of you who want to keep a finger on Fuwa’s pulse. This report may not look like a lot, but it took a lot of time to compile (especially trying to compensate for an analytics bug which I’m incapable of fixing myself). Now that it’s done, I’m already noticing things I should have included but forgot. Just remind me of questions you have in the thread below, and I’ll try to reply to everything.   - Tay     ----------------------------------- 2. Site analytics   A few weeks ago we started paying for a second, small server to host our analytics software. There’s a bug in the software which makes it difficult to get hard numbers for the past few weeks, but I think I found a clever work-around. Here are the numbers as best as I'm able to find:    Front site: 4-5k unique visitors a day and something like 7-8k daily hits
  Fuwazette Blog: Weekdays: 1.7k unique visitors (average); Weekends: 2-4k unique visitors per day following VNTS posts
  Forums: 6-10k unique visitors a day, 11-15k hits per day
  Reviews Hub: 40-60 unique visitors a day; each time a FuwaReviews review goes up, it spikes to several hundred uniques per day for several days
  VNTL-Moon: ~60 unique visitors a day, ~100 hits     ----------------------------------- 3. Abbreviated Financial report   Many members have been extremely generous with their donations, and from the bottom of my heart I want to say THANK YOU. All donated site funds have been put directly towards site costs: I’ve saved up a 3 month rainy day fund (split between donations and my personal funds) We’ve had one full round of software license fees We paid $100 past site debts Put aside funds for new Reviews Hub theme $70 spent on developing an articles hub site which ended up being extremely unsecure and ex’d by Nayleen (Maef and I were SO CLOSE). $40 of the $70 came from saved-up donation funds. Free: The feeling you get flirting with Flutterz or getting clever ideas in a PM from Eclipsed Free: #Renenvy   ----------------------------------- 4. Feedback Survey: Loli Policy   I promised Sanah a follow-up survey about Loligeddon, and haven’t been able to follow-up until now (well, technically, a bit later in October). If you’d like to give feedback on the Loli policies, have suggestions for changing them, or have something you want to tell me, here’s the link:   https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Yp2ADO3AROV7LvQ3mS47g0sINkFn-OEaPRPf6ZHzsqE/viewform?usp=send_form    Any proposed changes will be considered with our law maester when I next talk to him. There’s an option to include your forums username and be added to a follow-up roundatable discussion (space is limited) once that occurs.     ----------------------------------- 5. Commentary from Tay   Commentary on Analytics: It may come as a surprise to some that this quarterly update is the first time I’ve officially opened our analytics numbers to the public (Nay’s done it in the past, but always on his own impetus). This coincides with a decision to make the front site open-source and seek help from a much larger coding pool than before. These may be small steps, but they’re meaningful and I hope they’ll represent the seeds for yet more transparency in the future.   So. Let’s talk about these numbers. The big-picture take-home message is that Fuwa has continued to grow in the four(ish) months since our last analytics report. I’m a big data nerd who likes to try to use big-boy statistics (and, inevitably, breaks something and needs a math genius friend’s help), so here are a few other trends: Users are spending a lot more time, on average, in the Visual Novel and Dev/Translation boards. Almost twice as much time as they were in March 2015 Walkthroughs are still a huge draw New members are, literally, about nine times more likely to go to the dev boards than they were in March 2015 (within their first week on the boards). They’re about six times more likely to regularly go there afterwards. The amount of VN-centric sites linking to Fuwanovel has increased a tremendous amount. Like, a seriously crazy amount. Several times more links to us from other VN communities than in March 2015 (I didn’t do any hard numbers for this, though, since I only thought to check it right before posting this. Apologies.) Tay’s daily hatemail has decreased by several hundred percent since March 2015 The blog’s popularity on VNTS days has increased by about 45% since July. The front site’s traffic has decreased somewhere between 20-40% since pre-torrents, but the other sites have maintained solid, steady growth Daily user registrations on all the various sites are still a horrible approximation for traffic and engagement Autoposting is the bomb Our Google+ page is a lonely, lonely place, but I met a few really nice people on there who have since become friends. So… yay. Google+ did something good. The reviews hub traffic has continued to steadily grow. It’s not a steep growth, but it’s steady. The traffic spikes for FuwaReviews official reviews are higher than ever and they last for longer than the used to, as well. Our new anti-spam-user software is doing fairly well, which is great     Commentary on Site Finances: I just wanted to thank everyone who has generously donated to the site. As soon as I can get Nay’s help with an authentication library (or something like that), I’ve got a slick new donations app which will automate the donation process and make sure you get your goodies instantly.     Commentary on Site Leadership: Fuwanovel is an important part of my life. I’ve learned a lot over the years from building and running this place, and many of the most important lessons I’ve learned came from making mistakes or falling short of goals and deadlines. I’d like to open up a bit and share a bit of vulnerability on two such shortcomings.   I’d like to publicly apologize for my inconsistent presence in the community. I have not been able to give the site everything it’s needed, and I want everyone to know that I recognize it. Beyond being busy in general, I’ve had a truly bizarre amount of freak accidents or tropical storms or RL craziness mess up my genuinely well-meaning plans time and time again. I’m not trying to make excuses, I’m more or less just trying to express that I’m likely as frustrated as you with the lack of progress in certain site projects. I have plans burning in my brain for where we need to go and what we need to do in order to get there, and at times I, too, get a little burned out and discouraged when I see the discrepancy between where we are and where we need to be.   Secondly, I’d like to apologize to the dozens of friends who have spent hundreds of hours participating and working on the site who don't feel adequately appreciated. In the real world I make a real effort to reach out to and thank the people I work with for their good work. It’s an important part of being a leader, and it’s an important part of being a friend. I am disappointed when I review my track record for tracking and recognizing all the work done by so many great people on this site. When I get "Fuwa time", I tend to jump in and do work on the site without taking time to check in with everybody. I want to improve in this department, and I hope you'll help me as I try to do better.   As far as site leadership goes, only one other thing to discuss: adding another (/more) admin(s). This is something I feel like I’ve discussed so many times I worry that you all think I’m a broken record. I’ll be the first to agree that we need to spread the autonomy around. The way this works at the moment is that all the different parts of Fuwanovel have a dedicated leader who has the autonomy to run their project within a pre-agreed upon framework that she/he and I set at the beginning of the quarter (or year, depending on the project). It’s not a perfect system – in many ways because this is a hobby site, not a paying job, and I’m fairly adamant that people keep Fuwa in a healthy balance and not burn out – but it’s also not too bad.    Judging from recent posts as well as more than a few a hellaton PMs and emails, many people disagree with me on two fronts: the forums and the front site. I’ll tackle each of those below.       Commentary on the Forums: I’m quite happy with the trends I’m seeing in the analytics. I like to think that the improved engagement of new members with the VN and Dev boards heralds the wider change of userbase from torrent-seekers to VN-community-seekers. Even if that’s not true, VN engagement is higher than it was earlier this year, and traffic is still robust.   I’m still embarrassed and frustrated about the forums’ sidebar formatting. I spent an hour last week trying to figure out what I needed to do to fix it, but I can’t find my old notes anywhere. I’ve reached out to Nay about this and other things, of course, and I really hope I can get this fixed for you soon.   Earlier this quarter Sanah and I had some great discussions about the limitations of the current blog app and how we might provide a better blogging platform for users. At the moment I’m still waiting to see how the upcoming IPB 4 forums’ software upgrade feels for our bloggers. Sanah eventually opted to start his own blog and use the Fuwa app to drive readers to his new location. That’s, obviously, fantastic, since my goal with the blogs app has always been to give people a platform and help drive VN fans to them. So, what I’m getting at here is that if the IPB 4 upgrade is poorly received, I’m up to the challenge of finding a way to host a blogging platform if need be. Hopefully it won’t come to that, but the blog authors need to know, at the very least, that we’ll do our best to take care of them.   Not going to write any more about Loligeddon. Go take the survey if you want to share your views and/or propose policy changes. I will personally review all the entries.   Quite a few people have asked me to add a forums admin who would be in charge of both moderation and engagement. I’m skeptical of the idea due to past experience, but it’s brought up enough that I’m willing to open the door to feedback. Would you like me to make a survey about the forums experience and include a field for you to write desired forums organizational/leadership changes?       Commentary on the Front Site: Here’s the situation: we’ve committed to the open-source plan, but I’m not technical enough to make sure that’s set up or manage the various software forks that will result. Nayleen, our webmaster, has been traveling and working and dealing with craziness and thus hasn’t been around lately, but as far as I’m aware he’s sticking with us. Which is a good thing: the man’s a genius.    Back in August Nay and I realized that the plans we had for the front site were too ambitious to try and bite off all at once, so we decided to scale-back the initial launch plans and simply try and get a basic redesign up and running (using a lot of the old code under the hood) which would then be improved bit-by-bit over the next few months. This was poorly communicated to the design team, and Emi and Beato deserve an apology. Furthermore, that scaled-back version is still not up and running. Which is frustrating. It isn’t something I or a novice coder can address, however, since the front site is written with multiple coding languages.    The critical bottlenecks are currently: open development onto git (or wherever) (which Nay has already done to some extent), finalize the database structure so the other coders can know how it’s structured, roll out the design update with or without an underlying total code revamp, tackle each module one at a time thereafter. (Maef and I have been working on the articles and team builder concepts, and I think they’re going to be pretty great.)   After the bottlenecks are addressed and the rest of the design timeline is sorted out, Nay, maef and I will be posting some more information on the rest of the evil plans.       Conclusion Thank you for reading this post and for being a part of this community. I’m dedicated to keeping the site alive and improving it (even if by uneven pacing), and having friends and fellow fans like you makes the effort worth it.   Tay

Common cold = Masturbation confirmed.
 
Which means I have been masturbating for like five days straight. (´・ω・`)

Confession:  I've been having a cold for about a few days now.
 
I'd hope this masturbation analogy isn't true because it would be quite awkward explaining how I masturbated while at a birthday dinner with my parents.

Common cold = Masturbation confirmed.
 
Which means I have been masturbating for like five days straight. (´・ω・`)

Common cold = Masturbation confirmed.
 
Which means I have been masturbating for like five days straight. (´・ω・`)

I have a cold, which means I have trouble breathing, every movement is tiring me out and there is way too much slime inside me. That's almost like sex.

Thanks, sanah, for taking the time to write up your thoughts.
 
For those posting after me: for the sake of maintaining some semblance of focus in this thread, let's hold off discussing the Loligeddon issue until the survey is complete. If you want to post your responses here after taking the survey, that's fine, but let's try to keep discussion focused on the other parts of the update for now. I plan on keeping the survey open for ~a week.

Sorry, I can only love 2D women.

I'm a simple man and i don't set my standard too high, as long as this
 



is in the anime, i would be happy

Ah, a sense of community, that's a tricky business. I hope you don't mind if I ramble for a moment or two .
 
I remember talking with quite a few people about group friendships, and feeling sad about people going their separate ways and how you deal with it, how you stay together, and etc etc. The fact of the matter is this - if a group of people only comes together to have fun and talk about hobbies, muck around, share a laugh, play a game or two, then that group of people will always split apart at some point in the future. The bonds forged between these people are too superficial to withstand any tension, or any semi-serious inconvenience. Let me quote a story from Jeremy Clarkson's past:
 
"Back in the eighties I spent pretty well every saturday night with the same group of freind's in a King's Road basement bar in Kennedy's We laughed all the time, we went on stage with the band, we sang, we drank ourselves daft and we knew, with the sure-fire certainty that night will follow day, that we'd be mates forever.
 
Had one of them been accused of gouging the barman's eye out with a lawnmower, I'd have told the police I was dead at the time and that I knew nothing. I would even have taken the heat on his behalf, had push come to shove. Which would have made me feel awfully foolish today because I have no idea where two of those friends are, and, for the life of me, I cannot even remember what the third one was called.
 
How did this happen? Presumably, when I said goodbye for the last time ever, I really did believe I'd be seeing them all again the following weekend. It wasn't like we'd had a row, or that they'd all grown beards or moved to Kathmandu. We just went home and never saw one another again.
 
And this happens all the time. I went throug my address book earlier and there are countless hundred of people, friends, muckers, soul mates and former colleagues who I never see."
 
This indeed happens all the time. You’re friends with somebody when you’re 15, but when you’re 20 you suddenly meet up and find you no longer have anything in common. And the depth of the bond between you two isn’t strong enough to overcome this. Or you suddenly got busy, and you’re too tired to want to do anything, whether you continue to stay in touch will depend on the strength of that bond between the two of you. That is to say, is your friendship real or do you just meet up to whack out a rounds of Persona Arena at the local arcade every day? Because if it's the latter, then the slightest inconvenience or hardship will snap that friendship and chances are you won't even regret it breaking. Similarly, your forum games sometimes involve a bit of work and if bonds aren’t strong enough or incentives aren’t there for people to want to withstand that, then people won't participate.
 
This brings me rather round-aboutly to my point (‘round-aboutly’ is a word… now *shifty eyes*.) You’re an exceptional entertainer, Ren, but you don’t build a sense of community through a mutual sense of having a good time, a community is built upon very real and deep bonds.  I understand where you’re coming from though, the Members Lounge was supposed to be a place where members of the community could share real parts of their lives with other members, because this act of sharing is one of the ways people bond and grow close to one another. It was supposed to foster a sense of community before it failed spectacularly and hilariously, so that idea was my one attempt at that. You can’t shove a sense of community down people’s throats, so… not much you can do. This is kinda where I say ‘that’s life’, then I laugh nervously, give you a hearty whack on the shoulder, and offer you a strong drink . 
 
Anyway, Fuwa is surviving by being a place where people can come and talk about Visual Novels. So we may not be a close knit community, but it’s a place where people can relax and talk about common interests, or participate in projects, in a non-judgemental and respectful atmosphere. And maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe that's all it needs to be for now. Maybe it will be something more in the future.

If you were to lower yourself to my standard, then all Key VN adaptations were good.

Kimi to kanojo to kanojo no koi

Confession: simple plan is literally the worst band

*begins the summoning ritual for Ayana*
*places a slab of butter in the middle of the circle*
 
I wish I knew, as I really do like that opening guitar riff. Hell, I like the whole opening. xD

*begins the summoning ritual for Ayana*
*places a slab of butter in the middle of the circle*
 
I wish I knew, as I really do like that opening guitar riff. Hell, I like the whole opening. xD

Confession: I am officially back into League of Legends now.
 
Confession 2: After this year long break, I came back at a significantly lower skill level than I was before. I need brush up on my skills so I can actually do shit. xD

He speaks in dank memes, which transcends conventional languages.

He speaks in dank memes, which transcends conventional languages.

He speaks in dank memes, which transcends conventional languages.

He speaks in dank memes, which transcends conventional languages.

He speaks in dank memes, which transcends conventional languages.

He speaks in dank memes, which transcends conventional languages.