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Tay

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Posts posted by Tay

    Forums Updates and Emi as Admin

    in Community Coordination and Feedback

    Posted

    Good morning everybody,

    Tonight I'm planning on finishing the update process for the forums (including all themes) as well as finalizing some back-end sharing necessary for Emi to take over my admin duties. I'm still alive and around, paying for the site (etc.), but enough is enough and this is what needs to happen. 

    I'll post later today with more definite hours/timezones for the update, and will hop on Discord closer to the appointed FuwApocalypse hour.

    Much < 3,
    Tay

    9/14 Forums Software Update (Cancelled)

    in Community Coordination and Feedback

    Posted

    Forums update will be installed tonight at 8:30 PM EST. Weird time, I know, but c’est la vie.

    IPB 4.5.2 Stuff copy-pasted from Invision:

    Major New Features / Enhancements

    - New Front-End Design
    - AdminCP Dark Mode
    - Site Statistics, Search Insights, and Club Statistics
    - Marketplace now built into the AdminCP
    - Mobile App for iOS and Android (Beta)
    - Zapier Integration for Invision Cloud Communities

     

    UPDATE: Delaying update until the theme developer updates our themes. The update went fine, but 4.5 has a few rather large changes behind the scenes and our 4.4 themes aren't going to cut it. Rolled everything back to how it was pre-update. Shouldn't be too long before they're updated and we can try again.

    8/13 Forums Update - Bugs/Complaints Here

    in Community Coordination and Feedback

    Posted

    On 8/14/2020 at 8:02 AM, Dreamysyu said:

    If I remember correctly, I believe the previous version used to show what the title of the next unread topic was. Is there any way to return that?

    23 hours ago, Mr Poltroon said:

    This is my most used feature, so I'm @ing @Tay.

    Invision killed the feature. Link: https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/451296-next-unread-topic/?do=findComment&comment=2788500

    I messaged them to see if there was a way for us to restore the functionality.

    8/13 Forums Update - Bugs/Complaints Here

    in Community Coordination and Feedback

    Posted

    12 hours ago, Dergonu said:

    If the backer status is no longer a thing, maybe we could make this a post count goal, similar to custom titles. Incentivize people to post more to get the cool stuff. 

    (Regarding profile customization previously locked behind backer status) I imagine this will roll out to everybody soon. Backer contributions were very helpful for a while, but the donation system is largely gone right now (save those who are still willing to contribute on PayPal) and I know people want those sweet, sweet profile customization options.

    11 hours ago, onorub said:

    I gotta say, when the last update happened (at beginning of the year i think?) this site would eat up my google chrome memory and make the site laggy for some reason, specially in blog posts with lots of pictures. I was too lazy to report it and just began to post less instead, but it seems the site became smooth again. Good job!

    Glad to hear it! Any performance issues anyone has, at all, please report!

    (And report it here, not in Discord, as it's easier for an old guy like me to track)

    11 hours ago, Dreamysyu said:

    If I remember correctly, I believe the previous version used to show what the title of the next unread topic was. Is there any way to return that?

    May be a caching issue, or may be intentional from Invision. We'll know in twelve hours or so if it's a cron job that hasn't completed or if it's built into IPB. If I haven't written back about this, specifically, tomorrow, re-post and bug me about it until I do.

    8/13 Forums Update - Bugs/Complaints Here

    in Community Coordination and Feedback

    Posted

    Test this stuff and tell me how bad I broke things
    ===========================

    • Avatars. Shape and size okay on your theme?
    • Resizing windows on your favorite theme
    • Sidebars look okay?
    • Fixed Google+ for Fiddle
    • Deleted Rooke's theme with extreme prejudice
    • If you use the dark-dark theme (Infinite Stomach v7) how badly do you hate the animated header? And how much do you hate its height? Would you prefer it be skinnier and static?


    New Features I Care About Enough to Mention
    ===========================

    • Admin CP notifications
    • Email fixes
    • SEO improvements
    • Lazy loading of images to speed up page rendering
    • More email preferences options
    • Clubs are now fixed. Are we even using clubs? I meant to, but I don't think it ever too off.


    Possible Features I don't plan on activating
    ===========================


    Things I need to Activate But Might Forget
    ===========================

    • Giphy key > com enhance in acp (but only if you guys want giphy)
    • New SEO features


    Bugs Fixed
    ===========================

    • Lots
    • And Lots

     

     

    Note to anyone with access to ACP: haven't purged the old themes, yet, because I want to check some CSS stuff. But don't re-activate them or enable their use, it'll break stuff.

    Meta - Fall 2020 Site Chat

    in Community Coordination and Feedback

    Posted

    Hi everybody. My name is Tay. I’m the site admin, and I’m writing this post to share a few thoughts and to apologize for what has been a very difficult period for the site (and many of us in the real world, myself included). Please note that I am actively working on the site today (01:26 update: currently waiting on Nayleen’s help on a mysql issue that I don’t know how to solve) and will be available in this thread and on Discord throughout the day.

     

    Why did you disappear?

    I was overwhelmed by real-world responsibilities and the real-world issues affecting the site. I feel deeply that it’s my responsibility to keep an appropriate baseline amount of support (server, forums fees, forums UI theme subscriptions, front site plugin subscriptions), and have mostly done so, but not being here in a full, active manner means that I was unaware of even large issues, such as Invision losing my auto-pay details. I feel really bad, guys. I'm sorry.

     

    Why didn’t you more proactively pass along the keys to other community members instead of just ghosting us?

    Dropping torrents caused hundreds of real-world issues that made a site hand-off – even partially – unconscionable until resolved. It makes me happy that they feel like an ancient memory to most of you, but they have been my lived reality for a long time. Only this summer did that chapter fully come to a close. Fuwa is in the clear, for what it’s worth, and for the first time I feel like I have options.

     

    What the &$% is going on with site/forums updates?

    I’m working to fix some issues in how I access the various databases on the server. Once that’s fixed everything will be updated and troubleshooted. It’s going to be another Fuwapocalypse. But it’s gotta be done. I give you my word that, so long as I can get @Nayleen’s help, this will be done by week’s end.

    As regards the forms, specifically, Invision, the software company who made our forums software, deleted the auto-pay credentials I’d given them and the software license lapsed for several months. It’s been renewed and everything will be updated as soon as I get Nay’s assistance and make a bunch of meticulous backups.

     

    What is your plan for Fuwanovel going forward?

    It may not be appropriate for that to be my call. I need to touch base with all the core users still active and sort out what’s best. I love Fuwanovel. It’s been a work of love spanning more than ten thousand hours (and much more than that in dollars). But my focus and passion -- help bring visual novels into the wider gaming community – has been realized.  I’ve been fortunate enough to facilitate or be part of some major, tectonic shifts in the industry. It’s a different world and I am likely not the best equipped to pick a direction. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.

    What I’m confident about, however, is that the way I went about building Fuwa, while successful, is unsustainable. Palas put it incredibly well last month:

    On 7/9/2020 at 8:04 PM, Palas said:

    Speaking as someone who disappeared as well - and feel horrible about it, because I was involved with what I believe were the coolest projects Fuwa has ever had - I can say Fuwa's model is very, very exhausting. It's like running a business, but without, well, the business. The main site has to attract viewers and then retain viewership enough to have them interested in becoming part of the community. That, or the community has to be attractive in itself by virtue of being helpful or productive.

    Torrents brought a TON of viewers, so low retention rates weren't a problem. Without them, the only alternative was to make much more engaging content. VNTS, Reviews, articles and the reommendation site were all incredible efforts, but engagement didn't improve all that much, while the effort increased exponentially for everyone involved. So everyone I guess just kind of... burn out? And I mean, BunnyAdvocate is an absolute genius, right.

    Social media have a lot of advantage over forums on that, really. People can still be around even if they don't participate as much in a specific community anymore. Forums can be difficult to navigate, compared to -- say -- Reddit. People come and go, but joining a community this way when there are so many easier ways to do it nowadays is increasingly counterintuitive, and fostering a community made of people who take counterintuitive actions is an uphill battle.

     

    “It’s like running a business, but without, well, the business.” Perfectly said. For better or worse, I’m wholly or largely responsible for the projects he highlights: enormous and technical VNTS posts which took two people 5 or so hours to do every Friday night, an ambitious reviews hub scouring VN reviews from across the net, a VN reviews team, forums projects, etc.

    A lot of what I did on Fuwa amounted to spending ungodly amounts of time watching trends in both the industry and site traffic and building ideas around what I thought would bring interest to the community and the VN player base. It worked well: we had huge traffic and played an important role in bringing VNs out of obscurity. But the lived reality was often me researching, designing and proposing these projects, and asking others to step up and either run or contribute to them without compensation. We’d have people putting in 20 hours a week, some weeks, on top of core admin staff working 30-40 hours weekly, and it STILL wasn’t enough. Most pitched in because we liked the cause, and liked hanging out with each other, and liked the dopamine rush of user engagement. Some did it because I asked them. And some did it because they felt like they had to. I’m still working on pulling apart my feelings on this issue.

    I don’t know how to fix this part of being a fan site. I do know that it is wrong to ask so much of members without paying them. Fuwa has never made money and I was never able to pay for help. This isn’t going to change anytime soon, so any new site reality is going to have to take into account the need for a lessened human cost.

     

    Anything else you want to say?

    Tons. But that’s good for now. I’m spamming Nayleen on all the usual channels and mostly just want to get the site fully updated. We can chew on the site’s existential questions in the meantime.

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