Tay

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

(Thanks for the great post, Ren, and for everyone else who has posted. I've got a community update post half-done somewhere in OneNote I wrote last week. I'll go finish it and put it up on the community board so y'all have the latest to continue this discussion) (It's neither easy nor fun to read through these sorts of posts, but I genuinely appreciate them and all the time you all have taken to share your thoughts.)

Sorry for this (yet another) temporary post: I'm crawling back to the US baby step by baby step after an unexpectedly prolonged research trip. Apologies if you've been trying to get a hold of me and haven't had much success. Let's just say the ferries from island to island out here are really bad. Anyway. I'll go in and out of internet coverage for most of tonight and tomorrow. After that I should be back to a semi-normal schedule: check-ins to the forums and email for action items during lunch, and an hour of strict Fuwa work at 8-9 PM EST. If you need to get a hold of me, email and Skype are the best options. Thanks, everybody!

Hello and welcome Nao : ) Sanah's overview of the Western VN world was very good -- make sure you file that away for future reference. This site, Fuwanovel, is mostly geared towards fan community around visual novels (VNs). It's maintained a steady growth for the last three years and if at some point you want some help learning how to engage site users I'd be happy to send you a guide I wrote. As far as the business side of the Western VN world goes: I'm not associated with the other companies, but I know a lot of people in all of the big companies and communities. If you need help making contact with someone, or want some help figuring out who to contact, let me know, alright? I'm happy to answer any questions or help : ). In any case, welcome to Fuwa! Glad you're here : )

Update (9/7/15 8:52PM EST): Quick-links are back up for all themes FuwaFabulous and Gravity Green have gotten basic feeds back up on the sidebar. I don't have the corrected CSS on me, and I'm still waiting to talk to Nay and see if we want to just do the upgrade to IPB 4.x before I try and dig out the old, corrected code I'm going to see if I can add some feeds to the Dark Theme which won't blind you with huge blocks of white BG. They may be hecka ugly, but I guess we'll find out. Fixed the reviews hub bug for those who got stuck on old reviews Gave my cat many luvs

Yep, I already took them off. They were re-added due to a code remnant, not by me. Working on the dark theme right now.

Update: Favicon should be back. (Press Ctrl+R and it should refresh it)

I thought I'd be able to get a hold of Nay by now. I'll go put temporary stuff up in the meantime. Sorry for the delay, everybody.

Well, here's hoping the IPB 4 version can deliver you poor souls into the light of squiggly tildes.

Wow, they look great!

They work for me? Anyone else not seeing them correctly?

I put the awards link back up, but we've actually got to talk about that. I'll send you an email.

Please Note (8:16 PM EST): I haven't done any work to restore the forum index sidebars yet because I'm waiting to first confer with Nay. If the conversion software is, indeed, fixed, it may be worth it to just upgrade to IPB 4 this weekend and get it over with. (The apps in IPB 4.x work much differently than 3.x, so whenever we do the upgrade I'll need to put in time re-doing everything) If today's loss means I have to re-do all the forums customizations anyway, my thinking is that we might as well just bite the bullet and avoid having to do this again a few weeks down the road. All that said: I did a full backup (one for the database, one for files) of the forums before touching anything today. Worst case scenario is we roll-back the forums (and only the forums) tomorrow and lose ~12 hours of content.

Yeah, I'm working on it. Civilian causalities and all that...

Ok And yeah, I saw the sidebar is gone. Workin on it!

Unfortunately it appears all of my maintenance went as-planned and the forums will live to see another day. In any event, if you run into bugs in the software, report them here, please!

So true. Which is why I invented... the ultimate cat deterrent!

Update (1:09 AM): Fixed a typo in the Reviews Hub code which caused mass chaos (it made links to original sources look wrong) Overhauled the Reviews Hub "Find a Review" page Decided Rooke is, indeed, the devil and I must stand strong against his fiery darts (read: I'm going to stick with tags = game titles on the Reviews Hub, but change the way the software searches and displays tags) Came up with two blog-based options for the articles site project which I'll need to share with maef Still having trouble connecting to the site which is limiting my ability to work on stuff like ^. Someday Nayleen will come and rescue me... One idea for the articles project was to use forum software and custom CSS, but unfortunately the pages/content plugin seems to be broken. I think I'll need to uninstall/reinstall it with the update Did a little more research into IPB 4 and dreamed of one day prancing in its fields Fixed some errors in VNTS Bugged Zaka Talked to Decay, had him look over VNTS Gave one of my cats a lot of chin-scratches because it was either that or have my keyboard become his bed Slowing down a bit, as it's getting late. And by late I mean middle of the night. These posts are meant to help increase transparency as I'm working on this crap. Hope they've been helpful to someone!

I was flirting with Batman. I got distracted.

Update (9:49 PM): VNTS is written! Wrote up my take of the review hub overhaul action program and where I see the rate-limiting blocks Good discussions with Blog and Reviews team folks Got the reviews email net set up Listed to a crap ton of Pat Metheny and really enjoyed it At one point I listed to the Beatles. I think. Forgot to eat dinner. Going to go do that next before doing some Reviews Hub work

Update (4:16PM): Got Twitter auto-posting working for both the blog and Reviews Hub Finished tweaking Reviews Hub code Updated a billion plugins Did my research about IPB 4 Lots of discussion with the blog team Got email lists set up for the blog team, and did the technical-side for the reviews team's email list

Update (~2:05PM): Ran into a small snag -- having trouble connecting into the site (back-end, not front-facing site). Going to put the forums software to-do items aside (listed below) until I can get some guidance from Nay. Forums "stuff" on hold: Software updates Dedicated "Donation" app which will make forums goodies/management automatic Some blogs stuff to test Got it.

Update: Got the Reviews Hub code fixed. YAAAAAAY. I got Otaku Aniverse back up as well, but the other sources we lost in the rollback(s) will need to be re-negotiated since we were using some fancy RSS stuff. < 3 EDIT: I laughed so hard.