No 'My Content' page, IPB4 = fail. But really not having that page makes things reaaaaally inconvenient. That was the page that I had bookmarked and visited the most, so it really doesn't sit well when it's shown as "The page does not exist". And all the tweaks that made FuwaFabulous so fabulous have disappeared. Switched to Temporal temporarily.
I think the bones of this issue lie in your personal definition of "escapism."
Healthy escapism, in my opinion, is when you dive into fantasy to get away from troubling aspects of your life that you cannot control or change. It's perfectly reasonable to distract yourself from those issues by doing something that helps you forget.
Unhealthy escapism is when you are hiding from something that you really must deal with. Generally speaking, the longer you avoid handling these types of issues, the worse they get, so not only are you postponing the inevitable, it's likely that you are making your own future more difficult for the illusion of a simpler present.
If I was doing something that I loved, but it was making my situation worse, that would be a strong implication that the problem I was avoiding was that second kind of problem. Therefore, I shouldn't be avoiding it. Of course, knowing what you should do and being able to force yourself to do it are two different things. But if there's something you're running from and you know that running will hurt you, try to stop running.
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
I'm all for H-scenes until they're actually happening. Then it's just 'ugh, I can't wait for this irritating fuckfest to be over so I can actually continue with things.' Annoyingly though, I like the idea of 'couple-based' H-scenes (like, two people forming a relationship) because sometimes the sentiment behind it's really nice, so I don't turn H-scenes off in case they're actually relevant.
That said, any H-scene which goes mouth/vagina/bum (or anything in that order...) in one go is either gratuitous and annoying, or so hilariously bad that the very idea of popping a cock-rocket is impossible.
Here are some of my most recent drawings in full resolution; [EDITED: Apparently the post's images were lost after the site update so I reuploaded some new ones]
Hitokiri Battousai (Rurouni Kenshin): Tohsaka Rin and Archer (Unlimited Blade Works): Eren Jaeger (Shingeki no Kyojin): Heiwajima Shizuo (Durarara!!) This random anime girl I found on the internet...
I forgot what I wrote here last time... ^^;; I'd been exposed to drawing since I was very little and it's become an undying hobby ever since. Half of these were drawn back when I was in highschool, usually for a friend's birthday. I haven't been drawing anything lately since uni though, I never really had the time. Hopefully I will sometime soon, it's a hobby I love to much to let go. Please visit my DeviantArt to see more of what I've drawn~. Thank you! http://dimdito.deviantart.com/
I'm pretty sure that's not the argument here.
We're talking about whether or not it was rape, not whether or not this scene existing is okay.
Enjoy all the rape in VNs you want, but don't attempt to arbitrarly change the definition of rape.
I think the only problem here is how this scene is so exclusive to VNs, it would never happen in real life.
By real life standards it's rape, but by the VN's setting it's probably some weird thing we don't have a term for.
If Little Busters is a 4/10, all the scores on my VNDB lose 5 points, meaning the highest score I've given is a 5 and I'm heartless to the point of giving 1's.
Jesus Christ, I don't know anything about writing or plots or story, but if Little Busters! is bad what the hell is all the crap I've been playing and reading? Should I just conclude I've got no taste whatsoever and continue on my merry life?
I'll leave all this judging and analyzing to those who care. I'm in for the enjoyment, not for good pieces of literature.
I am starting to get a feeling that this is just the first step in an intricate plan to just release a dramatic and actually worthwhile Sakura VN out of fucking nowhere which features the collective cast of the Sakura games so far and is actually a mature and emotionally impactful game.
Because otherwise this game is like diarrhea: Several short quantities of worthless, repulsive shit released in startlingly quick succession, leaving a nauseating aftermath.
I have an idea for Winged Cloud though. Have an annual Sakura Jam where people are given 48 hours to make a Sakura game from scratch! They'd increase efficiency and well, the games would probably be quite a few times as complex compared to now. Win-win!