Tay Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 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 XReaper, FinalChaos, Emi and 25 others 28 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flutterz Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 Free: The feeling you get flirting with Flutterz Yeeeah, about that... I was just thinking of ways to charge people for it. AaronIsCrunchy, Tay, Tyrael and 4 others 7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greenshadow622 Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 Yeeeah, about that... I was just thinking of ways to charge people for it. Oh Flut, if you did that, we would all go broke! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tay Posted September 28, 2015 Author Share Posted September 28, 2015 Getting a few questions about the analytics: "Unique visitors" is not the same as number of times people visit the site ("hits"). Unique visitors (or "uniques") are the number of IP addresses, I think, which visit the site. Tons of them check in more than once, for example, so the number of "hits" can be as much as 3-4 times the number of uniques we get each day. Hopefully that makes sense! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darklord Rooke Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 Tay’s daily hatemail has decreased by several hundred percent since March 2015 And with it, the amusement derived from Tay’s mailbox. Boo! 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 A change which has been quite obvious and welcome. The increased discussion on the forums, and the increased translation projects and development on the boards have been fantastic. In the past a lot of the activity on the forums has been just people mucking around, which is not something that's sustainable into the future. Eclipsed, sanahtlig, Tay and 1 other 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ryechu Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 Got my Google Form submitted. Looking forward to getting that cleared up. One of these days I should probably sit down with you, Tay, and figure out how to get more visibility to the reviews site. While those numbers are great, they're definitely numbers that could get quite a jump with the right planning. Tay 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilverLi Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 A good update Tay. Thanks for some clarification. We may return next week with new complains. You could't poke at Nay to do a list of the amount of replies/topics created every day and span that list a year back or so. I am curious if the current upswing is that great compared to March - June. Edits. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nimbus Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 Thanks for the update Tay, hope everything is going well on those islands. I also submitted a loli report, hope it helps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sanahtlig Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 This topic has already disappeared from the sidebar. That's kind of a problem. Here's my response to the survey. Restrict: Sexually explicit loli images from being displayed on Fuwanovel Direct links to a single sexually explicit image of a loli or a gallery of such images (if the primary purpose of the page is to display such images, it can't be direct linked to) Discussions promoting real-life pedophilia Graphic and sexually explicit descriptions involving lolis Permit: Discussions / fan translation projects of games that include or focus on loli content Links to webpages about a game that include sexually explicit loli content (e.g., VNDB, DLsite store pages, official game sites) Any loli content that isn't sexually explicit Direct links to sexually explicit textual descriptions involving lolis (e.g., fan translations, stories) The current guidelines are inconsistent and unenforceable. Lolis are common in VNs, VNDB is a widely-used database of VNs, and VNDB features sexually explicit images (including of lolis). If you want to actually enforce the current measures, you'd have to forbid linking to a good quarter of VNDB, which is utterly ridiculous. If you're going to forbid discussions of a sexual nature, forbid ALL such discussions, not just ones involving lolis. Honestly I don't think this is even a problem currently, as I don't see discussions I would consider to be "of a sexual nature" at all on Fuwanovel, or any other forums I frequent. krill, XReaper, Tyrael and 1 other 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tay Posted September 28, 2015 Author Share Posted September 28, 2015 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. LiquidShu and LinovaA 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sanahtlig Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 The recent topics sidebar is back. The collective prayers have been answered. Rose and krill 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nayleen Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 Didn't even notice that shit broke because I've been way too busy lately. Darklord Rooke and sanahtlig 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tay Posted September 29, 2015 Author Share Posted September 29, 2015 Didn't even notice that shit broke because I've been way too busy lately. Yeat, it's almost -- almost -- as if you were travelling halfway across the world and back, and working overtime on projects, and dealing with new responsibilities at work, and balancing unexpected RL challenges, and planning Fuwa technical things on the side... ... or something. ; P < 3 Take care of yourself, Nay Darbury and Darklord Rooke 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XionsProphecy Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 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 That is really good, i have noticed a lot of new users lately. Tay’s daily hatemail has decreased by several hundred percent since March 2015 You received hatemail? That's weird. 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. Sweet. Good luck with that. 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. People Use Google+? Damn.. 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. If you need help with anything, just send me a PM with the task and i'll take a look at it. Been wanting to help out for a long time now. Tay 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sanahtlig Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 Any plans to show the number of views on each Fuwazette article and build this information into the interface (similar to the forums)? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tay Posted September 29, 2015 Author Share Posted September 29, 2015 Any plans to show the number of views on each Fuwazette article and build this information into the interface (similar to the forums)? I tried that earlier this year with two different plugins, but ran into problems with caching (which caused the blog to use a crazy ton of processing power to freshly load the site for each visitor instead of using cached pages). It's still on the table, however: I'm still working with our theme developer and two other WP devs (one of which is Yoast) to learn how to better implement this. sanahtlig 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shcboomer Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 Tay <3 Keep up the good work Tay. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin579 Posted September 30, 2015 Share Posted September 30, 2015 I just put it is a drawing, not the real thing, who cares? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
krill Posted September 30, 2015 Share Posted September 30, 2015 glad your to see you back tay, i you thought were strapped to a tree in a sinking isle, on a different matter ill will get back to sending hate mails and boxes of skin and teeth. Zenophilious, Mr Poltroon, Darklord Rooke and 1 other 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kingdomcome Posted October 1, 2015 Share Posted October 1, 2015 How much $ is required to host this website? p/month or whatever period of time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nayleen Posted October 2, 2015 Share Posted October 2, 2015 Exactly 3 money. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
krill Posted October 2, 2015 Share Posted October 2, 2015 Exactly 3 money. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tay Posted October 2, 2015 Author Share Posted October 2, 2015 Exactly 3 money. Though we pay 2.7 financial units due to conversion fees. Fiddle 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tay Posted October 24, 2015 Author Share Posted October 24, 2015 Loligeddon Survey is ending on Sunday so I have enough time to review the responses before taking this to our law maester. sanahtlig 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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