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So... how would you want Fuwanovel to be like in 2016?


Nayleen

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Sooo... The dreadful day.

I'm not happy to announce that I completely removed the beta site. For those uninitiated, I started working on a complete overhaul of the fuwanovel.net late last year, and made some steady progress while I built the systems behind it, and luckily enough had quite a bit of design works done by the awesome @Emi. Things were looking good until, well, I don't really know.

Real-life happened, my day job (I work as a web developer) got stressful when we wanted to finish up a working prototype of our new product, and my usual winter depressions set in, and I'm still fighting them every single day as I'm writing this. It breaks my heart to say that I couldn't deliver, since we had a lot of plans on what we wanted the new front site to look like, how it should behave and what kind of features we wanted.

Yet, I'm not sure if it's what we need right now. Personally, it feels like we planned a lot of stuff that might end up never being really used, so I think I kind of want to just gauge community interest in a new site, or just new features, whatever comes to mind, since I don't want Fuwanovel to just be a dead-weight front site with a community forum attached to it; I want there to be a wholly integrated Fuwanovel Experience(TM). Question is how to achieve just that.

 

So my question to everyone of you reading this is: What kind of features would you like to see on the main page? I'll just let this thread run before offering some input of my own, because I really need to see what you guys want before I sit down and invest time again, as lazy as that sounds.

So go ahead, hit me, and go crazy - the more elaborate, the better. I'm a programmer, not a designer, so the better of a picture you draw for me, the easier for me it is to think about the implementation.

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Gimme my torrents back pls

I don't really think Fuwanovel.net has a purpose anymore, since most of the information on it is rather old or is already on the blog. I think that you guys should focus on the blog, since it is way more important and useful, as of course are the forums.

If you don't, it would be nice to have updated information about games translations and data

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I think that anything possible and reasonable enough to implement in a short term is a good idea. It is better to implement little things even if they seem trivial rather than to imagine a complete reconstruction that in the long term won't be doable without tons and tons of work, time and determination.

 

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If pressed, I'd say the site needs MOAR lolis.

I'm actually not sure what purpose the front page was supposed to serve in the first place.  For VN info, there's VNDB.  For VN news, there's the main blog.  For reviews, there's FuwaReviews.  And then the community itself resides on the forums.  In my opinion, all the front site needs to do is connect these together in one place.  You can always tack on other things later as needed.

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Being active on both the forums and fuwazette made me realize that right now, Fuwanovel has two entirely separate sides, and they don't interact with each other or even really share a user base at all. So I decided what would help most in getting forum users to care about front-page stuff and front-page users to care about forum stuff is complete integration. This obviously won't be easy, but, the absolute ideal scenario would be no separate comment fields for fuwazette articles, creating an article also creates a thread in the forums and the comments/posts are the same. Same with reviews. And going further, comments in the front-page VN database would work similarly. You could make a comment thread that really just makes a forum thread tagged for that game. The way I envision this, is that there is just a "discussions" section in each game entry that shows a list of threads on fuwanovel about that game. And anyone who makes a thread on the forums tagged with that game has it show up there. I imagine that none of this would be easy, I'm just going with pie in the sky ideas here.

11 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

If pressed, I'd say the site needs MOAR lolis.

I'm actually not sure what purpose the front page was supposed to serve in the first place.  For VN info, there's VNDB.  For VN news, there's the main blog.  For reviews, there's FuwaReviews.  And then the community itself resides on the forums.  In my opinion, all the front site needs to do is connect these together in one place.  You can always tack on other things later as needed.

The one thing our front page can do that other sites lack is easily comprehensible translation information and status. Basically, I believe people would actually use it if we could replicate most of the functionality of the now-defunct http://vntls.org/. At some point, this was in the plans. I still think it's a very good idea.

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5 minutes ago, Rooke said:

and strangle somebody

Doesn't quite sound like something a "Master Poisoner" would suggest. 

---

I quite like the Sanahtlig's option. Make the front page look simple and appealing with some giant ass thumbnails leading to the various aspects of the Fuwa community, though this may not be exactly what he had in mind. At least until something more concrete is thought up.

Spoiler

qFgkLb1.png

 

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Agree with sanahtlig

Pleased Disappointed that Rooke used his powers to troll Ren instead of doing a wall of text suggestion thingy (though I'm pretty sure he's said all he had to say to Tay decades ago by now)

...Pls no integrate, them frontsite peeps are plebians

2/3 statements above are false

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6 minutes ago, Decay said:

the absolute ideal scenario would be no separate comment fields for fuwazette articles, creating an article also creates a thread in the forums and the comments/posts are the same. Same with reviews.

Many sites do this and it works really well :) 

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10176 (the review with a link down the bottom to the comments)

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/rpg-codex-review-undertale.106038/ (the comments is a thread on the forum)

The same happens with other news articles. It's a pretty neat design.

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Why do I feel like all that I've worked one previously has been utterly ignored ... Sigh

Well whatever, here's a summary of a few points you can work on.

 

Site uniformity. Find yourself a visual identity and regroup all the sites under a unique theme and menu. There shouldn't be different sites for a unique brand.

Walkthrough Editor, I can help program the core, but I can't work on the interface.

Blogs, articles, reviews, vnts, all those are made the same way. Let them be free to submit but showcased properly and displayed serparetly then. You'll gain efficiency, quality and quantity not having dedicated teams. Make your website community oriented for gods sake. That goes together with a submission checking process of course

As for the forum, I think we have all realized that IPB4 isn't that great. That aside it's very hard to find the relevant pinned threads and the organisation is a bit messy.

A Team builder. since it seemed like fuwanovel became slightly more Amateur VN oriented this could be a great asset. I can help with database organisation if necessary.

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I think a front site would be a good place to prominently display content from the stickies in the forums.  Basically, a place for guides: how to play untranslated VNs with text hooking, where to buy VNs (both English and Japanese language), and other generally useful content that Fuwanovel wants to highlight on a semi-permanent basis.  This content would be mostly generated by the community and included on the front site once it's been polished to an acceptable level.

But most important is simply to get the framework up and running, not get bogged down in all the neat addons that would be nice to have.

The integration that Decay suggested and Rooke provided examples of seems like a useful idea as well.  Just be warned that many visitors to the blog may not be interested in creating a forum account just to comment, so you might lose participation from some of them.

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It has already been said but integration, the move from front-page to forum to reviews to Fuwazette should be seamless, everything should look like you're on the same site. The front-page would show some of the latest reviews, posts on Fuwazette (which i don't think should keep it's name, make everything Fuwanovel), popular/new threads in the forum and blog posts.

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Where the hell is my new main site??? :conspiracy::conspiracy:

 

Don't get why you scrapped it though. We already had a plan of what was going to be added, and the direction it was going. People just lost interest and motivation to carry on. Could of just blew the dust off, get the people back and carry on developing. 

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I think an issue with a lot of these projects is the lack of motivation and time people have going forward. I honestly believe that if you feel you have some awesome suggestions, you should also help see those suggestions come to light. Help Nayleen and get teams to work on certain sections of the site. If multiple people want to help run a project or feel that their content/guide should be featured on the front page and integrated outside of the forums, hold a vote. Have a set time people can vote on certain elements being featured from certain members, and leave it at the majority. Don't worry about people's feelings or if you think it won't be a good idea to be featured (i.e. = a guide on how to hook VNs). If anything, having certain content not featured should make people strive to work harder within their team and try to get good content featured around the site to link it as one.

TLDR: Don't just talk about these suggestions, reach out and help with them. People who make suggestions obviously care about the direction of the site (at least I hope so), and so you are already taking your time to comment about it. Don't make up excuses about how you don't have the time to help; get out there and start doing whatever it is you can (no matter how small). The reason the site reaches such stills in advancement is simply due to the nature of VN players. Offering Tay and Nayleen suggestions is nice and all, but making them do it all alone is worthless and damn near impossible.

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Just make the blog the front site and expand the blog to include a mini wannabe vndb with information on some, not all, VNs that are popular, upcoming, or whatever. Also, more articles from more people. That way, if my primitive knowledge of how shit works is correct, there shouldnt be all that much to code/create?

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The front site doesn't have to be any grand schemed first-rate website with all those numerous convenient little add-ons. A small and friendly looking site would do just fine for newbies who are fairly new to the concept of visual novel as a medium and don't really know where to look for more and that's what really matters most imo. To me, the main site is more about attracting newcomers into vns and into our community than making it a convenient place for us members to use it as another blog or forum site.

Back when I was just a lurker during the reign of torrents on fuwa, I would visit the main site daily for small updates and patch links cause I didn't know where else I could find those things being a noob. I would often think that fuwanovel was a small group consisting of around 5 people or so and that they were just maintaining the site because there was no other site like it which dedicates itself solely to visual novels. But then I saw a link which led me to a walkthrough thread and from there I entered the forums and was surprised to find such a thriving(?) community hidden behind the main site all along.

Point is, since the site had less confusing interface, wasn't bloated with tons of features and wordy articles and provided me with small amount of useful news and links I kept coming back for more instead of getting scared and running away like I did with vndb when I first visited it(probably the main reason why I'm still so hesitant on creating an account there much less a list). So I guess I'm just asking here not to change much of the cute friendliness appeal the front site has and just add small useful features that would benefit newbies like a list with links for vns that are free and vns that have trail versions or add a post offering tips on where to find more news/information about vns all the while encouraging newbies to come and try out the forum section or just make a slide show tour to the wonderful vn world and make them realise on how much the are missing out or something like that.

 

2 hours ago, OriginalRen said:

TLDR: Don't just talk about these suggestions, reach out and help with them. People who make suggestions obviously care about the direction of the site (at least I hope so), and so you are already taking your time to comment about it. Don't make up excuses about how you don't have the time to help; get out there and start doing whatever it is you can (no matter how small). The reason the site reaches such stills in advancement is simply due to the nature of VN players. Offering Tay and Nayleen suggestions is nice and all, but making them do it all alone is worthless and damn near impossible.

I'm using this opportunity to announce that I'm willing to lend a hand anytime on community projects and all . But the problem is that I just lack experience and knowledge on these kinds of things so as long as there is someone giving instructions on the whats and the hows, my body is ready.

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I'd like some easier way to get to threads and members and such

An archive of sorts for threads, with different options for time stamps (1 week, 1 month, certain month/week/day, a custom date)

Then for members you could put up a new page when one clicks to a certain person's Fuwa title, Red Phantom for example, which then tells you the groups the person belongs in, so Administrators and Members in this instance.

And different sorting options for the thread archives and member pages would be great (sort by comments, how new it is, the sub-forum it goes, etc. | Sort by overall posts, reputation, etc.)

These kind of sub-pages for different groups of users and threads would be great for accessibility and overall heighten enjoyment of the site, at least for me that is.

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Hm... Making VN genre clubs, perhaps? And set some members with greatest enthusiasm to `mod` those clubs.

Those clubs can be moege club, nukige club, nakige club, yuri club, etc. I think this system can make people with specific VN interest to gather together, which make fellow fuwa easier to find new VN to read. And they can include translated or untranslated VNs.

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