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What's the future of Fuwanovel now?


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Well I don't know what will happen in 5 years later, but maybe if I'm lucky my posts count will be at around 7,000 lol. As for the community, I think there'll always be influx of the new members which obviously mean that we'll gonna have many new active members, and I hope it'll be like that.

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Well, the site lack any kind of direction right now (it's not a criticism BTW, just a plain fact), so it won't be a bad scenario if 5 years from now it just stays exactly where it is, being a slightly small and secluded, but lively community mostly dependent of the Forums. If something changes about management, it might again become a major news/commentary center for VNs too. The bigger the western VN market becomes, the more help people might need in navigating it, so I don't think there's any reason for Fuwa to become obsolete and die out, I'm at least optimistic in this regard. :]

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1 hour ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

Well, the site lack any kind of direction right now (it's not a criticism BTW, just a plain fact), so it won't be a bad scenario if 5 years from now it just stays exactly where it is, being a slightly small and secluded, but lively community mostly dependent of the Forums. If something changes about management, it might again become a major news/commentary center for VNs too. The bigger the western VN market becomes, the more help people might need in navigating it, so I don't think there's any reason for Fuwa to become obsolete and die out, I'm at least optimistic in this regard. :]

Honestly, after torrents got taken down I think the website as a whole kind of lost its purpose. The forums are nice, and the blog gets decent amount of attention I think. But back when we hosted torrents, we had a very clear purpose. Make VNs more popular in the west, and piracy is our method for doing that. Now don't get me wrong, I think the move to get rid of torrents was required so we could pursue a more legitimate cause. But 3 years after that, I still don't think we have found a new purpose. The forums and blogs really are the only main attraction to the website at this point. But honestly, who cares. Most VN related news you could learn if you hang out at /r/visualnovels/. That sub-reddit also has a much larger community. VNDB, has the purpose of cataloging every VN. But Fuwa? I don't really know what we do. We have a nice communal blog feature. We used to (maybe still do) have VN reviews on the main blog. Other than that though, no purpose. If it weren't for the fact that we got famous for hosting torrents back in 2012, 2013, and 2014, I don't think we would still be around. We are still living off of the momentum we got from our pirating days.  

Couple in the fact that the community is much smaller than it used to be. I wouldn't be surprised if Fuwanovel is dead in 5 years. I really don't want that to be the case, but I remember having this discussion with Clephas via pm a few years ago. He's been involved in multiple VN communities, and he said that once a community no longer has a purpose, it is on the road to death. So I think it is really important to find a new purpose soon. Hell at this pace, Fuwanovel might be dead in 2 years.

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18 minutes ago, Zalor said:

Honestly, after torrents got taken down I think the website as a whole kind of lost its purpose. The forums are nice, and the blog gets decent amount of attention I think. But back when we hosted torrents, we had a very clear purpose. Make VNs more popular in the west, and piracy is our method for doing that. Now don't get me wrong, I think the move to get rid of torrents was required so we could pursue a more legitimate cause. But 3 years after that, I still don't think we have found a new purpose. The forums and blogs really are the only main attraction to the website at this point. But honestly, who cares. Most VN related news you could learn if you hang out at /r/visualnovels/. That sub-reddit also has a much larger community. VNDB, has the purpose of cataloging every VN. But Fuwa? I don't really know what we do. We have a nice communal blog feature. We used to (maybe still do) have VN reviews on the main blog. Other than that though, no purpose. If it weren't for the fact that we got famous for hosting torrents back in 2012, 2013, and 2014, I don't think we would still be around. We are still living off of the momentum we got from our pirating days.  

Couple in the fact that the community is much smaller than it used to be. I wouldn't be surprised if Fuwanovel is dead in 5 years. I really don't want that to be the case, but I remember having this discussion with Clephas via pm a few years ago. He's been involved in multiple VN communities, and he said that once a community no longer has a purpose, it is on the road to death. So I think it is really important to find a new purpose soon. Hell at this pace, Fuwanovel might be dead in 2 years.

Actually, I think the main site still needs complete restructuring. The pages dedicated to separate VNs, for example, became pretty useless after they stopped being linked to the torrents, and I don't think that anybody would like to use Fuwa as a listing site since we have vndb. The blogs on the main site also died at some point.

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1 hour ago, Zalor said:

Honestly, after torrents got taken down I think the website as a whole kind of lost its purpose. The forums are nice, and the blog gets decent amount of attention I think. But back when we hosted torrents, we had a very clear purpose. Make VNs more popular in the west, and piracy is our method for doing that. Now don't get me wrong, I think the move to get rid of torrents was required so we could pursue a more legitimate cause. But 3 years after that, I still don't think we have found a new purpose. The forums and blogs really are the only main attraction to the website at this point. But honestly, who cares. Most VN related news you could learn if you hang out at /r/visualnovels/. That sub-reddit also has a much larger community. VNDB, has the purpose of cataloging every VN. But Fuwa? I don't really know what we do. We have a nice communal blog feature. We used to (maybe still do) have VN reviews on the main blog. Other than that though, no purpose. If it weren't for the fact that we got famous for hosting torrents back in 2012, 2013, and 2014, I don't think we would still be around. We are still living off of the momentum we got from our pirating days.  

Couple in the fact that the community is much smaller than it used to be. I wouldn't be surprised if Fuwanovel is dead in 5 years. I really don't want that to be the case, but I remember having this discussion with Clephas via pm a few years ago. He's been involved in multiple VN communities, and he said that once a community no longer has a purpose, it is on the road to death. So I think it is really important to find a new purpose soon. Hell at this pace, Fuwanovel might be dead in 2 years.

From what I've seen and from what other says, after all the people that were on Fuwa because of the torrents left, the Forums at least offered pretty steady levels of activity. The frontpage got stagnant because of the admin team having no time and main contributors giving up, but the community as whole isn't dying out yet - it might in the future, but there's not so many VN communities after all, not many places to migrate to and I'm not sure if it's that probable that everyone around here will just lose interest. I'm not sure where I would go if Fuwa wasn't there anymore - other options are few and not that appealing.

When it goes to purpose, as much as I understand, Tay's vision was to turn Fuwa into a major VN news/review hub. Obviously it would always be smaller than the visual novel subreddit, but that's not the point - Reddit is just aggregating news, not producing them. Fan sites like this are important pieces of every community's life and can contribute a lot to the community. Producing news and commentary is a very different thing than cataloguing media or sharing and ranking external articles. Add to this at least some token effort of promoting VNs among western gamers and we would have just as much of a mission as any site needs - the fact there's no leadership is the real problem.

1 hour ago, Dreamysyu said:

Actually, I think the main site still needs complete restructuring. The pages dedicated to separate VNs, for example, became pretty useless after they stopped being linked to the torrents, and I don't think that anybody would like to use Fuwa as a listing site since we have vndb. The blogs on the main site also died at some point.

Well, that's pretty obvious at this point, but it's also the most demanding thing to do. Not sure if it's doable at all in current situation, even if we try to overcome the clear limitations (Tay and Nayleen not having the ability to work on it), for example making a crowdfunding campaign and hiring someone to rebuild the site, we would still need more involvement from Tay than he's able to give at the moment. I'm afraid we're not escaping that limbo anytime soon.

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
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I think Fuwa is a nice alternative to some other places. I enjoy it here quite a bit.

So, from my perspective, out of all the VN-related sites on the internet, Fuwa is doing a better job than anyone else at making VNs attractive to me.

And that's in it's current state, even!

I'm very big on not depressing myself needlessly.

If any one person feels like Fuwa isn't living up to your standards, I would say that you should take the initiative to start fixing whatever problems you see.

Otherwise, you don't really care very much about the problems.

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