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A document to move us forward *Overview Posted*


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Initially phase 1 of the plan was to focus on building up a community at Fuwa, and was going to be initiated first. Then later on phase 2 (focusing on the health of the industry) would activate. I designed it this way because I thought Fuwa could do little to help the industry without more power.

 

Your idea is eye-opening, and shows there are steps Fuwa can take right now to help promote the industry. This will mean the document will need to be changed slightly. The need for phases, for example, will disappear. It also opens up many possibilities for Fuwa to support commercial development and localisation.

As I see it, the difference between a pirate community and a supportive fandom is essentially attitudes and norms.  Shifting these attitudes and norms is very important to enacting lasting change.  Much of the VN-playing audience currently views the industry with apathy or even disdain.  This apathy is contagious; if others around them feel no obligation to support the medium, why should they?  The good news is that enthusiasm is also contagious.  The more people see others taking pride in their hobby, the more these people will consider doing what they can as well.  Building support for commercial VN development and localization begins with building a supportive community.  This is important enough that I think it should be incorporated as an explicit objective in Fuwanovel's plan.  There are already plenty of VN consumers.  To increase the quality, quantity, and breadth of VNs available to the Western audience, what we need more of--a lot more of--are supportive fans.  If we can't convince our own community that the medium is worth supporting, it'll be pretty hard to convince anyone outside of it.

 

One of Fuwanovel's core founding objectives was to be a friendly place for VN players, especially new players, to gather and discuss VNs safe from the toxicity of other VN communities.  The VN scene sorely needs a community, not affiliated with a particular publisher, that supports the industry and serves as a beacon for people new to VNs.  Fuwanovel is in a good position to become that community, and this new direction could be seen as an extension of that founding objective.

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I'd personally like to seperate the fantranslation(localization) projects from any original vn projects for one.

 

Tay was thinking about separate threads but there’s only 1 OELVN currently being developed on Fuwa, and few projects in total. However, it should definitely be a goal of Fuwa to encourage more fan development/translation in general. Hopefully there’ll be enough projects in the future to warrant a split.

 

 

  • Bloggers for Fuwa (and by extension the social media - e.g. twitter/facebook) could also post articles/announce about the releases/progress (seperate post from the translation updates?)
  • Section on main site for said VN's (in seperate section so people don't complain I guess), I'm thinking it's better to just link to the game/product page or the developer's website + their thread instead of releasing torrents for them...
  • podcast, bring them on
  • possibly let them leak information exclusively through fuwanovel :3  (... well nothing much can be done here about that on Fuwanovel's side but oh well)

 

Excellent idea! :3

 

  • Project management / Repository/File management for groups that can't access/afford it (Dedicated space) - probably/unsure of how possible this is with current setup.

 

Could you possibly explain this to me? Unfortunately I don't understand what you mean. And no need for an apology, those were some interesting insights!

 

@Zakamutt: I feel like I now know part of the reason Tay has trouble keeping writers, this really needs to change. It’s incredibly unorganised. Considering you’ve had no meaningful contact or aid from staff, you’ve been doing an excellent job. The news site is an important tool for Fuwa to offer unique information to visual novel consumers, anything from in depth analysis on the state of the industry, to any interviews Fuwa chooses to conduct with localisation companies or developers (both English or japanese,) to staff reviews of recently released products. That such an important tool has been treated so trivially is a deep shame. 

 

@Sanah: Good idea, I think 'building support for commercial VN development and localisation' will be an important component in Fuwa’s strategy going forward (I’ll place your Gamertag idea under this objective.) Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to rework the overview yet, so once again this objective will be placed temporarily in Phase 2 (because it demonstrates how Fuwa can help the industry as opposed to gathering people to Fuwa.) The trick will be to encourage support for localisation and commercial development without looking down on, or being disrespectful to, people who pirate. You’re really helping with your suggestions on how Fuwa can support the industry, which is important because the strategic document was light in that area. 

 

------------------

 

Suggestions have been terrific so far, and the end document is going to be far better for it. You've all been awesome. Don't be shy if you have opinions or thoughts on the matter, feel free to voice them.

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  • Project management / Repository/File management for groups that can't access/afford it (Dedicated space) - probably/unsure of how possible this is with current setup.

Most fan TL groups run some sort of blog to post updates and from what I hear a lot of them still don't do version control in some way, be it through version control software (Git, Mercurial, SVN, CVS, ...) or simply having the documents on Google Drive / Docs.

 

With the right setup you could give them a small space, dedicated version control and even a subdomain (Traps Are Cute Translations could have trapsarecutetl.fuwanovel.net for example) that directly ties them to Fuwanovel. This is a really endgame plan and requires some dedicated hosting, separate from the main site. Just an idea though.

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Speaking from the social media side of things, I do have plans to unite the blog, twitter, facebook and even the youtube directly with the front page. That said, my hands are a bit tied until a certain god (Tay) sets things up for the front page to be updated and prettied up along with individual download pages. 

 

On another note, I'd like to see us host info pages for licensed VNs and instead of a download link, the link is to the store page or steam page. It would also tie into the Youtube project I'm cooking up. 

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The trick will be to encourage support for localisation and commercial development without looking down on, or being disrespectful to, people who pirate.

I think this is important, both generally and for personal ideological reasons. If Fuwa were to start looking down on pirates, I might quit the site.

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I think this is important, both generally and for personal ideological reasons. If Fuwa were to start looking down on pirates, I might quit the site.

 

One of the core tenets of the Fuwanovel community is we treat each other with respect and courtesy. If the community were to start looking down on a group of people, any group of people, it would lose an important part of its identity for no benefit.

 

 

So will we not be able to download VNs from here anymore?

 

Piracy has been included in the overview (2nd post of the thread) as an important tool for Fuwa to use in its quest to expand its userbase. Do not worry, nobody is suggesting Fuwa abandon the practice of hosting torrents. I have added a note that a discussion on whether torrents are hosted on Fuwa may need to take place at a later date, but I doubt that would be anytime soon.

 

@SolidBatman: Excellent ideas!

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Increasing our userbase seems important. I'm not the most experienced person in the matter, but we'd have much to gain if we were able to use the blog/facebook/etc to gather more users. It seems like you're planning on that already, but I think the way you're thinking is slightly ineffective? If you gather a team of writers and staff, they can easily end up losing motivation or not caring enough to produce a lot of content after a short span of time. It happened with the blog and with facebook already, where the team was originally big and after just some time one or two people ended up in charge of everything, from what I heard.

 

Maybe you could try to give incentive to normal users in case they provice quality content for our social media? That content could be approved by a team of your picking and then you'd have a window in the top of the screen which shows the latest contributor and gives a "thank you" message, maybe even add an item to their profile or grant them some other privilege. Of course, it's just an idea.

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Increasing our userbase seems important. I'm not the most experienced person in the matter, but we'd have much to gain if we were able to use the blog/facebook/etc to gather more users. It seems like you're planning on that already, but I think the way you're thinking is slightly ineffective? If you gather a team of writers and staff, they can easily end up losing motivation or not caring enough to produce a lot of content after a short span of time. It happened with the blog and with facebook already, where the team was originally big and after just some time one or two people ended up in charge of everything, from what I heard.

 

Maybe you could try to give incentive to normal users in case they provice quality content for our social media? That content could be approved by a team of your picking and then you'd have a window in the top of the screen which shows the latest contributor and gives a "thank you" message, maybe even add an item to their profile or grant them some other privilege. Of course, it's just an idea.

I want to get everything in place before doing something like that. And I did put out a call for twitter people and only had one person offer their services. The twitter does continue to grow well enough.  Zaka has been begging for help with the blog for a while now (I tried to get on, but for some reason my account could never be created). As for the Facebook, it grows every day. Most of its users don't visit the forums unless linked and fewer want to make an account. It's almost its own separate forum. 

 

I'm not privy to the page counts on the front page, but it is way higher than on the forums. So I'd say we are already doing a good job on the social media front. Getting all of them united and prettied up will only help. I proposed something like this to the staff a while back to get the blog revived after a long dry spell and it got no where. So now I'm trying to do things without that help :P Really, if I can just got the main blog permissions from Tay, I can go about finally implementing everything I need aside from the creation of a hidden forum just for the social media team to co-ordinate everything. 

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Hotsauce2000 is currently helping me with blog work, he's been p. cool so far. I could still use more people of course, since I took on more work recently it's gotten surprisingly busy (well, news tend to come suddenly, then it quiets down again.) The end goal would be for me to not have too worry too much about editing other guys' posts and just have them post their own (because if I get them PMed to me, I'm going to edit them no matter what~). The current method is workable though, just that I'd want one or two more writers.

 

If we're going to coordinate blog, facebook and twitter we might have to get a specific person to do that, and that will probably not be me. Of course, a potential skype group or whatever could do the job too, depending.

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If we're going to coordinate blog, facebook and twitter we might have to get a specific person to do that, and that will probably not be me. Of course, a potential skype group or whatever could do the job too, depending.

I'd rather have a forum to use. Not as quick, but much less prone to spamming and easier for those without skype. 

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That would be nice, as you could be more organized than in a group pm (which wouldn't be threaded etc.) IM chats are still a really good way to bounce ideas off each other in real time, so I don't think we should discount it entirely. However, that kind of thing is more for small-scale discussion than big stuff, so it can be handled more informally I guess.

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Hotsauce2000 is currently helping me with blog work, he's been p. cool so far. I could still use more people of course, since I took on more work recently it's gotten surprisingly busy (well, news tend to come suddenly, then it quiets down again.) The end goal would be for me to not have too worry too much about editing other guys' posts and just have them post their own (because if I get them PMed to me, I'm going to edit them no matter what~). The current method is workable though, just that I'd want one or two more writers.

 

If we're going to coordinate blog, facebook and twitter we might have to get a specific person to do that, and that will probably not be me. Of course, a potential skype group or whatever could do the job too, depending.

 

What exactly are you doing except writing the VNTL updates etc. you can see on the front page of Fuwa? I know you are doing a lot but I am a bit curious what it is. I guess you are checking sites about updates and news on VNs too?

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The "took on more work" mostly means doing more blog content. Other than just my blog content, there's being the editor for hotsauce2000's posts and being one half of the unbeatable @fuwan0vel twitter duo.

 

I can't call myself hugely busy, but since I started posting more frequently and timely it's taking a decent bit of time. Especially the first time doing the bulletin when I had eleven different entries to research it, potentially write all content for, otherwise rewrite provided content etc. Took a while.

 

I generally take a while making a post no matter what to check for typos, match my style guidelines and try to do comprehensive research (like digging up old forum posts about translation statuses of secretive teams...)

 

Otherwise I have a major timesink in RtK. When I'm going at my intended speed, it takes me about five hours per day with breaks.

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I went ahead and set up a dev version of the site on http://fuwanovel.info/ . Please note a few things:

- This doesn't mean we're switching to that URL

- People should be able to tell from a first glance that the state I had is fairly old, approx. end of last November

- I'll use it to showcase some of the ongoing development being done, since that site runs independently from the actual (live) one

- I'll start making changes which I already discussed with Tay first, afterwards will depend on how things progress in the meantime (new ideas/projects/priorities popping up)

I might pick up my "dev blog thread" again to keep you guys informed.

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Seconded Beato, no worries, I know how much work it can be to create a single VN page because of those banner images.

 

Any new layout I might whip up would have to use (mostly) the same assets, and the banners would be the same sizes we already have. Maybe apart form the big banners on the front page, but those aren't a big problem either way.

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Made http://fuwanovel.info redirect to the main page and set up http://beta.fuwanovel.info instead. Apart from missing recently added/changed database entries, that's what it'll look like.

 

Some texts changed, stuff got ripped out, so it looks really barren in some places (2/3 "browse" sites don't have anything in their sidebar, since the guest comments are gone entirely). Featured games on the frontpage are probably going the way of the dodo as well, meaing we either need new filler content or I really should start working on a new, somewhat slimmed down layout. Then again, I really liked it at 1024px.

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Aye i know i'm late on this thread but i think the Fuwa forums could use not only a major Visual overhaul but a technological one too. I know profile customization isn't the main feature here but i would like to see something that show's off the person's taste more. That and getting music onto your profile is a pain, those big youtube players don't look very good and they take up valuable space. WIth better mechanism's in place there isn't much else we will need from Fuwa, the community here is already drop dead awesome.

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