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Hey everybody, this is a pretty significant post. Please saddle in with me. Fuwanovel is migrating to both a new domain (Fuwanovel.net) and a new server (which we host). The old “.org” domain is going to be redirecting to the new “.net” domain automatically, so even if you forget to mark your calendars with the following dates, you’ll still end up in the right place. Be sure to update your bookmarks at some point, though : P (Tomorrow) Wednesday 2/18/2015 – Evening: the forums, the Fuwazette blog, and the FuwaReviews blog will be redirected to the new domain. Next week (as late as 3/1/2015): The front site will redirect to the new “.net” domain For those of you who are nosey and want to start poking around the “.net” domain right away, you’ll find all the services I had mentioned but the forums will be outdated and the front site may or may not be online or functional. Do not panic – we’ll update the forums at the time of the transfer tomorrow night, and no content will be lost. Precautions and Cause Some of you will remember our failed migration last year. We’ve taken significant precautions to prevent a repeat of last year: Nayleen has optimized the server and we have paid for a significantly more powerful machine to host the site. Nay and I both did our homework looking for hosts, and we’re very pleased with the one we’ve got: scaling the droplet (the hosting power) is easy, and we’re enjoying a good value for what we’re getting. We did this move for many reasons. Chief among them were legal concerns and recommendations, and my deep-felt responsibility to protect the many community leaders from new legal risks (of which I’ve only very recently become aware). More positively, it also needed to happen because we have a lot of new content and services rolling out in the near future. Consequences of TOS The hot-button issue is compliance with our host’s TOS. I’m engaged today and tomorrow inspecting it and getting legal clarifications, but I do not believe we will be able to host torrents on the front site following the move and the D&R board will be too much of a liability to keep. It wasn’t my intention to have this happen all at once, but I feel like we have little recourse in light of protecting one another. I apologize if the legal liability is shocking, but the best way forward is to admit that what’s done is done, and the only thing we have control over is how we choose to move forward. Compensation I don’t know how else to say this, so please bear with me: I realize that losing the torrents will rub some of you the wrong way. It should make all of us concerned, as they were a major draw to the site. I’ve got two thoughts on the matter: 1) the year-end surveys indicated that torrent usage among the three surveyed usergroups (core, FB, Twitter) was much lower than anticipated, which will soften the blow, and 2) new features must by necessity rise to attract users in their place. Here is a taste of what I’ve been working on over the past few months and crystallizing (hurriedly) in the last few days: The forums have been updated with blogging software. Users can input links to their own blogs, import RSS feeds of their blog, or create blogs hosted by Fuwanovel itself. This includes official/featured blogs such as the Recognition blog, or the Dev Boards Update blog (which is open to all the project managers in the dev boards to post freely on), or the Help Wanted blog (which similarly allows project managers to post freely when they’re looking to fill a position). All these blogs will have their own RSS feeds and will be incorporated into the corresponding Fuwazette categories. (Saving Tiago, Zaka and others time and hassle) ^ this blog functionality will have a lot of cool implications (such as for private clubs and the VN readers club!) The FuwaReviews site will now be reviews.fuwanovel.net, and it will be much more robust than simply a blog of the team’s reviews: I have negotiated with ~a dozen prominent VN bloggers and received the green-light to incorporate feeds of their VN reviews into the reviews site. I plan to continue to reach out to more bloggers and build this base. Things are looking pretty positive. I’ve been in productive talks with several OELVN devs (if I’ve talked to you about this, please don’t name names) and it looks like we’ll be able to form productive agreements for early-access game reviews, interviews, and PR access (we get emails/rss feeds of exclusive insider info to publish on our blogs before they announce it publicly). I can’t finalize these agreements until the full “.net” site is live, but it looks promising! I believe that I’ve arranged for an interview with [two gaming site writers/freelancers]. The interview would be about the VN landscape, Fuwanovel’s history, and how we plan to grow/expand in the future. No firm commitments, yet, but I’m in talks. There is another possible opportunity for an interview in a similar but more tech-focused major online blog as well. The front site redesign team is going to be launched for-reals in the next 72 hours. I’ve made a template for, and several examples of, mock-ups (which are flawed, but conversation starters), and I’m busy this afternoon uploading useful assets/psd resources to be available and ready for the team. Emi has agreed to be our secret-genius weapon, which means we can’t fail : P We’ve purchased a forums add-on which will allow us to use forums content in clever ways in our other websites. I’ve started putting together some ideas of ways it could integrate with the front site (including “FuwaScores” of games where fuwanovel users can score the games they’ve played and track their VN playing history), but its scope is much larger than that one implementation. With Nay’s help, I hope to come up with lots of cool ways to use this. Part of my discussion with devs is their agreement to a “releases” feed which would track OELVN releases and which could easily integrate TL releases on PC, but also on iOS and Android. I’ve been talking to several of the mobile app store VN devs, and they’ve almost universally been enthusiastic about the idea ^ This would be incorporated into the games section and a “What have I missed?” section which would list the important recent news and releases Fuwanovel Academy – the evolution of the “ultimate VN starter kit” idea – will be a section on the front site which will explain VNs, help players get started with a VN within 10 minutes of starting reading, and provide a lot of advanced information about the VN landscape, “movers and shakers” in the western VN world, and (hopefully!) some exclusive (read: slightly longer than normal) demos from our dev allies Obviously added on top of this is outreach to TL groups and OELVN teams to get them to use the Fuwanovel dev boards and/or the updates feed Expansion of the creative corner and dev boards Last of all, I’d like to mention that our host of the past two years has been very generous to us. I’ve passed along our gratitude for the extra nine months he’s given us to put our ducks in a row, and I want the community to know he’s making the transition very easy for us and being very supportive. No matter what we do, we're going to lose some of our traffic and our userbase. I’m convinced this is a necessary decision (if a painful and hard one), and that we’re going to make it through this. People can say a lot of things about Fuwanovel, but nobody can deny that we have staying power. Thank you for your time. I realize this is a lot, and it’s overwhelming. Please don’t be afraid to speak up or ask questions. Tay

I definitely don't think we're going to alienate the TL community, it's in my opinion in fuwanovel's best interest to help translation teams and it has always been a key aspect of fuwanovel as well. I think it'd be perfectly fine to link to each team's respective patch, we don't need to host it ourselves or anything, there's no harm done in that. I still think the transition will be very rough and all in all we're going to become something completely different which will lose the interest of many, but i've said before that i don't stay here for the torrents (i will get muh porn either way ) and i think there's more people like that out there. Wether fuwanovel can strive this way or not beats me, but trying to do something is better than being a sinking ship, and i think this set of projects at least has the potential to put us on the spotlight and help us become more relevant and useful than just be a seedbox.

Wow. The host switch was so powerful a move that I somehow changed gender. Amazing.

PMs are none of our concerns, you're free to do whatever you want or need to in there (even though I might have a personal issue with them, depending on their nature, not related to piracy), just like you could still burn DVDs/switch USB sticks or engage in peer-to-peer file sharing (guess what, torrenting) to share files between friends and acquaintances. Fuwanovel just won't be the faciliator for that kind of deal. It's straight up illegal for licensed games and a legal grey area at best for anything else. Fuwanovel will provide patches (with a possible optional opt-out for the creators) and possibly even quick installation guides, pretty much the contents of a readme.txt or install.txt, which - and let's be honest here - is the hard part about tapping into the medium. Most JP-only games are only a google search away, the patch might not be as readily available. For all the people who stopped reading after coming to the conclusion "torrent are getting will be removed, GG Fuwanovel", keep your eyes peeled for upcoming new features and developments. This is not the end, but a fresh start away from the slump of the past year or so, which the site desperately needed.

Dracu-riot! is like the Half-Life 3 of the VN world. It will never happen, and even if it does, it won't live up to anyone's expectations.

Anything else that may or may not be answered in a not so spoilery tag.

Would the act of patching games be considered under legal scrutiny? I'm talking about providing torrents/downloads to the patch themselves without the game. Maybe it's just my way of thinking, but I've seen Fuwanovel as a database for torrents to VNs with English TL, and that being the most important part. Taking that away is changing the entire focus of the site in my eyes, but if you were to still be able to host the patches themselves without the games, that meaning still holds true to me.

Ok, i'm going to make the steins;gate review i promised, but i won't rush it, first of all, i have to refinish the VN and take as much screenshots as possible, and then, think about the review as much as possible, i won't neglect anything.

Good luck admin-sama~~~ And removing the torrent is a good decision IMO, however we need to give people the link for english patch ofc. Finding the game itself is pretty easy too, people just being lazy to search on internet.

There wasn't a connection between the torrent policies and the host choice (no killing two birds with one stone). The connection was between a commitment to protecting myself and my friends/community leaders, and a specific series of steps necessary to do so. My priorities were first to them, then to keeping Fuwanovel alive, and then to everything else. The host was chosen more or less for the power of the computer unit and the cost per minute/per month to run it (we found a good unit for a solid deal, and we took it). Fuwa's a big site/community, and hosting is expensive.

This looks interesting, will keep an eye on it....

Must..resist...steins;Gate...hate...

This list won't feature the VNs in order of "how good they are". Rating them would be way too much of a clusterfuck to me. The VNs are not in their respective order. Meaning number 1 is not the best, and so on. 1_CHAOS; HEAD 2_Cross Channel 3_G-Senjou no Maou 4_Fate/Stay Night 5_Forest This Visual Novel is the easiest visual novel translated to get a bad ending without using a walkthrough- which just adds to the fun of it. It makes a massive amount of references to common literature, which makes it even better. 6_Katahane It may seem like an ordinary moege- the atmosphere is light, the story is full of cuteness, which you can note by the character design and soundtrack. It gets really good in the middle, and you'll be dying to know what happens in the end. A game with multiple perspectives, it's definitely one of the most enjoyable Visual Novels I've ever read. 7 Majikoi 8_Little Busters! 9_Tsukihime "You shouldn't tell lies that you can't even fool yourself with" 10_Swan Song A post apocalyptic Visual Novel. 11_Symphonic Rain It may seem like your ordinary moege. Trust me, it's not. 12_Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo (and sequel) 13_Sekien no Inganock Steampunk. An atmosphere full of mysteries and references that will make your head blow up. 14_Steins; Gate A visual novel that deals extensively with time travel and it's consequences. 15_Utawarerumono 16_Fault: Milestone (1 & 2) 17_Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni 18_Kara no Shoujo 19_Umineko no Naku Koro ni 20_Planetarian 21_Ever 17 Another top 10. 22_Remember11 It lacks in the ending, but otherwise the story of this VN has enough to easily become one of my all-time favorites. 23_Zanmataisei Demonbane 24_Rewrite "Could it possibly be rewritten, this fate of hers?" Another one that enters the top 10. 25_Narcissu 26_Grisaia no Kajitsu 27_Saya no Uta Only if you enjoy dark and messed up settings. 28_Higanbana no Saku Yoru ni 29_Eien no Aselia 30_Rose Guns Days (1 & 2) There are small sections of gameplay on this one, but you can skip them by pressing the space bar, so this still qualifies. 31_Sengoku Rance I feel obliged to comment on this VN before suggesting it to anyone. It's an Alicesoft title, which speaks a lot for itself... If you don't know how it's going to be like, well.. Kind of tough to describe. Lots of sex, including comedy rape. Alicesoft tends to make the whole story a comedy until right near the end, where things actually do get serious. It's worth checking out, if you don't mind Rance's personality. 32_Phenomeno Want a short VN that can captivate you for their whole duration? Here is it. Visual novel adapted from the youth horror novel written by Hajime Ninomae and illustrated by yoshitoshi ABe. 33_Ef- A Fairy Tale of the Two 34_Dysfunctional Systems Another one great for those who want short Visual Novels. 35_Daibanchou Another Alicesoft title. While Rouga is not near Rance's level when it comes to pissing off people, alicesoft's style is something which often doesn't please people. 36_Yume Miru Kusuri The endings pack quite a punch. 37_Kikokugai- The Cyber Slayer 38_Eden 39_Hoshizora no Memoria 40_Katawa Shoujo Yep, it's somewhat overrated. Still, the fact that it is substantially easier for those who are starting to play visual novels to read should not be discarded, and overall, the story was good. 41_World End Economica 42_YU-NO 43_Shikkoku no Sharnoth Yep, there is a minigame on this one. If you download a save data you can skip the minigame, though. So it still qualifies. Another VN that enters my top 10. 44_Muv Luv Alternative The first Muv Luv didn't have enough to enter this list. You should still read it, though~ MLA is definitely awesome. 45_Dangan Ronpa 46_Comyu - Kuroi Ryuu to Yasashii Oukoku 47_Hanachirasu 48_Ayakashibito 49_I/O 50_Deardrops

Sounds interesting! I'd (of course) be interested in taking a look at it, but let's make sure we do what's best for you, too, if this is an ambitious blog post : ).

Never be the same, but I survived!

An excellent welcoming to the new era!!

Everyone is alive...

although I had to reset my password...

Until it's forever ruined for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkqSNS9va5k

Dang. This is freakin' perfect music.

Here is specific one I remember.

Ohhhhh Nosebleed u have same fetish as me(except chubby), yeah man traps IRL traps r hard to find. And u hatin rape kinda surprised me a little though. Yeah i hate seein girl gettin rape IRL but i do enjoyed it 2d dimesion. I want to get raped by an asian yandere stalker. P.S i really want to try wakame sake, after seein it in some of Nukige i read.

Forward brethren! xD

Futa is a hermaphrodite, meaning they have both sexual organs A shemale is, as Monmon said, a guy with boobs. I love futa on male by the way, sexy stuff~ Fun fact, a Futa does not need to have boobs or look like a girl at all, it just needs to have both sexual organs. But most people prefer female looking futas so it pretty much became a staple for futas to look like females.

Happy chinese new year guys!!!! 恭禧发财.

Goodbye, torrents. Now other communities won't be able to bash us for problems regarding these torrents. Goodluck, Fuwa. May you steer in a direction that's best for all of us.

I think we all prefer a "snail" pace rather than a "are you guys dead?" pace ^^ Gambatte!

Chaika anime. Finish. Show, good! Best girl, Chaika! Speech, cute. Chaika, drown in hugs! 9/10 Chaika, season 2, watch! Thankful.

Really excellent point Ceris. This is definitely something I've been looking into. It'll depend on the TL group. It's in their own best interest to self-host the patch and not give it to any other platforms to distribute for several reasons, but I don't know where the line is drawn when they decide to do so, regardless. One thing we're absolutely going to do is offer resources such as a private forum, survey capacities, and publicity to any TL group who needs it. The hosting and software costs to host a dev team website can be surprisingly high, and I have no problem giving them a private space in which to work so they can save their money (at least until they start with releases) for assets.

1. compare yourself with an animal dog, cat, monkey, lion, platypus, others 2. favorite food curry rice, hamburger, ramen, sushi, borshch (some kinda russian soup idk), shirako (roe) 3. sport that you like soccer, baseball, golf、target shooting, horse riding, sepak takraw (wtf.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepak_takraw ) I feel like the choices got obscure as it went on rofl.

So do all hosts have a ToS that ganks torrents soo 'it can't be helped, bb torrents' Or was this a 'we definitely want this host for X reasons, but oh no, their ToS means we have to sacrifice our torrents! oh well bb torrents' Or a 'there have been rising legal issues, so to protect our community leaders we will switch to a host that forbids torrents. Kill two birds with one stone! bb torrents' ~~ Oh, I'm not bitter about this change btw. Already DLed everything there is to DL 8D. Just curious~

Lurking since August huh That means you pre-date me Hi senpai~ Glad to have you aboard

So here is another one that I was listening to before that: The feels are strong tonight.

My only misgiving about this whole ordeal is that Fuwanovel.net is an anagram for "New Futa Novel", and I'm worried about the consequences this may have for the future of this community.

Ah nope, that's not Madoka rip-off, that's what they teach you at school.

One more Yolo, one more SR~ Is this ridiculous yet? It's my favorite Nozomi after that promo one too.

Yuri ♥♥♥♥

A glazed doughnut.

I cannot help but feel this thread title is implying things that simply aren't the case... A negative connotation, I'd call it. Is it simply paranoia? Must be. By no means would Tay ever dream of doing such a thing. I'm sure of it. Nevertheless, I've at least already updated this thread to reflect these changes: https://forums.fuwanovel.net/index.php?/topic/7231-rules-and-guidelines-for-this-board/ Make sure not to forget to do your part when the time comes: https://forums.fuwanovel.net/index.php?/topic/7975-the-fuwadirectory/ Thank you, it's much better without all that moderating burden. And are you talking about me or Tay? Because this entire ordeal was the result of my scheming and plotting behind the scenes. That's kind of hilarious actually.

Koiken Otome is a kusoge that fails utterly to utilize the potential of its setting and manages to fall flat on just about every count when it comes to the story.

I'm looking through these and I am just like... 'magine a Fuwa webcomic. The only one I have ever read is "It's a hard life", which is a comic covering someone's Nuzlocke challenge in Pokemon, although with high dramatization. Kinda filled with a lot of really really dark humor. Nothing can be said for the art at first though... 'cause well... heh. Definitely gets better eventually though.

Necroing for this absolute treat of a find I just made: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1908899476/avas-demon-book-two http://www.avasdemon.com/ Amazing atmosphere. Gorgeous style. I think I'm in love.

Clean. No bullcrap. No apps to slow you down. Performance over beauty, people.