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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

Yeeeah, about that... I was just thinking of ways to charge people for it.

Hey, at least Ryechu saved the FuwaReviews from me, and god damn, the work he has done for it has been great so far. In all honesty, FuwaReviews seems like the one bright spot here to me. The blog TL status updates have been good of course too, but I'd love to see the blog be a bit more active than that (though not with my help.) Here is where I think I get where Ren is coming from, because what he is complaining about is something I am completely guilty of. We have all these people, who are saying they are going to do all these things. Nayleen the front site, me with Reviews, The LC council and whatever the fuck we do, the "Bloody Senators" and their little game, etc. etc. Then, real life happen. In my case, I attempted to tackle FuwaReviews and get it running. But after a long day of work, or school, or housework, or yardwork, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was a bunch of tedious reading, or site work. I wanted to sit around, naked, and play MGSV, or Fallout NV, or anything I could just shut my mind off and do. I know nayleen works, Tay of course is like Dr. House on an island (and still in med school for the record), I'm just so damn tired and stressed all the time. These are real life issues that affect people we love and care about, and affect our futures. Lets say I slack on school work to pump out a review. Now I take a zero on an assignment and cant make it up because its college and its time to be an adult. Alright, well lets make sure school work is done before I do my review. Annnd now its the weekend and by god I work close to 30 hours in 3 days as weekends are damn busy in retail. So now I exhausted and can barely focus. There is no way in hell I could retain the information I need to write my review. And thus the cycle begins again. So what we get is over-promising, and under-delivering. Not out of any malice, or dislike for the site or the direction it is taking, but because, in my case, I will literally get overwhelmed and eventually have a breakdown. Fuwanovel, 98% of the time, is the second to last thing on my mind, the last being the cleanliness of my room currently (its a disaster in here). Sadly for you, you, Fuwanovel is your hobby, and you don't really see things as work. So you put in a ton of effort to make people happy, and provide fun activities. You enjoy that thing. Meanwhile, I about lost my shit in my contest and got overwhelmed and now I feel like shit because I still can't afford to get the prizes to the winners. Instead, that money went to paying my doctor so he could give me strong pain pills when my throat decided to swell up and caused an incredible amount of pain when I was even breathing. Life just happens, and Fuwanovel is not my life. It should not be anyone's life. Because as much as I used to care about Fuwanovel, at the end of the day, its just a website with people who have a shared interest in VNs. I hope you continue to do what you do here Ren, because while I don't really ever take part in the competitions, I do like seeing the effort and creativity put into them. Now to go do Spanish homework, get drunk, and sleep for like 5 hours before doing more house work. I've only slept like... 16 hours over the past 4 nights. Edit: No, fuck Spanish. I'm hungry and all I have had so far today is a glass of milk. Spanish homework can go to hell right now.

And now a little something for all you image editors out there. (If you don't speak Photoshop, just keep walking; there's nothing for you here.) Some visual novels make image edits simple — the UI is mostly flat colors, 90º angles, and 1-bit transparencies. Easy peasy. Meanwhile, some more recent VNs like to store all their UI elements as semi-transparent overlays with full 8-bit alpha channels. If you've ever tried editing these, you know what a pain they can be. And so, I came to love a command I've never had to use before in all my years with Photoshop — namely because if there's a transparency on something, I'm usually the one who put it there in the first place. Ready? Tattoo this on your arm: Layer > Layer Mask > From Transparency Let's look at one possible scenario where it might come into play: Text on paper. At first glance, doesn't seem like it would be too hard, right? Then you get it into Photoshop and realize it's a mix of transparent elements and fully opaque type. If you just grabbed the rubber stamp tool and tried cloning out the text right now, you'd end up with something like this. That's because your cloning source is semi-transparent. The trick here is to separate out the 8-bit alpha channel from the source image so you have an entirely opaque image. So with the source layer selected, choose Layer > Layer Mask > From Transparency, temporarily disable the resulting layer mask, and you get something like this. From there, it's just a standard retouching job. Once you clone out the type as best you can, you're ready to add new text from your TL team. (In this case, since the type and paper are at two different levels of transparency, you'd also need to do a quick cleanup on the layer mask. If you look closely at the mask thumbnail, you can see the type as pure white on a 60% gray. Just paint over that part of the mask with more 60% gray and you'll be good to go.) Enable the layer mask again, export as a file with 8-bit alpha support (a PNG, most likely) and you're done. This was a fairly straightforward example, of course, but the basics remain the same no matter how complex the retouching job. Now rinse and repeat 500 more times with all the rest of the game files. Aren't you glad you decided to take up image editing?

And with it, the amusement derived from Tay’s mailbox. Boo! 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.

Pop quiz, hotshot. There’s an untranslated (i.e, romaji) word sitting there in the script you're editing, staring right up at you. It’s been left like that because the TL team figured people ought to know what it means. But will they really? And what are the ramifications if they don’t? You’re running out of time, and patch release day is breathing down your neck. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO? In the case of KoiRizo, I ended up relying on a journalistic standard commonly called “the first reference rule.” Here’s how it works. Visual novels for all! Let’s say you’re a journalist writing an article about efforts to improve educational standards in underdeveloped nations. At some point, you might find yourself needing to refer to The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, aka UNESCO. But if just you dropped the acronym “UNESCO” in there, most people wouldn’t know what the bloody hell you were talking about. And if you went with “The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization” every time, your prose would be about as ungainly as me at my prom. So a compromise gets struck: you explain the term on your first reference to it, then use the shorter form thereafter. An example first reference: “The director-general of The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), pledged to make visual novels part of the global curriculum by 2025.” Or: “The director-general of UNESCO, the UN agency focused on international education efforts, pledged to make visual novels part of the global curriculum by 2025.” At this point, you’d be free to use “UNESCO” in any future references, since you’ve already explained the term. Everyone wins: the reader understands what you’re talking about, and you only have to use one word instead of eight. Ojousamas for all! The same holds true for visual novels. Let’s say an untranslated term like “ojousama” shows up in your script. if the reader has consumed a fair number of anime/manga/VNs, they might know this describes a young woman of certain means and refinement. It’s a common VN archetype, after all. But a relative newcomer to these genres would have no way of knowing that. They’d be lost if you just started dropping O-bombs out of the blue. So the first thing to do is determine context. Is this a one-off reference? If so, you can probably just fully translate the line and be done with it. (“She takes a limo to school? She must be an ojousama” becomes, “She takes a limo to school? She must come from money.”) In the case of KoiRizo, however, the word “ojousama” is used several dozen times. In fact, a character’s ojousama-ness becomes the focal point of an entire route. It would be a fool’s errand to try and excise it, particularly when there’s no one English word to replace it. So we apply the first reference rule. The initial mention in the translated KoiRizo script reads: “Because she's an ojousama, it'd be a given that she wouldn't worry about matters like money.” It hints at the meaning, but doesn't quite go far enough. So applying our rule, we update it to: “She's a proper young lady of means — an ojousama — so you'd expect her not to worry about things like money.” We’ve now defined the word “ojousama” in context and set the stage for its future use. This will make the rest of the VN flow much more smoothly for both new readers and purists who prefer their tropey terms untranslated. If several hours go by without us using the word again, it’s common courtesy to provide a reminder of its definition, but otherwise we should be good to go. All for gruel! You can even apply the rule in reverse. Here, two characters are about to spend 50 or so lines talking about a certain home-cooked dish. Original translation below: A: “Okay ... What's in the pot?” B: “Rice gruel with egg broth.” We don’t want to spend the next 50 lines saying “Rice gruel with egg broth.” Nor do we want to just say “gruel,” which sounds like something ladled out in a Depression-era orphanage. In fact, this is a steaming bowl of Japanese comfort food deliciousness. So we apply the rule in reverse, and bring back the untranslated term from the original script: A: “Okay ... What's in the pot?” B: “Ojiya — rice end egg porridge.” Now we can safely use the term “ojiya” for the next 50 lines. This ends up working better on several levels: it makes the dish sound more traditionally Japanese, it strikes the right emotional tone, and it helps us shave extra words from our lines. P.S. - If anyone knows where I can get a really good bowl of ojiya in New York City, I’m all ears.

tada~ http://blog.fuwanovel.net/2015/09/shiny-days-troubleshooting-guide/ Those are all super generic troubleshooting tips that probably don't apply to any specific problems being encountered. It just tells me that 0verflow doesn't know wtf either.

It's not even about her looking too loli, she is confirmed to be under age in game which makes it impossible for Jast to include her in the official release since that would present them with legal issues in a ton of countries.

http://vocaroo.com/i/s038YIP68L3S That should take care of that.

Playing Dies Irae - Acta est Fabula

Ah, a sense of community, that's a tricky business. I hope you don't mind if I ramble for a moment or two . I remember talking with quite a few people about group friendships, and feeling sad about people going their separate ways and how you deal with it, how you stay together, and etc etc. The fact of the matter is this - if a group of people only comes together to have fun and talk about hobbies, muck around, share a laugh, play a game or two, then that group of people will always split apart at some point in the future. The bonds forged between these people are too superficial to withstand any tension, or any semi-serious inconvenience. Let me quote a story from Jeremy Clarkson's past: "Back in the eighties I spent pretty well every saturday night with the same group of freind's in a King's Road basement bar in Kennedy's We laughed all the time, we went on stage with the band, we sang, we drank ourselves daft and we knew, with the sure-fire certainty that night will follow day, that we'd be mates forever. Had one of them been accused of gouging the barman's eye out with a lawnmower, I'd have told the police I was dead at the time and that I knew nothing. I would even have taken the heat on his behalf, had push come to shove. Which would have made me feel awfully foolish today because I have no idea where two of those friends are, and, for the life of me, I cannot even remember what the third one was called. How did this happen? Presumably, when I said goodbye for the last time ever, I really did believe I'd be seeing them all again the following weekend. It wasn't like we'd had a row, or that they'd all grown beards or moved to Kathmandu. We just went home and never saw one another again. And this happens all the time. I went throug my address book earlier and there are countless hundred of people, friends, muckers, soul mates and former colleagues who I never see." This indeed happens all the time. You’re friends with somebody when you’re 15, but when you’re 20 you suddenly meet up and find you no longer have anything in common. And the depth of the bond between you two isn’t strong enough to overcome this. Or you suddenly got busy, and you’re too tired to want to do anything, whether you continue to stay in touch will depend on the strength of that bond between the two of you. That is to say, is your friendship real or do you just meet up to whack out a rounds of Persona Arena at the local arcade every day? Because if it's the latter, then the slightest inconvenience or hardship will snap that friendship and chances are you won't even regret it breaking. Similarly, your forum games sometimes involve a bit of work and if bonds aren’t strong enough or incentives aren’t there for people to want to withstand that, then people won't participate. This brings me rather round-aboutly to my point (‘round-aboutly’ is a word… now *shifty eyes*.) You’re an exceptional entertainer, Ren, but you don’t build a sense of community through a mutual sense of having a good time, a community is built upon very real and deep bonds. I understand where you’re coming from though, the Members Lounge was supposed to be a place where members of the community could share real parts of their lives with other members, because this act of sharing is one of the ways people bond and grow close to one another. It was supposed to foster a sense of community before it failed spectacularly and hilariously, so that idea was my one attempt at that. You can’t shove a sense of community down people’s throats, so… not much you can do. This is kinda where I say ‘that’s life’, then I laugh nervously, give you a hearty whack on the shoulder, and offer you a strong drink . Anyway, Fuwa is surviving by being a place where people can come and talk about Visual Novels. So we may not be a close knit community, but it’s a place where people can relax and talk about common interests, or participate in projects, in a non-judgemental and respectful atmosphere. And maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe that's all it needs to be for now. Maybe it will be something more in the future.

This thread is for particular CGs that are very memorable. Put them in spoiler tags and mention the VN outside the tag. Write why you like it too! (Ever17)

I have a cold, which means I have trouble breathing, every movement is tiring me out and there is way too much slime inside me. That's almost like sex.

I'm just going to remind you that fan translations are technically illegal; we are tolerated by the license holders, but they have the power to shut us down at any time for any reason, or no reason at all. Between the bad publicity of shutting down projects and the fact that a non-zero number of people who play the patch will (hopefully [i can dream]) purchase the original game, most do not do so. However, once you start accepting money for your work, all of that changes.

I'm thinking of writing a Shiny Days troubleshooting guide for the Fuwazette. If you guys find any solutions to some of the problems going around, I'd like to know. Right now we have the random crashing which can be resolved by being in windowed mode. We have the save issues which is resolved by either installing the game into a non-write-protected directory or running it as admin. There's the crash with the three dialog boxes after selecting a costume that some people on the JAST forums have described, which has no known fix, IIRC. Anyone have any other issues/solutions? To Sanahtlig, did you figure out if installing .net framework 3.5 made any difference? Seems like it made no difference for the full screen crash but I haven't seen anyone report about the other crash. edit: this article is going to trigger so many people who hate seeing "game" used to describe VNs

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.

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.

Sorry, I can only love 2D women.

I feel like most parts of the site needs more exposure on the other parts. Right now it feels like Fuwanovel is four independent sites with nothing to do with each other, the front-page game database, the Fuwazette, the Reviews Hub, and the forums. More interconnectivity and more ways to see what's happening on one part of the site from another would be great and would encourage more people to participate in all aspects of the site. Sometimes a simple solution can work really well. Look how many more personal blog posts were being made once they enhanced the sidebar to show the last 10 (although it's back down to 5), that was a pretty immediate boost. The user blogs are a minor and unpopular section of the site, so I'd imagine that adding that level of exposure across the other sections of the site would have even stronger effects.

Ever 17 I love this image i just love it (narcissu) Everyone needs a helping hand yume miru kusuri Clannad Muv luv alt Yume miru kusuri Katawa shoujo Sharin no kuni It is in spanish but if you played the vn you know what this part says anyway KS brass restoration

And you're derailing this thread even further with your personal attacks. What makes you think you're in a position to condescend on others here? You criticize me for external linking to my blog... but at least I've contributed something. Does it really matter where I host it, if it's relevant to visual novels / Fuwanovel? Just yesterday people were complaining that there wasn't enough discussion / content on this site. One of the areas singled out for improvements was the blog area. I could stop updating my blog here--but what problem would that solve exactly? Or do you just snipe at people because that's the only way you know how to interact with people on the Internet? I posted the page views to argue against the statement of your's I quoted. I think that was obvious to... everyone except you? I can see where the traffic comes from by the way. Most of the traffic came from the Steam forums, specifically from a forum thread titled "Sakura Swim Club adult version + Uncensoring Patch now available", with a link title of "How to uncensor the Steam version of Sakura Swim Club". I imagine people who clicked the link inside were... interested in uncensoring their game they bought on Steam! Shocking, I know. But I suppose to double-check you could ask Denpasoft how many downloads the patch got (it's hosted on their Amazon servers). You know, instead of posting needless snark. Then you could match that up against Steam sales and Denpasoft sales and show once and for that the demand for adult content is substantial but that Denpasoft itself is unpopular for any number of reasons--as I'm confident that both Steam sales AND patch downloads overwhelm the number of sales that Denpasoft has made. But no, you're more interested in posting useless speculation (and ironically, criticizing others for doing the same) rather than doing the legwork to arrive at actual answers. Great post. Way to add to the discussion. Glad to see you took the effort to write that out.

Welcome aboard ~ Riveting plots you say?

I fully expect to be in the hospital before I am ready to finish my Sakura trial And christ, that sounds like a legit Sakura game. Sakura Trial. You play as Jun Takeshi, a young, upcoming lawyer in Japan. One day he gets a case he can't turn down. Two sisters, accused of shoplifting clothes stand trial for theft. He must now choose which sister to fuck. Oh, and maybe keep them out of jail or something.

Katawa Shoujo

Common cold = Masturbation confirmed. Which means I have been masturbating for like five days straight. (´・ω・`)

The recent topics sidebar is back. The collective prayers have been answered.

In the interest of facilitating a community restoration patch, I did a comparison of files between the English and Japanese installs. Google spreadsheet The installations are sufficiently different that even if the censorship could be undone by replacing a few files, I wouldn't know which ones to replace.

Imho, bonding in a forum as big as Fuwanovel doesn't have the same connotation as bonding in a group of friends. There's a simple reason for that : in the end, we're all a bunch of strangers to each other. Ren, you want to use games and activities as a purpose for bonding members between each other, but I think that can only work among people who already appreciate each other's company. I play games / participate in events when I know I can have a good time, and it's just not likely it will happen with people I don't know. Sure, I could take the time to get to know those people, but the keyword here is time, if I already have a group of friends to play with, and other activities that keep me busy, I'm not sure I'd take the risk to involve myself in potentially time-consuming activities where I'm not sure I'd enjoy myself as much as with my friends. In a community with so many diverse people, where so many different people can be found, I think Fuwanovel really thrives with it debates and exchange of constructive opinions about Visual Novels. That's the simple reason why VN discussions is still going strong, because no matter how different we all are, the one and only common thing that links us all together are Visual Novels. And it seems normal to me that bonding should come from those discussions, rather than random activities. And, relating to one of Rooke's post earlier, this bonding is deeper than one you could get from activities, since you genuinely gain a sense of respect for the people with whom you exchange constructive ideas. To me, that's the real sense of community we could develop on fuwa. As mentionned earlier, the fuwa reviews are a prime example : when I see one of Ryechu's reviews (or any other reviewer), I read someone's opinion that is structured and well thought, that I may agree with or not, but no matter what I will relate to it because it talks about Visual Novels, and people are all here because of their interest in Visual Novels. I gain respect for people who are able to make me reflect about VN, or teach me new things. Maybe it's just me, but I bond with people that I respect. When you had personal issues and you made this thread saying that you might not be able to continue your activities on Fuwa, I remember posting something in the thread, but it was more because I respected you as a person for giving so much of your time to Fuwanovel, rather than because I was sad that you wouldn't be able to host your events. tl,dr : Fuwa's dynamism comes from the discussions concerning VN with all the members, bonding comes from people exchanging opinions and gaining respect for one's well written thoughts, so community events/programs should probably focus on VN discussions (could be a lot of things, organized debate, VN polls, VN discussions thread similar to /visualnovels/, ...) Some ideas that I didn't put many thoughts in it, so they might be bad ideas : - Would it be possible to rank the thread replies depending on the number of like? It would push people to write more relevant stuff (since it does feel rewarding to have your post being the first one displayed). very similar to /visualnovels/ once again, but it gives more meaning to the like system, and might have the benefit to make the more relevant content be easier to spot (I always found it bothersome as a user to have to scroll through mountains of pages to be able to be able to find the relevant info needed when I wanted to reply myself, and it's even more overwhelming in topics I'm totally unfamiliar with. - Separate the member lounge into two different things, a "Community activities" section, and a "Real life talk" section. I think that anything that doesn't belong to those two categories could easily be posted in the "other discussion" section. If the real purpose of the member's lounge is bonding, then, there's probably nothing better than having a section in the forums where you can share your problem, worries, ask for advices, tell a funny story or sad story that happened to you recently, rant about your problem in real life... Because empathy is also a real form of bonding, much as you happen to care about the characters in VN when they have issues, the same can happen in real life. It wouldn't be the brightest section ever, but not everything has to be cheerful and happy go lucky in a forum.

*looks at own signature* fair enough (´・ω・`)

I feel like I learned a bit more about you than I'd expected...

How do you feel about pears?

*A mental reminder I will never act upon: Insert downwards pointing arrow here*

Thank you CeruleanGamer! Well, the game has no adult content so it will indeed be the full package .

^ eclipsed got you covered Just know, it is my duty as the most vocal hater of everything, to tell you that Little Busters is bad.

Earlier in KS life it could be said that it was for small companies or individual looking for some funding to get something off the ground. Now really it does feel like a early pre-order store and larger companies do a KS just for marketing buzz and early income to offset there risk. I think Shenmue 3 probably is the best recent example of this. Honestly though I don't really have a problem with it too much.

Started playing pirate rogue last night thanks to Babiker. I'm still very, very awkward with it, but I'm enjoying it. After nothing but hours and hours of cw, it's nice to have a change of pace. Speaking of cw, I'm loving it more than I ever since TGT. Justicar Truehart is really bringing out my ResidentSleeper even more. Don't worry. I'm really fucking bad at Hearthstone and I've been playing (a lot) since beta. Added you.

the problem is the new site is there there a slippery slope . "when they banned the torrent i did nothing cuzz i didnt use torrents, then they banned the lolis and i did nothing cuzz i didnt like lolis , then they banned hentai and then it was to late"

Don't you love it when things go to plan? :3

It never really got up and running. Tay was, is, will be in the near or far away future, exploring possible power structures for when he leaves the site. Ignore the LC and just hit up Tay if you want something done. He loves both work and people flooding his various inboxes with queries, it gives him fuzzies and makes him feel appreciated. That day he had a thousand messages in his inbox he literally shed tears of joy.

Aaaaaand… who else wants that school metaphor to be swiftly kicked in the vulnerables? Anyone? Anyone at all? It can’t just be me.

I don't really think anything has changed. In the end this is a VN forum, and people are still creating threads and talking about VNs. The people I'm interested in are still around, and VN discussion is still happening. What more is needed? As for loligeddon, I've been moderated several times for posting SFW content. Merely referencing lolis appears to be a censorable offense. I had a private discussion about this with Tay, who said in July that he would make an announcement on the subject in August. Welp, it never happened. You've seen me become more distanced from the site, and that's the main instigating factor. At one point I considered myself a community leader of sorts here. Now I just hang out and talk to people and make no particular effort to contribute. Has loligeddon contributed to the current situation? Not sure. But well, if people lose faith in the direction of the site, they're not going to want to contribute (even if they stick around). That's only natural. As for the OP, I get the sense that there's a misconception regarding the donation system. The donation system is for paying the server bills. It's not for paying people who are currently volunteers to work on the site. The existence of a donation system does NOT obligate Nayleen--or anyone else--to do anything.

Here's basically all I've been using Fuwanovel for in the past few months: Front site / FuwaReviews / FuwaZette: Visit maybe... once. A month. Forum: Log in Check PMs -> reply if have something to say Update my progress in What are you reading/playing/watching threads Check 'Fessions thread Check Intro threads -> hii welcome Check general threads -> merge double posts / move topic if needed -> report change(s) to Moderation Logs -> reply in thread if something to say Check FuwaChat -> reply if I have something to say Mark all as read Log off Back in Spring would probably add a "Think of how2bootlick Tay so he can buff BoardMods some more" We were supposed to have a revamp of some sorts over the summer, but

As one of the "old" members of the site who has basically gone from being a semi-active lurker (that's an oxymoron, right? I'm pretty sure that's an oxymoron... but, that's what I'm gonna call myself!) to an active poster in the Reviews super-secret forum and PMs mostly in regard to the running of FuwaReviews, I'm sort of in the category of "gave up on the forums, but not the site." I check the site every day for two reasons: One, to see if there are any new posts that may actually be relevant to my interests. Unfortunately, with the history not scrolling back as far as it used to, sometimes I miss a few things here and there, and that sucks, but if I don't see it instantly, I'm very likely going to miss it. And then when I do post on something, then I get sidetracked or forget about it or "promise I'm going to do it later only to not do it" (my most recent example being that I reserved a spot in Ren's thief game, even saying that I was going to apply for it on Skype, only to completely get sidetracked by work), then I don't post responses to anything that may need responding to. It's a commitment I can't make, and commitments I should avoid making, so I tend to stay away from things I don't feel strongly about. What I do do is spend some time in our reviews subforum. Anytime there's a new post in that forum, I'm instantly reading it. I don't care if it's Bats or Palas or Exenorate or whoever (Down<3) updating their status post or if we have hold of a new review key or what have you, I read that, because that's what I like to do on this site. I like doing FuwaReviews - I like the business side of doing all of it. I like working with Flutterz on making sure my reviews are as perfect as they can be. I like trolling Bats when he is drunk and posting Minute Reviews that are a paragraph in length and have more jokes than actual content. I like to get people's opinions on what games we should consider high priority. I do what I enjoy on the site. Unfortunately a lot of that is behind-the-scenes work, which sucks, but it's what I enjoy. I would hope people act with this same mentality. If they aren't having fun, why are they here? When the torrents were removed, we lost that crowd. Oh well, they went to [removed] and now they sit on the forums "hey x game is released where the hell is my ddl of it wtf admin". Then the "Forum Cleanup" policy went into effect, and that sent a lot of people packing because they were worried that they were going to get banned because they post something that may be considered suggestive. That's not exactly the intent, but I understand where they're coming from, and I also understand why the Administrators would want to take that route. We can't please everybody. That's impossible. Somebody is going to show up and ask "WHAR TORRENT", realize we don't have those anymore, and never come back. Somebody is going to post something that crosses the line in a spoiler and not realize we can't do that, get warned, and leave. That's the natural flow of forums. Same with cliques, moderation, and members. Natural flow of forums. Spoiler regarding a similar forum that may trigger people. Don't click if you're easily triggered.

The operation went good. I have a new liver now, and I misread the heart operation. They strengthened the inner walls in my heart and added a pacemaker. So I am well and good. Will be back home in three days.

Tiags-chan! Did you think we would leave you out of the loop? Here's a hint: October soon.

Finished Hatsuyuku Sakura. I wasn't expecting much from it, but I was pretty impressed in the end. What acts like a moege tries its best to push its way into the utsuge territory, and while it does fall back onto nakige (and its magical twists) in some parts, the majority of the endings actually end on a pleasantly bittersweet note. It actually tackles its darker themes more responsibly than I expected it to at first, and for that the writer has my respect. What I can't praise is the author's tendency to write twists just for the sake of having twists at places (there are a few random ones) and his habit of outright skipping fight scenes altogether (why even have them in, then?), but those are my only complaints about the writing. Not much to say about the art, but the OST is easily the highlight of this VN - it quickly made its spot amongst my favourites. All in all, a very enjoyable 8/10 from me, definitely give it a read if you're looking for some feels with entertaining comedy and interesting plot. Other than that, I've slowly resumed Sui (finally!), and I'm making my way through Meakashi. I think I'm around the last third, but damn this arc is long! More and more of dai's goodness is sneaking its way into the OST, and Ryukishi's hilarious writing is reaching a legendary status in my head. It feels hilarious and endearing in a different language, but I do have to wonder how I would feel about reading something like this in my native language. At the very least, I can definitely see why some people hate it. Anyway, now that I'm done with HatsuSaku, I might get back to re-reading Kara no Shoujo and then finally jump on that sequel... or maybe go back and read Cartagra first.

Thank you for the responses! I am happy to hear plenty of people here like Umaru as well . @Satsuki: ( ^-^)/(TuT ) @Flutterz: Yeah, I keep forgetting what those board things are called XD. A shishiki or something? @Nosebleed: I agree with you so much! In some of these scenes, the characters hit you right in the heart with only a few words, and sometimes with a single facial expression. So great (>w<)! To be honest, I did feel a tinge of sadness for a moment after giving the board away. Last year, I got a Mami board at the Madoka movie. At the time, I was so happy, but then I put it on my shelf and never looked at it again, so yeah. Sunflower Wars is not on my schedule unfortunately but thank you so much for asking! @monkeysrumble: I can definitely understand why people would dislike Umaru as well. Actually, I feel like they toned her down after the first two episodes. It makes me wonder if the mangaka maybe calmed her down a bit from the initial responses, or perhaps I am just thinking too deeply into this. I reckon if you still hate her after three episodes, that might be a safe time to give the show a drop. I had a booth at a con in Melbourne earlier this month, and I doodled some Umaru pictures while I was there:

HOW! DARE! YOU! IMPLY! MY! LOVE! FOR! RITSUKO! IS! PURELY! BASED! ON! HER! BEING! A! LOLI! its nothing like that!!!!!! ritsuko is love! ritsuko is life! so what if i want her to run towards me in the morning going "Onii-chaaaaan" while smiling brightly? its love i tell you. LOVE!

There are SO MANY redundancies in these sentences, but I kept telling myself it's okay. Then a bunch appeared in the same line: OH COME ON! I hope this is getting another edit before actual release (please? Pretty please?) Suggestions - "The fact I wasn't joking showed how perilous my situation was." Or "That I wasn't joking showed the gravity of my situation." But my preference is probably something like "I wasn't joking, that's how perilous my situation was." something like that. The point is, see how clean and bloat free my suggestions are? See the colossal bloat in the sentence above? The bloat obstructs the meaning, the imagery, and the impact of the words... it also makes my eyebrow twitch.