Monday, February 25, 2008

Quick Notes
-- I'm visiting FUNimation's office this week to show off Version Vibrant. I'll probably be programming on the plane since we're launching so soon. I'll be sure to take pictures!

-- There'll a "Personal" meta category which you can use to store publishable personal fiction. If your fiction is in the anime/manga style you can put it in the Original Anime category

-- I used to love writing fiction. You couldn't stop me. Then I stopped, for personal reasons. I'll probably upload an old story I wrote about 7 years ago while I was just a college freshman

-- I want to eventually have sub-categories for areas like TV, Movies, Comics/Books, but we're just going to keep them general at launch and add sub-categories as it becomes apparent what people are submitting. We might have a few though to start like Avatar, Harry Potter, etc.

-- I saw the movie Gattaca, it's a good one

-- I'm glad you all agreed with my decision yesterday. I think PG-13 is just right for us, and I apply the same standard to WORLDS/myOtaku as well.

-- So much to do, still...I really need a vacation.
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Sunday, February 24, 2008

Adult Fiction Decision
Thanks all for your feedback. I read every single comment and have been reading fan fiction on other sites to get some sense of it.

This is a VERY difficult issue for me personally. I have nothing against the adult fan fiction community and I know that offering adult content would increase our audience.

Sarah/Dagger said that the most important thing is not to backtrack. I agree with this. Allowing content and then taking it away or censoring it would be too upsetting to members.

We're probably going to launch and not publish any works above a PG-13 rating...by keeping it strict at the start, we'll avoid the backpedaling problem. We can always pedal forward, though, depending on how things go. We'll also solve the problem of ratings, since the difference between PG-13 and NC-17 is much wider than the difference between R and NC-17.

I know that this move will alienate some fiction writers and readers and communities. The best I can say is that we never had a fan fiction site before, so you're not losing anything, you can still keep your adult stuff on other sites and if you want to promote your general purpose stuff, we'll be happy to host your works. It's the same with our community of adult artists who upload their normal content to us

My hope is that, since 80-90% of all fan fiction on fanfiction.net is appropriate for teenagers, that we'll still build a healthy and thriving community.

In many ways theO is an extension of myself, so not all decisions I make are purely related to building traffic or making everyone happy. A lot of the decisions I make are related to what I feel comfortable with personally, you know?

I hope you understand and that this doesn't deter you from submitting your general audience work to us, I just don't want to lead you guys on and would rather get this out of the way now..
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Saturday, February 23, 2008

Fan Fiction Help
Fan fiction is a HARD area to cover correctly. There's a culture of it online and I respect that.

What can we do to avoid the mistakes so many other fan fiction sites have made?

What are the MUST have features/what are the controversies?

I want every unhappy fan fiction author online to find a happy home with us, but I understand it's going to be a journey.

Here are some hot topics that I've gleaned so far:
> People like to upload adult-themed/controversial fan fiction works

> People don't like censorship of any kind on their fan fiction

What else?

We might not get to everything at launch but I want to hit the ground running immediately on how we can improve and improve and improve and I need your help. If you know of any fan fiction authors, get their input and comment here too
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Friday, February 22, 2008

Later today
It's no secret that we're temporarily pulling back on the cosplay site until we can figure out how to integrate it uniquely and epically into Version Vibrant

However, later today I'm going to announce Version Vibrant's NEW section.

The reason I'm announcing this section ahead of time rather than leaving it as a surprise is I need *all* of your help to make sure it has great content near launch.

If you can contribute yourself to this new section, I want you to prepare in advance for it. If you can't contribute and know someone, personally or just OF them, I want you to give them a heads-up. I'd really appreciate the help

Post your guesses as to what this new section is here, just to see who's a great guesser :)
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Thursday, February 21, 2008

How to Launch A Site In 10 Days...
Version Vibrant will be online within 10 days.
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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The Underdog...
Our competitors are big and scary

They have an enormous amount of cash at their disposal. In some cases millions of dollars

They have teams that are many times our size, all working in one place, all working out of a nice office

They have smart business people focused night and day on wheeling and dealing

And these are only the competitors I know of; no doubt there are many in stealth mode or that might come out of nowhere tomorrow

What chance does a 'mom and pop' site like ours have? What are our advantages and what can we do to out-run the big/scary companies?

I can write an essay on this topic, especially given how optimistic I am about Version Vibrant, but I'd like to hear your thoughts instead.

Comment--
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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Speed...
Speed has improved, we found the culprit and fixed it.

I also took two hours to implement some Version Vibrant-level technology into the main page of each person's myOtaku blog.

As you'll notice myO member pages load instantly now BUT there might be some bugs with it. Let me know here.
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Monday, February 18, 2008

Still trying to figure out what's wrong with speed...

I fixed the problem with Modifying Posts on myOtaku and also made it so when you log in you stay logged in longer
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Quieting a Concern
I'm trying to figure out why the site has been so slow the last few days. I don't think it's due to the surgery since the day after we did it everything was speedy.

Just to quiet a quick concern, we have it setup so that if you register a WORLD it checks to make sure the URL of the WORLD isn't someone's existing member name

So, for example, if someone other than me tries to register: theOtaku.com/worlds/adam

It'll give an error message and ask you to select a different URL

You also don't "friend" members in the new theOtaku, you subscribe to them and who you subscribe to isn't publicly displayed, so we're keeping myOtaku friends separate from theOtaku 'subscriptions'
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Sunday, February 17, 2008

Because You Asked Nicely
When we relaunch, while you'll have to adhere to a 100 x 100 exact avatar size, you'll be able to use the PNG file format (as well as GIF and JPG). This will be a test on our part for launch, if it goes well we're going to add PNG support everywhere.

All that's left for us to do right now on Version Vibrant is to polish and add security checks. Then we're going to move our entire site to our powerful, new servers and I will most likely be online for 48 hours straight fixing the inevitable bugs that arrive, answering questions, calming angry otaku, and monitoring everything.
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