Adam

Though I don't really get involved with OB affairs, I just want to add that it would be good courtesy to remove his real name from the entry... Adam

I thought the 'petty and cruel dictator' comment was interesting First, the President of Iran is democratically elected Second, the President has no real power, the clerics hold all the power in the country, the President is just a figurehead. That's why when Iran had a very moderate/progressive President, he wasn't able to do much Third, while he has said a lot of idiotic things, he's also been GROSSLY mis-quoted by the media, who ignore any intelligent arguments he's made and blow up mis-translations as bumper sticker headlines...really, when is the media's job to serve as a propaganda platform? It's a shame that our democratically elected, thoroughly incompetent, religiously fanatic President actually has power and the media doesn't do nearly as good a job at calling him out on anything.

If you haven't heard the news: [url]http://www.theotaku.com/news/view/epic_theotaku.com_fan_manga_contest_announced/2690/[/url] [url]http://www.theotaku.com/news/view/epic_theotaku.com_anime_art_contest_announced/2686/[/url] theOtaku is hosting two of the biggest anime art contests ever, but we're running a little short on entries now, which means your odds are great and we're in need. A win-win ;)

I'm a big fan of hot chocolate, whipped cream required. I agree with AzureWolf that Serendipity's frozen hot chocolate is priceless...reminds me, haven't been in a while One thing I want to contribute to this thread is the subject of thickness. I went to a gourmet South American hot chocolate place once and the drink was so thick that it was unbearable. I had to throw it away. I believe it was because they just melted a bar of chocolate into a cup...

I think the AE Boards' Otakupedia entry gives Rick WAYYY too much credit with regard to his theOtaku contributions. Rick was never an important staff member and his writing abilities were awful. We had other reviews up there by other members, including myself, and I never thought that erasing his contributions was a big loss. It probably took me more time to EDIT his reviews than he took to write them. I didn't even post a few because the writing was so bad. In fact, I don't think Rick was even around when we launched a dedicated review site. He had sent reviews to add as supplementary to our hubs. We had a lot of important team members during that period, including Shy and Syk, who helped built the IMPORTANT parts of our hubs, but Rick was way way way below that level. Rick was a nice guy, but yes, a bit crazy. I think it's more accurate to say that he was a minor staff member on theOtaku who submitted a bunch of poorly-written reviews and then went mad. I don't remember how we severed ties, but it wasn't some big dramatic ending.

Thanks all, it's good to know OB members are thinking of us in these troubling times. James expresses everything about theO/OB beautifully, I have nothing to add. Don't worry, if anything ever happens to theOtaku, I'll ensure that OB can get on a lifeboat and can drift away to safety :-)

I talked to a friend of mine that works in finance about this. He said that on *any* topic, most people don't take analysts too seriously. They just look at historical information, use a few simple economic models, and then predict the future based on those models. I doubt most video game analysts really know the industry too well.

On the main page of our fan art site, we display new artwork. Currently, we have it configured to display the last 48 hour's worth, which translates to approximately 18 pages. People who browse our fan art site actively, do you think this is a good number, or should we shorten it to fewer pages and display only the last 24 hours, for example? -Adam

I've absolutely never supported pop-up ads, so it's our ad broker that's at fault if you ever see them. Please notify me immediately when this happens and mention the page you were on.

Hey everyone, Thanks for your replies! Give me some time though to define our needs more specifically as they relate to the next version of theOtaku.com before I respond.

I only got to skim this thread, but as someone who's taken quite a few advanced classes in economics, I feel obligated to say something here! [quote name='DeathBug'] Actually, I do, in a fashion; surpluses are bad. Economically, a macro surplus is a sign of inefficiency; not all resources are being used to their fullest capabilities. [/quote] How in the world are macro surpluses bad and deficits good? Surpluses are simply created when government revenue is higher than government expenses. This has nothing to do with resource allocation; rather it's simply the government making a profit. You'd never criticize a company that makes a profit as being 'inefficient'. Quite the opposite, companies that are unprofitable are the inefficient ones. Governments are different than companies, of course, and shouldn't exist to try and solely get surpluses. But if it happens, great! I mean surpluses can accrue interest and thus create a small revenue stream and backup cash reserve for the government beyond taxes. They also don't incur interest payments, like deficits. We're going to be paying for Bush's "efficient" use of deficits (and just the interest of it) for quite a long time. [QUOTE=DeathBug] 2) The formula for Gross National Product is G+I+C+NX. That's government spending plus investments plus consumption plus net exports. If you increase any of these, all things remaining equal, the GNP will rise. Increasing government spending will lead to a greater return as long as the other factors remain stable; you have to spend money to make money. Therefore, we can see that a surplus is actually a bad thing; the surplus that Clinton gets credit for should actually be the surplus he gets blame for, as it heralded economic downtimes. ("G" went down, so GNP went down.).[/QUOTE] I don't want to sound mean, but beyond the equation G+I+C+NX = GDP, everything else here is wrong. Increasing government spending crowds out business investment. This is because the government borrows money to fund its spending and this raises the interest rate, which makes investments for businesses less desirable (the "crowding out effect"). Thus, a higher G means by definition a lower I, which means a lower C as well. You cannot keep the other variables equal, as you assumed. Otherwise, why wouldn't every president, upon taking office, just borrow trillions of dollars and mindlessly spend it? Increasing government spending also creates a federal deficit (as I talked about earlier). The rise in GDP from increased G isn't very sustainable for an economy. This is why even with a massive increase in G, our GDP growth is still nowhere near where it was under Clinton. Speaking of which, Clinton managed to grow the GDP solely through C + I + NX. That means, during his tenure, people spent more money, businesses spent more money, and foreigners bought more American goods. THIS is sustainable. Additionally, though G went down, we had a budget surplus, which every trained economist in the U.S. cheered heartily for. -Adam

Fan art ratings are relative, definitely not absolute. People obviously have different individual scales for grading. The only purpose of the rating system is not to rate the individual piece itself, as that's impossible to do given different people's scales, but to rate pieces against each other. And with that purpose in mind, there's no difference between a Yes//No system and a scale system. (Except the Yes//No system is much faster and easier.) We used to have a numbered scale system, but it was quite problematic. It was on a scale between 1-5 and our highest ranking artist had a 3.7. Now, you can see how discouraging a 3.7/5 is for the highest artist and most people ended up around the 3 range. It's one thing to be rated a 3.3 and another to know that 80% of the people who viewed your work liked it. The 80% number is DEFINITELY more encouraging than a 3.3/5. -Adam

As we're moving our fan art site to a predominantly auto-submission system, I'm going to need a few people to help moderate so that art is categorized in the right place, nothing inappropriate is uploaded, and titles are spelled correctly :). I'd like 4-5 people preferably for this. Moderators will be able to delete artwork, edit artwork titles/captions/categories, and even freeze the artist if they're spamming. This is a huge and valuable responsibility, as we have one of the top fan art sites on the Internet. It will also let artists not have to worry about our old and inefficient approval system. Basically the code for moderating artwork is done and very intuitive to use. I need people I can really trust and who have been around OB for a while and are active in our art community and who want to see it prosper. Please reply to this thread if you're interested in one of these spots. (You also have to have an active myO account.)

Problem resolved.

Limit removed. It's too annoying to implement a hex system, but if there are any colors you really want to see (that are reasonable and noticably different from the ones we have), just post a list here. -Adam

Fair enough, are the new colors all right? I wanted to give the main site some personality, black and white and gray just kept getting to me. -Adam

If we ever made another fan fiction site (we used to have one under the leadership of Sara), it would be amazing and highly innovative. I've played with mock-ups of it in the past. However, there's a LOT more I think needs to be fixed around theOtaku before we should even start worrying about new features. A fan fiction site would be at least 6+ months away. -Adam

Juuthena, For signing guestbooks, I made it so that it stays on the same page. Deleting guestbook entries is trickier business though, so I left it as-is. For adding friends, I feel the current system is fine, because you can see the friend added once you do it. (And thus there's a handy link for you to click after you've done it - and I can't imagine it's a function people use too, too often.)

Chabichou, -> I took the time today to fix both glitches you mentioned. Thanks for pointing them out. Custom smilies in modify posts and mp3s now work. Enjoy. Shadow Guardian, -> Sorry to hear about your troubles. I'm not sure what to say to them though. We've had 130 art submissions today alone, which is actually a bit above average, so I know the huge majority of people are getting through fine. Maybe it has to do with your browser not liking transmitting things online. -Adam

Comment posting error fixed. Also, I *think* I fixed the problem a few users have been experiencing (like Sara/Panda) about text wrapping. Please re-enter your introduction to see if it works right.

I really thought I fixed the delete comment option, ah well, I'll try and get to it tomorrow.

That'll be the next thing on my agenda to fix... UPDATE: I think I fixed the problem...anyone still having problems?

I really don't have the time to tackle the issue of why blogs aren't working in myO v2. I don't think I did anything different to the intro code-wise, so it doesn't make sense to me that they should stop working all of a sudden. Can someone who's sufficiently web-savvy do some source code investigating and see what's going on there? (Blogs are those images with iframes embedded inside them. I think they're awful, but a lot of users put them on their sites. For some reason the iframes aren't loading.) Thanks, -Adam

Ohkami, The biggest reason why categories are slow to be added is that they take me time to add to our central database. In all, it takes me about 20 minutes to update all our areas: wallpapers, guru, fan art, greetings. Doing this on a daily basis makes me want to complete the process as soon as possible. So you can see that stopping mid-approval and then going through the process to add a new category is quite tedious. On the flip side, I don't want people to send art in other categories under Original Anime. This defeats the purpose of this section and if we ever add a category on it in the future, then the art is mis-categorized. So the best thing to do is just to send me a polite email asking for a new category and try to have more than 1 piece for the new category. Then be patient and I'll try to get around to it. Thanks, -Adam

Mimmi, Problem fixed, thanks for bringing it to my attention. Chabichou, myO v2 relies heavily on CSS...We didn't disable anything but the fact that we use it so much more than before might cause strange effects like the one you mentioned. I'd recommend viewing your site's source and playing with that. I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to CSS so I can't comment beyond that. Thanks, -Adam