5 Years!


Five years ago today, I registered animecharactersdatabase.com with the hopes of creating a website that would people find the answer to "Who's This Character".

We went online early May 2007 with a thousand characters from roughly a hundred sources. All indexed by 6 key traits: Eye Color, Hair Color, Hair Length, Age, Gender, and animal ears.


These past 5 years, the site has grown so much. Form 10,000 daily visitors and 30,000 characters in 2010 to 50,000 daily visitors and 46,000 characters in 2012.

A lot of amazing things began happening in 2011.


anonymous17 (aka Hime-sama), Yeray, LiCobra, EatsSweets, Igraine, flareburst have all contributed over 1000 characters! Hime-sama did the impossible, contributing over 9000 characters in under a year.

Bogie, Sas, Hikarihaze, LiCobra, sunshade, InfernalQueen, Igraine, anonymous17 and EatsSweets have all done an amazing job helping with the Who's This Character Board. Solving more than a hundred posts each! And Bogie's past 1000.

And can't forgot our moderators that keep the site running smoothly, helping with a great many things! CaptainBrain, 13x31, anonymous17, Satellizer123, LiCobra, Igraine, InfernalQueen, Shinigami_55!


Yet, with all we've accomplished in 5 years, I feel we still have so far to go!


With a growing community, and an ever dynamic site.... one day, we'll be #1 in anime!


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A little shoutout for me (Rei).

I added the first 26,000 characters from 2635 anime and game titles. 100% of the code that runs ACDB was written by me, and continues to be maintained by me. ( Currently 287631 lines, 894698 words, 10882448 bytes of code and 15581 subversion commits ) I build and maintain our servers. First with OAMP ( OpenBSD + Apache + MySQL + PHP ) setups in 2008 up until 2010 when I switched to FLMP ( FreeBSD + Lighttpd + MySQL + PHP ). I've taught myself PHP, Assembly, Bash, MySQL, DNS, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, Debian Linux, GDB, and C among many other tech skills along the way. It's been a fun journey for me, one I hope never ends! ^_^

We've been kicked out of Google AdSense and adBrite denied my request to use their ad network.

Google sent me this letter on March 15th: Google Letter 1

They had threatened us back in October of 2011. I was prepared, and had a backup plan: apply at adBrite.

Joining was easy, but their reviewers rejected us.

You can read through the emails exchanged:

adBrite 1 ( to us )
adBrite 2 ( from us )
adBrite 3 ( to us )
adBrite 4 ( from us )
adBrite 5 ( to us )



Essentially, they rejected us for being an adult site. Which is false, but I accept we have some images that are NSFW. I asked them for guidance as to what they considered adult.

Their answers basically came down to "anything that might make an adolescent male giggle or say BOOBS ". If I removed everything past that threshold, there wouldn't be an ACDB left.

I didn't see many options, clearly they don't want us. So I asked what was the deal between them and fakku.net And they replied with even more hostility.

So be it.

Anime Characters Database will not be supported by advertisements for the foreseeable future.


I will be running JList promotions for the time being. JList does not pay me for showing their ads. They only pay me a commission on sales. You can support the site by clicking one of the JList banners and shopping at JList.

Adding SSL to Anime Characters Database was no small feat.

First, needed to grab the latest copy of lighttpd.

After configuring it, compiling it installing it, updating my root Jail script to launch it, writing a new configuration file, generating a SSL perm file, generating some Diffie-Hellman and Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman parameters installing, creating log files, altering permissions, modifying firewall rules...

The new server failed to start.

Damn thing was looking for shared libraries in the wrong path.

So I changed the configuration prefix, installed it in / then copied and pasted that into the chroot and it started fine ~

Next step was getting the right mod_redirect rules.

SSL is a bitch. Always complaining. Always giving scary warnings. I swear the industry that reaps money off of "trusting" certificates has everything to do with this.

Self signed a cert and limited the server to www.animecharactersdatabase.com all other domains with redirect out.

Last but important, I reniced the lighttpd process to 20.

So even if a new SSL BEAST like hack happens, I wont care.

Also SSL is CPU intensive, so I also don't care.

nice 20 = lowest of low priority. If there's any CPU left, it'll run. The moment something else wants to run, it gets stopped. ^_^

Passwords can now be recovered using a standard, and simple process.

Head over to http://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/fpw.php . A link is also available to this tool on the Login page.

Step 1 is to provide the email address your account was registered under.

Please be careful, and enter it correctly. You are permitted 3 attempts per day.

After entering a valid email address, a reset key will be generated and emailed to you within 5 or 10 minutes, usually. I purposely rate limit our emails, just in case some clever hacker breaks in and finds a way to send a 100 million emails - they'll be queued up and sent one every 5 minutes.

Once you have your reset code, copy and paste it into

Step 2

If the key is valid, you'll be redirected to your Account Settings page where you will be prompted to update your password.


That's all there is to it. ^_^



Oh, one more note for Nerds:

You can use the Password Reset like a one-time-passphrase. Since it automatically logs you in, and can be used only once - it makes for an ideal means of logging into the site from places you suspect might be bugged with key loggers or packet sniffers.

Looks like we're off to a good start for 2012!

38,000 characters
7,500 members
Around 60 regulars
30,000 daily visitors
15 pages per second

The database has been optimized to run fast, and we now have daily backups of the site.

I'll likely be making minor tweaks to the site for the next few days. As I don't yet seem to have enough energy to pull off another big project.



Some predictions might be nice, hmm?


This year... I think we'll reach 50,000 characters easily. 60,000 is possible, but will depend largely on how soon we hit 50k.

We'll have over 10,000 members, and over 100 regulars hopefully as early as April. ( Sooner if I finish updating various member features like Favorites, Groups, Awards, and so on. )

I'll be aiming for 100,000 daily visitors. Essentially 3x our current traffic levels.



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I wish everyone a Happy new Year, and look forward to working with you all though 2012 and beyond!

Over the course of running Anime Characters Database, I've been faced with many challenges regarding the speed of the site database.

Running a concurrent MySQL database has many well defined challenges when you have several people at once selecting data, updating data, deleting data, and inserting data.

The books will tell you to use the appropriate storage engine for the situation.

MyISAM has only table locks, but performs well on selects.

InnoDB has row level locks and table locks.

Finished some log rotation.

Serving over a million page requests per day can grow some large logs...

-rw-r--r-- 1 www www 1.1G Oct 1 01:10 access-jail-186.log.2.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 www www 16G Dec 19 02:46 access-jail-186.log.3


Made some updates to our Tag Pages:

http://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/tags.php
http://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/newtags.php

Added a Cloud-like list of who's been online today to our member stats page:

http://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/memberstats.php


Here's what's left on my ToDo list:

Tags

From my profile...

Select my award
1
2 3

1 = desc
2 = img
3 = select/deselect

See my Main Award

1) An updated favorites list would be awesome
2) build hall of fames for ever place members contribute
3) finish the password reset tool
4) isolate mysql & mysqld then craft automated backups and a read only database
5) create a mycounts database table then use it every place COUNT(*)'s happen to show a bar of member accomplishments ... like 99 fav chars, 10 fav series, 77 loved characters, 2 hated characters, etc all with links to the relevant pages. people with all 0's might find motivation to use the tools and change that, and see the changes in real time ^^
6) update all moderation tools
7) try again to create a moderation center that gives a useful heads up of where mods need to direct their attention so we never have to hear again from members complaining about something not being modded for months
8) experience moderation from the non-admin perspective. i'm kinda curious if there is adequate notification of status. new changes. pending moderation. modded approved. modded denied. and why.


update Who

members
after new thread
can delete if no replies yet
can add NSFW
but not remove ...

We have made our site's staff very own Alignment chart.

For those of you who doesn't know what I'm talking about,
Here's an explanation of what Alignment is:
"Character Alignment is a shorthand for a given character's (or religion's, society's, organization's, etc.) moral/ethical outlook on Life, the Universe, and Everything. Many roleplaying games use some sort of alignment system as an "ideal" for a character to live up to, though some gamers deride them as crutches to "real roleplaying," and some systems accordingly have none at all." (Quoted from TvTropes.org)
Example:


(If you still don't understand, just go to this forum to find out what was going on.)

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For the past three (!) weeks we've been discussing this topic on the forum and creating our own alignment posters. I was the leader of this project, and Sas was editing all of the images. I am very frateful for his help.

This is the result of our work:



These are the members who took part in this project, and helped out in the process too:
EatsSweets, Rei, Rinn, flareburst, Igraine, CaptainBrain, LiCobra, Sas and me, anonymous17.

All of the participants will be getting an award, which hasn't been created yet. The award is now discussed on this forum. (the last page of the forum, where we've been discussing this prject earlier.)
EDIT: The awards were created and given away on 2011\12\15.

I'd like to thank all of you who was taking part in this project! It was a very fun way to draw many members of our main staff together! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

anonymous17 (AKA Hime-sama)

P.S.: I wish we could do another project like that, so the whole staff could participate! Or maybe we can do it every year.

To all members and staff please note that the Forum Rules have been updated and all changes should be noted.

Uploaded a large patch to source.php


This should fix:

- add to fav
- remove from fav
- edit plot


Also tweaked the style and layout a bit.