Lounge, Forums, Guilds ... we have something of a problem in that there isn't much activity going on any more.

What can be done to change this ?

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

For what it's worth, if you told me there was a lot of activity on this site at any time, I'd be surprised. An Anime Character Database should have accurate information on anime characters. I've found that a lot of key characters are missing and, in the case of the characters that are on the site, a lot of the info is wrong. This is entirely the fault of the admins of this site. They allow people to contribute with little oversight into whether the contributed information is accurate or not.

The way I see it, this site should've died a long time ago. I think they managed to extend it's life with the waifu thing, but it's gonna get old at some point.

Jesus I would love it if you would help Rei he works alone and also the support that users give him is very poor they don't read the rules to add characters and Rei deleted those rules because they don't read them the help is very little the members seem to be very few in fact I help and support rei and it is very difficult to add people who support abcd. Because some of them don't like to introduce themselves and leave their accounts and they don't know how to send images in their messages to Rei, it's hard to understand some ideas and she does her best to make users enjoy this database, there are also characters that myanimelist doesn't have like figyu@carnival among others.

The Jesus For what it's worth, if you told me there was a lot of activity on this site at any time, I'd be surprised. An Anime Character Database should have accurate information on anime characters. I've found that a lot of key characters are missing and, in the case of the characters that are on the site, a lot of the info is wrong. This is entirely the fault of the admins of this site. They allow people to contribute with little oversight into whether the contributed information is accurate or not. The way I see it, this site should've died a long time ago. I think they managed to extend it's life with the waifu thing, but it's gonna get old at some point.

Perhaps you'd like to help moderate the numerous entries on this site. There are quite a few, and we're all trying our best to deal with them. A lot of us have lives (other than myself, who spends half of his time watching anime, but I can't see them all anyway).

[ Edited Jun 9, 2018 ]

The Jesus For what it's worth, if you told me there was a lot of activity on this site at any time, I'd be surprised. An Anime Character Database should have accurate information on anime characters. I've found that a lot of key characters are missing and, in the case of the characters that are on the site, a lot of the info is wrong. This is entirely the fault of the admins of this site. They allow people to contribute with little oversight into whether the contributed information is accurate or not. The way I see it, this site should've died a long time ago. I think they managed to extend it's life with the waifu thing, but it's gonna get old at some point.

You know, constructive criticism is what we were looking for. This is just straight up negativity which is helping nobody.

Also "It's gonna get old at some point."? But you still use the waifu feature every day, I can see your activity. XD

To add what ShinyShinigami said (since I've been here for quite some time), we've always had a lack of a character division. At best, we had five, maybe seven character moderators? And with some people uploading 20+ characters a day, that makes fairly large load when the number of character moderators starts dwindling. All of us who moderate/administer the site are purely doing it voluntarily, we get paid absolutely nothing to do what we do here. In my case I moderate the extra details, and with two regular people uploading 100-200+ details (sometimes daily), I'm obviously not going to take hours upon hours trying to verify every single one of them, so I just glance through them to ensure that the detail follows uniformity and call it good since I'd rather spend my energy writing stories than getting frustrated that there isn't a legit source for 100+ extra details.

As far as the database goes, we index a bloody tonne of titles, and those that upload titles and characters for those titles have their own specialties. Maybe they're part of some other site that only stores text-only data for visual novels and/or H-games and they want to bring that data here by hand while providing character images that they're not able to do on that other site. Maybe another is great with keeping up with currently airing anime, maybe they're great with older stuff, maybe they're great with underground anime... Not everyone has the same tastes in anime, and not everyone is going to notice that a character or part of a franchise is missing from ACDB. Sure someone could scour other sites to fill in all the missing characters and series, but in all honestly, who is actually going to spend the thousands of hours - maybe even ten or hundreds of thousands of hours - doing it by themselves? The data on those other sites have been built by their community, and ACDB is no different.

If you really do care about the quality of the info on the site, then why not lend us your hand instead of condemning the lack of admins we actually have? Do you really understand how much time and energy confirming and approving all this data actually takes?

What Rei wants is more social interaction on ACDB, this is what Rei is after with his inquiry, and the database portion of ACDB should have very little to do with the social portion. Rei and I (and others) have noticed that quite a bit of people come into the lounge, maybe say hi, and never return. We can't be sure if it's that the inactivity that drives them away, the fact that most of the people lurking in the lounge are moderators (since that's usually the case more often than not), or perhaps a combination of the two, or even that they're intimidated by the fact that there's only moderators in the lounge because there's no other regular members that stick around in there.

By drawing in more people to socialise here on ACDB, we will draw in people that will actually care enough to take a bit of their time to help fix and/or add to ACDB's data. This is the end result that Rei wishes for, and Rei knows as well as I do that the reverse of that does not and will not help ACDB.

Thank you superwarioman! ( I am man, btw xD ) While I code and run the business side of things all by myself - there is no way I could manage the massive amount of content we have without the help of so many moderators over the years. 13 sums it up very well the long hours and hard work they have done and continue to do. For many moderators, they have some series they really enjoy and that motivates them to work extra hard to add it to the site to a high standard. However, the further a series is away from something they know and enjoy the harder it becomes to moderate. I want everyone to have fun and enjoy themselves, and I never want to see our moderators suffer.

People have contributed thousands of hours of their time into building ACDB; giving us a gigantic wealth of data, information, characters, series, features. There is no need for the site to die. There is only a need for us to do better.

Like Eiki-sama said, let us focus on constructive criticism. And I will tie it all back to the need for an active community.


Database Accuracy

The comment system is largely going to be used to report mistakes. I'm working on rolling out a new type of comments for characters and series pages. It's going to be a take on snapchat and twitter. Short messages, and limited life span. I'll also add Anonymous posting. So people can say the usual "this character doesn't have red hair!" or "this series is missing characters!" or "die rei i hate you i hate you die die die". Then I'll add a side menu module so that moderators and members might actually read the comments, and act on them if they like.

Mods are family. It's really important we all know and respect one another - the best path for someone to become a moderator is to make positive contributions and engage positively with other moderators. Thus an active community is necessary to keep up recruitment.

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

Hmm, i always wondered but how do Guilds even work here?

Each member is granted 100 Guild Coins, but only the Guild Master can spend those?

rpgguy999 Hmm, i always wondered but how do Guilds even work here? Each member is granted 100 Guild Coins, but only the Guild Master can spend those?

You donate coins to a guild and yes the guild leader is able to spend those on trying to get certain characters. Some characters have lots of guilds trying to get that character while some have no competition. You have to spend money to get more than 100 coins but as a member you can donate those coins to whichever guild you want to support. You can also request that the guild master spend them on specific characters, though if the guild leader hasn't been in a long time it's unlikely that they would be spent on that quickly.

Personally, the main thing that keeps me from being active in the community here is that acdb is visually cluttered. Any time I've wanted to get involved with it, I've just been confused as to what's what and given up. I don't know what the lounge is, whether it differs from forums or the chatbox, etc. Another criticism I have, maybe not so much related to the community but making the site easier to navigate which might make people want to stick around more, is the top banner. Having anime screenshots behind the navigation makes it hard to look at, especially when the text is red. I think in the future it'd help to have the first box or two be black, and have the screenshots only on the left side. I frequently forget that there is anything in front of the banner because it stands out so much. I also don't think smash or pass should be featured on the left - maybe that space could be used for something community focused?

I made a mockup of the changes I'd like to see, so I could be more helpful. I took out the navigation icons because they just seem like generic icons that could mean anything, and don't add anything to the navigation, just make it more confusing. Those could easily be replaced with something clearer. The community spotlight is also just a basic idea, I'm not sure what you'd do with it since I'm not an active community member, but it could be used for anything - I just think that if we're working on building a more active community, something community-related would best serve in smash or pass's place. I think reducing the site's clutter would go a long way toward increasing activity. ^^



I want to add that, although I like the concept of the new sidebars, they do add to the clutter. I think it might be better to only have the one on one side. They sort of squish the content into the center and it looks a bit sloppier. I also think it'd be better to color them darker in order to match the header, rather than have them white like the main site content.

[ Edited Jun 11, 2018 ]