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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 bench. 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. ^_^