Behind the scenes at the Chiba Network!

This blog is meant to give readers a behind the scenes look at how the sites in The Chiba Network work. There's a lot that goes into the sites and hopefully it'll be interesting or at least answer some questions. Thanks for reading!

Sailor Moon Links.Com behind the scenes.

This post will be updated with new info about AGSM so check back for updates. Last Updated June 4th, 2007.

A Gateway to Sailor Moon-Sailor Moon Links.com emerged when I discovered I was having a lot of trouble finding Sailor Moon sites. Google for all its positives sometimes makes it hard to find updated material. The problem with the internet is at some times it is too spread out. For fandoms this makes being a fan difficult, when great sites can be buried or lost in the depths of the internet. So basically the plan was to create a place where Sailor Moon fans could find any Sailor Moon site in existence.

So where did all the links come from?

I'm back on Deviantart right now checking through Sailor Moon groups. I've also headed to LiveJournal and am checking out Sailor Moon groups there, though it's sometimes hard to reach group leaders.

The project began by surfing through the anipike and visiting every site there. After that the process was expanded to a google search. I used google to search for every character name I could think of, as well as common search terms "Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon" et cetera... I went through the results until they degraded into pornography which was naturally avoided. This was utilized to create the link directory base. From there I expanded outward, I tried to ask people I had encountered in the Fanfiction area if they had a site the wanted linked to from AGSM. This included areas like FF.net, ASMR and other sites.

I am on Sailor Moon forums including Genvid, Tower of Time, SMI, and SMF, and I made sure to ask anyone with a Sailor Moon site if they would like a link as well. It took a while but I went through DeviantArt and SheezyArt as well looking for Sailor Moon Art. There is probably more I can do with that too.

DeviantArt is a huge site, and it took me a great deal of time to go through it. I also had to triage the site, by looking through the first two pages of art for each artist. If I didn't find Sailor Moon art, I had to put it in a file to contact later, and I still have to do that. Just looking on the first two pages though I found several hundred artists. It was a large task.

I recently visited Animemusicvideos.org and contacted any Sailor Moon AMV artist who could be reached as well.

These methods are by no means perfect, but they are the best that I can think of.

More updates to come. Please post any questions you might have.

Suggestion Box

Just to make things a bit more convenient I am setting up this post. Anyone can come along and make suggestions on how to improve any of the sites mentioned here, or also how to improve Sailor Moon fandom in general, or anime/gaming fandom in the Northeast. It's wide open.

Thanks!

What is a module?

Recently on both SailorMoonFanfic.com (SMFFDC) and SailorMoonLinks.com (SML) I set up a module system. This is currently in place on the Fanfiction.net links page on SMFFDC and the Deviantart Page 2 page of SML.

Basically for the purposes of these sites, a module is a grouping of links which I have set up so that every once in a while (I haven't figured out the schedule yet) I can switch the positions of the entire group and replace them with another module. That way every link will spend some time at the top of the page at some point. Each module is labeled so visitors coming to the site looking for a specific link can seek out the module it was in if it's not where they expected it to be.

Just to be clearer, for example if you go to the SML Deviantart Page 2 you'll see a large amount of links. The first are part of Module 1. Down the page you'll see Module 2, then Module 3, and Module 4. At some point I'll go in and change the page. Module 1 will be put at the bottom, and the other three modules will move up. This rotation system will give everyone an equal shot at being visited.

Questions, Concerns, Comments, feel free to post them.

Sailor Moon Fanfic.com. Has it been so long?

I will update this post with more info over time so check back for updates! Last updated June 6th, 2007.

I am currently expanding the library project to Princessserenity.net and .Moon. ASMR is next!

The Definitive Sailor Moon Fan Fiction Directory, and the site that would grow from it, Sailor Moon Fanfic.com emerged from the thought that it was not entirely easy to find Sailor Moon Fanfiction on the web. The Sailor Moon fandom is blessed to have a lot of authors. (More than 8,000 at last count.) This blessing however is also a curse in terms of keeping track of everyone. While some fanfic authors have become quite popular, others have been overlooked I believe due to the pure size of the fandom. In 2000 I decided to try to make some sense of things and try to provide a central place where people could find Sailor Moon Fanfic sites of all types. I searched for fanfiction sites wherever I could and then emailed the web masters for permission to link to their sites as well as to learn more about them. The original concept was to link to all the sites out there, and then readers could explore them, including the individual libraries, including the mega sites like ASMR.

The one problem I had was it took me quite a long time to get the site going. After the initial site construction, I continued to search various sites, including, ASMR, AI, SMF and others. The original plan was then to expand the listings to profiles within all the library sites, and only now, in 2007 have I reached that point. Obviously many people have left fanficdom, however with the lack of Sailor Moon on TV and such fanfics are important to fill the void left by the lack of the series so the work continues.

Recently I finished the first wave of the Fanfiction.net Project which was to seek out Sailor Moon authors and offer to link to their profile. There were 8000 authors listed in the ff.net directory for Sailor Moon (before it disappeared) and I used that for the search. I didn't contact every author however as I am still trying to figure out how to handle NC-17 content. Also if it appeared an author had retired or was just beginning a fic I held off. There were other reasons, not negative, just reasons why I might have held off as well. There is perhaps more to do with ff.net.

In early June I contacted many people on Dot Moon, and on SailorMoonFanfiction.net. I am still checking to see if some people on both have been contacted on FF.net though, so there's more to do.

Next will be more checking on FF.net, then a look at ASMR. I'm still trying to figure out Media Miner. Media Miner is a logical choice, but at the last time I checked it was hard to search for the series fanfics were based on. ASMR is also logical, but it is facing a decline in usage, especially in the realm of fanfiction oriented matters. I am exploring other sites though and there is more to come on this front. Eventually LJ will be looked through but I'm waiting for it to settle down following this week's issues.

What is C-Tokyo???

This post will be updated over time, so check back for new stuff! Last updated May 29th, 2007.


C-Tokyo is a brand new site (which lacks a domain) which started from the idea that sites should emerge to fill the gap between anime conventions. Often the forums attached to convention sites fill up with content right before and after cons but then those forums die out. C-Tokyo was a prototype site meant to bring the anime/gaming community closer together, if such a thing is possible, within New England, though I have since expanded the concept to the entire Northeast.

Originally, I used google, as well as visited sites like Deviantart, and AMVs.org in search for New Englanders into anime and gaming, as well as those who attended cons, and even non-New Englanders who visit the cons. The idea was to link to sites belonging to them in the hopes of creating a central gathering point for fans. There has been slow progress in this regard, but I have assembled quite a long list of Deviantartists at least.

Originally a forum was attached to the site, but it was attacked by spambots, and I as of yet do not know how to deflect them so I'll have to rethink that idea.

I'll be honest. I've never had to grow a site like this before. My previous efforts have been a very straightforward idea, and there has been a wide variety of content to link to. But in this case, it's much harder to know a strategy to pursue. While the attendance at cons is skyrocketing, the attendance of fans on forums seem to be quite low, so I'm not sure how best to build communities, if that is even what people want. At the very least though for the sites on the internet I am hoping to increase their visibility. There is a lot out there to see.

More to come...

Profiles in stuff that didn't work: Affiliation with other series sites.

Both Sailor Moon Links.com and Sailor Moon Fanfic.com had the goal of both making the Sailor Moon fandom stronger and easier to navigate. But to that end is also the idea of providing a place where people new to the series that could help them find information that might lead them to start watching the show and thus create more fans. To that end I decided why not set up a more widespread effort, namely ask site owners who had popular sites devoted to other series if they would like to link exchange. This would have the added effect of perhaps drawing Sailor Moon fans to those sites and thus introducing them to a new series as well. The way I saw it, everyone wins.

But the problems emerged.

1.) Google had trouble finding anime sites. This isn't just in regards to each series, but also with regard to anime in general. If you do a search for anime you get a lot of odd results. When you search for Sailor Moon, a lot of the main sites come up first, but if you search for other series, often you'll get older sites.

2.) Of the sites that were found many were not updated in years. No matter how popular the site may have been, if it's not updated recently, its unlikely to get a link exchange going.

3.) Many sites were fanlistings. Fanlistings are a great thing, however most of them only agree to link to other fanlistings for whatever reason.

4.) Lack of interest. Of the sites I could find. There just wasn't much interest in the idea. I don't begrudge the people who said no at all. While disappointing, perhaps my strategy was flawed.

Given all that, I met some very nice people who did set up links, and they are linked to from a prominent place on the Sailormoonlinks.com ^_^. I may try again someday...

Profiles in stuff that didn't work: Forums.

The Chiba Network once had two forums, one for the Sailor Moon sites, and one for C-Tokyo, both have since ceased to be. In C-Tokyo's case, there was not enough interest, or for that matter any interest in the forum, and it's hard to get those things going without a core base of support. Lesson learned. As for the Sailor Moon forum, well I did have a good group posting, however, the spammers attacked and they attacked hard. The security fixes I attempted to put in place failed and that was the end of that. I believe I managed to set up a phpbb just when the spammer had been planning their first invasion so it caught the forum when the internal defenses were at their weakest. Needless to say I could not keep up with it. I'm not really cut out to be a forum mod. It's a large task to not only police a forum, but also make it grow and keep it interesting. I would have wished to have the C-Tokyo forum work because for the most part all we have is the convention forums, so I dunno. New strategy is needed I guess.