What features do you want to see in YaoiAi V2?

[Ai]

Due to the fact that it's going to cost over $2000 to renew the script licences for all the sites, I've decided that money would be better invested in getting something custom coded that will do exactly what I want, rather than having a bunch of stupid features I'll never use. Our current software is very server intensive and not that well integrated. Parts of the site feel like they just aren't connected to others!

So here's your chance to tell us exactly what features you want to see in the next incarnation of AnimeOTK.com and it's sister sites!

Basic Outline of my Plans

• Forum
• Image Gallery (Fully featured tagging system, better "favorites" system, ability to zip and download a gallery section)
• Video Clip downloads
• Fiction Section (Writers will be able to link chapters from their stories)
• Artists/Writers will be able to add their own sub-folders to their gallery/fiction area
• Mini-Games (far too much to list here, and no - not crappy miniclip style flash games lol)
• Single "search" box - search the gallery, fiction area, forum and video downloads (or just one if you want) at the same time
• Single Site registration - register on one site to be registered on them all, the userlist and profiles will only display on one domain.

Yes, it doesn't look like much changed (apart from the fiction area), but it would take you half an hour to read all my detailed plans! Here is where you guys come in though.

What features would you really love to see?
What current features of the site are you desperate to keep?
What current features of the site do you hate and think we would be better without?
What areas of the site need improving and how can we do this?

Bare in mind this is a long-term project and is currently just in the planning stages, once the planning is done I'll be able to look for a coder to write the software for us and have a better idea of how much it'll all cost.

Over to you!

[Tritium]

Your plans sound good to me. but would this site have enough memory, space to host mini games and clips? i mean, a lot of members might decide to play at the same time, or download at the same time. wouldn't the site encounter problems in that event?
single sight registration would be awesome. like the suggestions section, the yaoi and general chat, the request sections. what if a member could be notified about what's new in those sections the moment he logs in?
or maybe, you could program more formatting options in the fiction section. there are no paragraph indent options, and the spacing in between the lines is relatively small, which makes it difficult to read larger blocks of text.
I don't know the first thing about programming, or writing codes, so you are like IT titans to this humble member. I bow before your wisdom.
I appologise if I said anytthing that may lead you to think I'm criticising your work. I'm very grateful to you all for keeping this awesome site, where yaoi fans can talk freely and share their common hobby. it doesn't matter if you don't change a thing, as long as we still have yaoiai!!!

I'm quite worried about the idea of single site registration. It sounds good, but care has to be taken to preserve the identity of the other sites. I don't think anyone on any of the sites would be happy with a 'one-stop-fetish-shop' site approach where all the sites are only minorly seperated with a huuuge central crossover.

Many of the sites have a very clear and preserved identity.

People from AotK DO NOT want to associate with the diapered fetish people - then again, us here on Yaoiai don't want to either, and nor do the furfags... I mean, the furryai crowd.

All the seperate sites have a community of their own, this should really be encouraged, not integrated. Multiculturalism is a failed system~

Not least the problems of mixing fetishes could encourage problems - not least more big-headed trolls from AotK to come lord over the peasants on the less important sites is a problem I had to face a few times in my tenure here.

Its sounds like a chatroom idea through and through. "Yeah, lets just make the sites so its like we're just stepping from one room to another!"

In principle, fine, but if carried out too broadly, bad. Experiments like getting AotK mods to come to other sites was disasterous enough. There's just not enough people on all the different sites who want to be members of others.

Very few people on AotK will care about yaoi, all they'll want to do is flood the galleries with spanking pictures left and right. Furries will just want to spam here with gay furry pics. The diaper fetish people will be everywhere arguing for legitimacy while everyone else tries to avoid there wherever possible. God forbid one person finds a picture and decides to upload it to three or more sites.

Its hard enough keeping AotK together with the adult-consensual spankers on the same site as child-discipline spankers. Its a whole new can of worms if handled badly.

My overall point is, there are so few members here who are also members of AotK or FurryAI or diaperedanime and the same on all the other sites. Combined membership sounds good - but is there *really* demand for it and does the convenience outweigh the problems of potentially trying to mix so many different, seperate fetishes?

This site, like FurryAI and Diaperedanime would benefit from becoming more seperate from its sisters, not more alike. The forums have just been upgraded nicely - what YaoiAI really needs is upgrades to its fiction section, the ability to better read stories without downloads. The ability for uploaders to get abstracts and paragraphs automatically posted to the forums for advertising and to be able to edit their stories in situ. Definately better reading of stories ON the site, without downloading is the first port of call. Each site needs something different. Copy-pasting the same changes (just like copypasta'ing the same posts) to each site may not be ideal!

[Tritium]

Wow, you are so analytical RobM. Had absolutely no idea of the implications. There I went, just writing without thinking. Maybe the administrators and the site moderators should have a talk about upgrading yaoi ai, and decide which ideas to put into practice. Or maybe you could request input from more experienced site members.

[Cherrystar]

I agree with Rob on the single site registration thing, not a fan of that idea. Also, I don't care if there is a mini game section, that doesn't interest me. I mainly like the forum, galleries, fan fiction, and resident artist suggestions.

[anonymous]

It is all looking good in terms of plans.
The site itself is awesome NOW, so I'd love to see the new one. There are a lot of unnamed images, though - one thing we need is a upload policy - for example rules about adding tags, categories, image repetitiveness protection... etc.
I also want to see a nice YaoiAi banner. User submitted stuff is ok, but the images kind of don't match the site theme... Last but not least - bring back the feature to be able to download all your favourited images to a zip file. I totally miss that and I hope I am not alone on this one...
Otherwise - great idea on that mini-games section - I think a lot of people will love it.

Edit: Sorry for my English, it's like 1:00 am here and I am also writing this through a phone and not a PC...

My thoughts on the image Gallery downloads are... very mixed but mostly negative.

On this site, as opposed to some of the sister sites it could be very useful - we don't have many resident artists to piss off by trivialising their artwork or by highlighting the ability of users to skip the whole "Looking at and possibly commenting on" their art.

This site has mostly non-resident art. Despite my best hopes, we havn't attracted many resident artists here - we don't offer many opportunities that Y!Galleries etc doesn't already, sadly.

A fully featured tagging system, better "favorites" system would really be fantastic here as on other sites, currently we sub-divide by gallery better than on other sites - YaoiAI has more and harder working image mods that our sister sites so we can garantee with high-accuracy that images are in the 'right' gallery - tags would be very useful to search within SUB-galleries.
Especially for things like, foot fetishism, sporting pictures (Mentaiko has lots of this, mixed together with other stuff, same with Club XYZ) so better tagging and searching would be brilliant.

Remember that most uploaders don't tag images out of laziness, rather than anything else, a more intensive system wouldn't improve that unless it was very clear on the tags offered.

Back to the zipped-downloads.

I don't believe zipped downloads would be a good idea but I'm really willing to change my mind for this site if thats whats popular~

For residents, it robs them of comments. I don't think any artist would be fully satisfied with this, users downloading their entire galleries probably without commenting on a single picture in the process.

Its something I think that seems like a tiny change since obviously pictures can be saved anyway by members just by right-clicking them, but in terms of consequences it could be huge and unpopular.

BUT since as I said, we don't have a lot of residents, the trouble with non-resident galleries is that those galleries can sometimes be 2000+ images, you'd be facing hundreds of megabytes, possibly gigabytes in downloads per file and thats costing both pageviews per user and costing in potential comments. Both of which are the lifeblood of a forum/gallery website.

There's some excellent java/flash yaoi games out there, I'd quite love to see this site host some of those~

[Ai]

To clarify:

"Single Site Registration"
This system means that should you register on YaoiAi.com and wish to visit say AnimeAi.com you won't need to register a new account there. All member lists will appear only on AnimeAi.com, so don't worry about your name showing up on a furry or diaper site! It will only show up there if you decide to visit and post

"Zip and Download"
For non-artist areas, this is a no-brainer - it will probably save bandwidth overall isntead of loading 2000 pages, users who wanted to download it all will just download a single zip file. Artists would have the option to enable it (disabled by default). With the new server setup I'm planning, bandwidth won't be an issue either.

@anonymous: I plan to have a "booru" style tagging system so users can add tags and vote tags up or down depending on if they agree with them or not

@RobM: There will be rewards for commenting to help encourage it plus see my clarification above

Yeah, but who on earth loads 2000 pictures in an afternoon - people discriminate using thumbnails. I'm not sold on the idea that its going to increase traffic, interest and community values.

[Ai]

Part of the plans include a "credits" system. users earn credits by participating, commenting etc. To download the zip file will cost a certain number of credits depending on the size - don't worry, it's unlikely to impact things in a major way. Plus with the new server setup I'm planning we will have about four times as much available bandwidth