Here we are, on a rock, screaming. Happy Birthday!

Wow. Eight years since this place opened up shop and six since I've been the owner. Can you believe that? And we've been so active recently! We must be doing something right.

Things have been mostly uneventful regarding the site since my last post. You'll see though that I recently dropped a couple dead boards and improved the recent posts box. As for the scanlations project, it's not dead, we just haven't had the money to import any of the doujins we wanted to translate. However, I expect to be ordering one or more next week. When they arrive I'll send the scans off to Chesir for translating.

A big thanks to our donors from Uboachan and Sushigirl who covered expenses for the past two months. Hosting is $43 per month and can be a bit heavy for me, so donations are always greatly appreciated. I've left a link at the bottom of this post.

We're staying around and going strong. I hope you're all having fun or getting something useful out of the site, and I'm going to keep the doors open for as long as I can.

Thanks guys,
- Seisatsu

Donate: http://bit.ly/2k78pQH

Originally suggested some time ago, the idea has finally come true and is official now.

Uboachan is currently and actively working on the translation of Manga, Doujinshi and other fanworks related to Yume Nikki. The group behind the translations is Patchy Illusion Team. For those who don't know, we were originally a group oriented to game making/help. The team was disbanded, however, and I decided to take the reins and use it for this project. The name may ring a bell in some users.

We decided to create an all-purpose thread where we will publish new releases, post announcements, answer questions from the users and take suggestions. If you have something to say, this is the right place: https://uboachan.net/yn/res/5860.html

That being said, here's our first announcement: We are currently in the need of more people. If you want to give a hand, please, make sure to check the about page in our site and see what would you like to apply for:

http://scans.uboachan.net

You may also post in the thread, or send me a mail. ( a2501@openmailbox.org )

More hands working on this means faster and better translations. This is a work done by the users for the users. And, as much as we all would love to translate manga as fast as possible, it is a rather time-consuming process prone to error. We're all human and we need to use our time for other things, such as work and/or college, or other people pointing out what we did wrong.

Please, notice no prior experience in any of these fields is needed at all. I personally don't have any problems with teaching people how to use gimp and what's the difference between a good and bad translation. Ultimately, we're doing this for our own enjoyment out of our own free will, so don't feel discouraged to give it a try if you want to participate. We don't bite.

Many of us have always felt a special connection with Yume Nikki, and it has even changed the lives of a few people (uboachan is a big proof of this). There's still a lot of unknown material ready to be discovered. I hope we can manage to make it available for everybody through our translations, and to spread the love for Yume Nikki.

Well, we're still here.

Many people have told me over these past five years that the site is already dead, or that the users here are only shitposters, or that this place just isn't worth running anymore. But the Recent Posts bar continues crawling forward without fail, and it's not just full of bullshit, and it makes me feel like I'm still making a worthwhile use of my time and effort in despite of our detractors. I think that, even though Uboachan has changed so much, and many things have ended forever, there is even now still quality content and discussion to be appreciated.

That's not to say that everything has been great. The CP spam was unbearable for a while and we took too long to come up with a good solution. Questionable or, yeah, even bad decisions have been made in the running of this community. I've felt so uncertain sometimes and wondered if I was making the right choices, or if I was betraying my values or the values of this site in the name of peaceful conduct in times of trouble. There have been ugly and destructive public arguments between staff and users, and the staff have been divided in opinion on important issues and come to uneasy compromises.

Our two most involved moderators left a few weeks ago, and the staff room is very quiet now. But, maybe it's for the best if I run most of this show on my own from now on. The other staff members will continue to support my efforts to keep the wheels turning.

And I'm really still trying, you know, because I still love Uboachan! I hope that this can keep being a place that other people can love as well. You may not believe it, but without Uboachan I would not even have half of the IRL friends I have now, I would not be living with these cool roommates, I would never have met my previous or current girlfriend, and I may have never even moved out of my Mom's house, or gone on a real adventure in my entire life. The power of the Internet to connect people together is deeper than I can fathom. This place is so special to me, so I'm going to keep loving it and running it for as long as I can.

Let's see for a while longer where Uboachan can go from here.
- Seisatsu

Happy belated New Year Uboachan! And also, happy belated Birthday!

It may not look like much yet, but the staff have been busy devising new ways to make Uboachan great again this year. This has included subtle changes to the board rules, and reenvisioning of the policies by which the moderation staff operate. And behind the scenes, we've been working on bugfixes and new software to help us battle the rising tides of CP spam. Some shitty pedo won't be the death of us, and neither will negativity or bad vibes. We're stepping up our game in the background to clean this place up.

First off, the wordings of the rules have been altered to reflect a major change in the goals of the moderation staff. We're going to be tougher on shitposting this year. Let this be a warning: destructive posters and poisonous sentiments will be leeched from Uboachan like venom from a wound. If you are a total dickwad, you will first be warned generously to clean up your act, and then you will be banned. Let's all take this opportunity to be awesome and helpful people – the kind of people who build up a community rather than tearing it down. We could use some community-building right about now.

The CP spam remains a problem this year, but we've got people working behind the scenes to make the spammer's job harder. Every new countermeasure we develop incites an almost immediate change in the way the bot operates to nullify that countermeasure. We are being watched, so we're going to watch right back. Please welcome Jove, our new Janitor and Countermeasures Developer, who has been writing us software to help the board and the staff do their jobs more quickly and efficiently. Among these new developments is a bot that notifies the staff of new posts and suspected floods. We'll also be hiring additional Janitors to help us out! If you'd like to help us keep Uboachan clean of spam, shoot me an email at seisatsu@uboachan.net and tell me why you would be a valuable addition to the team.

And last on the docket, we've got way too many boards! It's not my fault, I didn't do it, it was like this when I got here. :(

We're finally going to be working on merging and restructuring boards. Don't worry, the staff will be accepting requests to move threads from retired boards to their new and consolidated replacements so that good content isn't buried and lost. And of course, we will be relying on input from the userbase during this process to ensure that existing board communities are preserved throughout these changes. This is going to include a major change to /n/, which will be revealed shortly.

Stay tuned, play nice, and have fun. I love you guys.
- Seisatsu

Sup guys. Don't adjust your television set, I've got a few orders of business to tell you about, and they're kind of important. It's really long winded this time so bear with me here.

First off, my long-time roommate and several year veteran Uboachan poster Izumi was just given moderator powers a few days ago, and is now getting situated. It's a bit unusual for a user to be promoted directly to Moderator status without being a Janitor first, but I need some more direct help running the site, and I feel that living together with someone else on the staff will give me a partner to collaborate with on a day-to-day basis if need be. It's really nice to have another person here in my house who's been active on Uboachan longer than I've been running the place, and I hope that it will help us communicate better with the entire staff team if we go at running things together. The staff list in the FAQ is also up to date again.

I'm sure everyone's noticed the annoying CP spam that's been constantly appearing on the boards. Bit of bad news here. I've tried setting up countermeasures such as phrase filters to automatically block posts, but as soon as I set them up, the bot changed tactics and stopped duplicating phrases between posts or leaving links in the post body. Unfortunately, this is a confirmation of our worst fear regarding these spam waves: they're only partially automated. An actual living and breathing pedo scumbag is behind the scenes, willfully and actively adjusting the bot's parameters to break through our security measures every time we update them. Not even captchas will stop a human. There is literally no way to stop the spam, and there never will be, and it will probably never go away until the person responsible is tracked down and arrested. Most likely they're in another country and this will never ever happen. All we can do is hire more Janitors to try and keep on top of them and hope they give up eventually. Sorry guys, I know it sucks but there's nothing I can realistically do here except ramp up our cleanup efforts. Though, if any of you have any novel ideas, please find and post in the relevant thread in /sugg/. I'd be happy to hear some fresh thoughts.

Further compounding the above issue is a weird bug we've nicknamed the "Ghost Thread Bug", which prevents threads from dying properly when a staff member deletes them. Deleting the thread deletes the image and makes the thread page 404, but a shadow thread remains on the board index and won't go away until someone else posts in the board or an administrator manually rebuilds the index. This is a huge pain in the ass and leaves garbage everywhere each time we clean up a spam wave. I've tried a couple things to fix it but they didn't work, and what's more the thread deletion code looks correct and I can't figure out why it isn't working. Even worse still, the maintainer for our software has basically retired and I don't have the skills anymore to track down the glitch in the codebase. If anyone here is competent at PHP debugging, please email me and I'll set you to work tracking this thing down. (My email address is in the FAQ.)

On a lighter note, I recently found out that the Oekaki module has been broken for at least a month. Oops. We needed some configuration changes to support a new version that was updated in some time ago, which have now been added, so it should work again. Go play around and help me test it here: https://uboachan.net/test/res/159.html

Also, for any Uboachanners on the west coast US, I'm going to be departing northbound on a road trip from Willits, California on the 23rd of this month with Izumi and a few other friends and settling in Bremerton, Washington for ~10 days before we turn around and head back to Sacramento. I can't stop to meet anyone on the way up, but I may be able to stop for short hangouts on the way back south, depending on how things turn out. If you'll be in Bremerton from the 24th of November to the 3rd of December, or somewhere along the route back to Sacramento around the 3rd, or if you live in my general Sacramento area, email me some time! I love offline meets. Again my email address is in the FAQ.

That's all for this time. This is a big news post, so I might make some edits in the next couple days, in which case I'll note it at the bottom here. Thanks for reading!

Comments go here: https://uboachan.net/sugg/res/2560.html