Soooooo.... You’re a site member. You’ve been around for a while. You really like AMVs. But, you’re wondering what it up with AnimeMusicVideos.org, its future, and how you can help. Well, I’m here to hopefully answer your questions!
It has been talked about a lot but the Org is due for some changes. Recently we have announced a server fund raiser to replace our ancient servers with ones that won’t break anytime soon. But is there more going on? In a word: Yup!
While we get new hardware to keep things going for years to come, we are also refining and expanding what the site does and how it does it (spoilers: yes, we are redesigning the site
). Here’s an overview breakdown of the plan:- New Servers – The site can’t run without something to run on. The #1 way the Org will go away is if there is no hosting. Check the fund raiser thread for more details.
- New Site Design – The site is currently stuck in the 2000’s as far as site design. A new design is being worked and will have less junk, better layouts, uploading via web instead of FTP, better compatibility with phones and tablets, and so on.
- New Pro Features – One major group of users the Org has not helped over the years is convention coordinators. If an anime convention wants to do anything with AMVs (contests, exhibitions, etc.), the convention coordinator must do it themselves and this can often be a pain for them. The Org will have new convention features to make this easier such as collecting and hosting videos (duuugh), automatic contest rules enforcement (date premiered, anime used, video category, hasn’t won any previous contest (prize trollers), etc.), uploading “no bumper” copies of videos, collaborative and distributed contest judging, playlist creation tools, bulk video downloads, single-file set list creation and download, and more.
- New External Site Coordination – Some people have their own web sites and would like to show off their videos on their own site. The Org will have an “embed” feature to allow videos to be streamed from other sites. Some people like to host their AMVs at other sites like YouTube because it can bring them a little cash or whatever. The Org will have a “embed video” feature so that AMVs hosted elsewhere can be embedded and viewed inside the user’s video catalog entry page here at AnimeMusicVideos.org.
- New Education Features – The Org will host a formal AMV wiki to better educate members of the ways of the AMV. This will replace the current (highly outdated) “guides” section.
The fastest and easiest way to help right now is with the server fund drive. Our ancient machines desperately need replacement and it would take you 10 minutes to help out with that.
After that, it is more up to what you are good at doing. Are you good at making cool, user-friendly, pretty, dynamic, information-based web site layouts that look good on monitors as well as phones and tablets? We need you!! Are you good at taking a pretty designed button and making it do on the server what the button says it does (“save” is an important button)? We need you!! Are you good at making efficient data structures and queries for complex collections of information? We need you!! Are you good at using command-line-based tools to create larger continuous video files from multiple other smaller video files? We need you!! Are you good at coordinating other people online to create something awesome? We need you!!
The site has survived with a few core volunteers. Derobert has been the undying keeper of the servers and this site community owes a large debt of gratitude to him for keeping our servers patched together with duct tape and chewing gum all these years. Many people have updated site code here and we are all very grateful to them as well. I have done the one thing that I can’t quite trust anyone else to do yet: make sure the bills get paid. People come and go and now we need fresh folks to step up to take this community from cool to awesome! This is where you come in.
Specifically, we need the following kinds of volunteers:
- Web site designers (make things pretty and visually easy to use)
- Web site front-end developers (good with web browser framework tools and that kinda stuff)
- Web site back-end developers (good with server-side code, databases, command-line tools, etc.)
- Project coordinators (good with encouraging people to get stuff done and sticking with it)
We have tried getting people to do stuff then announce what has been done when the update is ready for release. This seems to have confused the community into thinking nothing is getting done then suddenly everything happens. I want to change that immediately.
With this new effort, I would like to turn this around so that everyone knows what the volunteers are working on as they work on it. Everyone will know how the site and community are growing. Everyone can get involved in making this a better place!
So, have some more questions? Would you like to volunteer? Discuss below and we’ll get there together! You folks are awesome!!
Thanks again and have a great day!! ^_^
Phade.
