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Upcoming Goals and Road to 2k videos
This post will cover some goals that we’ll be looking at, and how we’re going to be approaching 2,000 videos in the near future.
Main topics:
- MAX 300: Road from 1,700 to 2,000
- Community Update: Forums
- Resources for Creators
- Side Site: Video and Creator Index
- Future Site Upgrades
MAX 300: Road from 1,700 to 2,000
We’ve reached 1,700 videos on the site recently, and are planning the series of 300 videos to the path of 2,000 videos on the site in a way to allow for creators to have releases that have been waiting a while.
During this “MAX 300” road to 2,000 videos, the base release will include a lot of releases from creators that have been wanting to find a place to have their videos up and may include many older videos.
To start, the series will include releases from Albinohawk and Sage. Over time, creators like Towa may get slots.
Below you can see the arrangement for Albinohawk releases from June 14 – 30, 2023 and starting with Sage in the last three days.
Community Update: Forums
With the server situation resolved, we’d like to work towards more community involvement alongside the new content releases. This post will go into the usage of forums.
Plans for Forum Usage
Back in April 2022, the forums were introduced on HMV Mania but there wasn’t much of a focus on them. Now with the server situation resolved, there can be more user applications and community involvement on the forums.
The discord server has been around since December 2021 although that platform has been shown to have problems with user accounts getting deleted and servers deleted without help from discord. This leaves the discord server to be text-only for user safety and privacy. The forums can be a place to share media (images and video) that would usually cause problems in HMV-based servers for their account.
Something we’ve wanted to do was allow a richer community experience that didn’t jeopardize the safety of user accounts on other platforms, e.g. discord. The forums are a great place for that. It’s common for hentai servers to allow for images and links, although HMV communities face a very unique and targeted problem of reporting compared to other general hentai communities. Had some funny memes or links you wanted to share, but couldn’t in the HMV Mania discord server? The forums are a great place for that!
This is also an alternative way for a user to communicate without having to sign up for Twitter, reddit, discord, and so on. Many of these platforms lock you out of your account if you don’t attach a phone number to it. We want to try offering an alternative that doesn’t ask for all this unnecessary information just to interact with the community.
User Accounts for Forums
Historically, accounts were only made for creators for this site. With the introduction of the forums, there is now a stronger use case for regular accounts to post on the forums. Viewing the forums does not require an account.
We’ll need to find a better way to handle user applications so that users can get their accounts created in a timely manner. There was previously a problem where users would submit applications but the timeline to receive their accounts were very inconsistent.
Forum Structure
The forums are currently arranged into three main categories, with subcategories in each:
- Site Discussion
- Feedback
- Resources
- Updates
- Media and Chit Chat
- General
- Memes
- Pictures
- HMV Discussion
- Creative Corner
- Genres
- HMV Suggestions
- Links
Site Discussion
This category has three subcategories.
• Feedback: This area of the forums is for users to provide feedback about the site.
• Resources: The Resources area of the forum is a space where users can discussion information that others may find useful.
• Updates: This area of the forum is for updates about the site.
Media and Chit Chat
This category has three subcategories.
• General: Think of this section of the forums as a chit chat area, or what doesn’t fit in the other categories.
• Memes: This section of the forums is for posting memes. It can be media such as pictures, text, or links to a video.
• Pictures: This area of the forums is for posting images or links to images. For meme pictures, go to the Memes Forum.
HMV Discussion
This category has four subcategories.
• Creative Corner: This area of the forum is for discussing upcoming animation music videos people are thinking of making, as well as a collaborative space for brainstorming ideas.
• Genres: This area of the forum is to discuss genres that can be used to help organize videos on the site.
• HMV Suggestions: Know a creator or video that isn’t on the site that you think would be good to put up? This is the area of the forum to mention such videos.
• Links: This area of the forum is for links. It can be a link to an HMV, downloads, etc.
Over time this can change based on what is most useful for the community.
Media on Forums
HMV Mania itself won’t host media for these forums, it will come from other sites. Some sites such as reddit and Twitter will automatically embed, and such a list can be seen here.
Even if the linked media gets taken down (e.g. on Twitter), the account and thread on HMV Mania itself will remain safe. In the case of other platforms like discord, this would result in a deleted account. On that note, please don’t link media on discord!
Resources for Creators
The forums can also serve as a good place to provide resources for creators.
A few starting threads have been made to start, such as:
This can also help supplement what is over in the Tutorials section.
Side Site: Video and Creator Index
There are limitations with WordPress and the theme we’re using, and we wanted to try out a separate site that would not have to worry about said limitations.
For those that have been following the Twitter account, a side dev site is planning to be put up in the future for a better experience in searching for videos. Ideas such as genres, creator information, a random video page, etc. will not be restricted by limitations of WordPress on this dev site. It would end up being a subdomain to hmvmania and we’ll be looking into how to get it up in the future.
This site will be the HMV Mania Video and Creator Index and likely will be a subdomain. You can see a demo here.
Future Site Upgrades
The blog post from June 6th gave some information about what happened with the site going into limited access, although we don’t want to have to do that in the future.
With the extra space, we can expect that using the full space would last until around the end of 2024. So we would still have a year and a half.
However, we don’t want to exhaust the space completely this time. If we start to get closer, then we may end up having the legacy server stay up with the content that’s been uploaded up to that point so the videos can still be available to users. We struggled with the decision to not have users be able to access the catalog 1,688 videos that had been available up to that point. In the case of now, that would mean around 3,600 videos in total.
We’d have to discuss it more, although we could in theory have a separate staging site to test out the idea of distributed servers. After some initial discussion, we agreed that the current approach is not sustainable long term. We would end up having to pay more than five times the current plan if we don’t find an alternative solution, and that aspect of financials would be a big hit to the site.
