[2010.12.30] A few important notices :)

Hello, fellow Mao fans!

I received a notification from Forumotion that due to the forum's high activity, we might be able to receive a free forum domain.

That would mean that instead of the current address "maoasada.forumotion.net" we could choose a shorter, top-level domain. Sadly, "maoasada.com", "maoasada.net" and "maoasada.org" are taken. Only "maoasada.biz" is free, but that sounds too... business-y for my ear.

Any ideas?

maoasadaforum, maoforum, ballerinaonice, maofans...

Hopefully after the name change "maoasada.forumotion.net" will redirect to our forum for some time. Just in case, if I go ahead with the name change, I'll send an email to all the members with the information about the new official address.

So make sure your e-mail addresses listed in your profile are not out of date!


Donations

https://maoasada.forumotion.net/donate

As some of you probably noticed, I removed the advertisements displayed on the forum for the registered members. Sadly, this is a paid operation, and the poor world standing of Polish zloty makes paying for anything a rather costly operation for me. If it wasn't for that, I could remove the ads for both our members and the unregistered guests for a longer period of time, activate the gallery, etc..

Thus, I decided to take a leaf out of Yunaforum.com and activate the donation option. If you have a monetary equivalent of a cheap McDonalds dinner to spare , please consider sharing! The money donated is going directly to Forumotion.com and none of our admins can use it for any other purpose except for paying for revoving the ads / activating the gallery / paying for more space for avatars and smileys, etc.. Depending on your location, you can use either PayPal (a better option, if you have an account) or your phone (a worse option, because you can't specify the amount of money donated; but perhaps the only choice for those who don't have a PayPal account).

4-5 donations could be enough to have us going advertisements-free for a year.

Of course, the forum is and will remain completely free!

The donations are completely voluntary for those fans who have some to spare and would like to see the forum working faster and without the annoying advertisements at the top.


Logo help

To celebrate Mao's wonderful performance of "Liebenstraum" at Japanese Nationals, I created a lavender "Liebenstraum" theme that will be uploaded in a week or so. Sadly, I'm still missing the logo. I just can't seem to find a nice photo of Mao in her "Liebenstraum" dress. If I find a photo/screencap that I like, it's in too low quality to use as a logo.
If any of you have a nice HQ photo from Mao's Liebenstraum program (preferably in the new dress), please share!

New Admins

As I mentioned in the Happy New Year thread, I decided to appoint two new admins to take care of the forum in case the current admins went AWOL again .

The new admins are:

☆Genie
inskate

Once again, thanks to the moderators for taking care of the forum while I was away!

what about changing the current address to maoasadaforum, it much easier.... hmm how much money would you think would be good amount for donation?

Okami wrote:

As some of you probably noticed, I removed the advertisements displayed on the forum for the registered members. Sadly, this is a paid operation, and the poor world standing of Polish zloty makes paying for anything a rather costly operation for me.

Polish złoty? Greetings from Silesia

I love all changes here!! Pictures and new graphic are gorgeous!

About domain:

Maybe asadamaochan.com?

ballerinamao wrote:

how much money would you think would be good amount for donation?

I'm also curious about that

ballerinamao wrote:

what about changing the current address to maoasadaforum, it much easier...

That's what I'm planning to do, I'm just waiting for the other fans' suggestions. "maoasadaforum.com" would be nice. "maoforum.com" is available as well (and shorter ).

BTW I checked the forumotion.com support forum and it says that even when a new domain is activated, the old one still works so there's no danger that some fans who miss this notice will not be able to find the forum after the domain's changed.

Quote :

hmm how much money would you think would be good amount for donation?

Any amount is fine! I think that is you use PayPal the lowest possible donation is 1 Euro (not sure about the non-european countries, I think the only way to know is just to click the link, then chose the PayPal option and there should be a notice about the lowest possible donation for your country. To check the option you don't need to give your PayPal details or anything.).

If you pay by the phone, sadly, I don't think there's an option to chose, there's just one. For people from Poland its 6.10 PLN. I think it's ~1,80 Euros for people from Europe, which gives the forum 100 points. (Again, just checking the options is free.)

For example: if 10 people donated 1.80 Euro or its equivalent, it would be enough to keep the forum going without adds for half a year (or a whole year for the registered members if we let the guests suffer the ads ).

If there would be any points left, it could be spent on activating the gallery (100 points = 100MB of storage space, right now we have barely enough to host the avatars).

europeanfan wrote:

Greetings from Silesia

Greetings from Lubelszczyzna!

maoasadaforum.com is great.

I'll check the donations options. I hate those ads

alyssa wrote:

maoasadaforum.com is great.

I really like this one, too!

alyssa wrote:

maoasadaforum.com is great.

Yeah, I think so too.
And I really hope I could do something to help or donate. I don't even have a Paypal account.

Okami wrote:

If you pay by the phone, sadly, I don't think there's an option to chose, there's just one. For people from Poland its 6.10 PLN. I think it's ~1,80 Euros for people from Europe, which gives the forum 100 points. (Again, just checking the options is free.)

I don't have a paypal account, so I'd rather pay by the phone (or maybe if we are both from Poland I can transfer you money in złoty on your bank account?) but still I don't know how to do it. Is there some special number (like 7***), on which I'm supposed to send sms?

europeanfan wrote:

I don't have a paypal account, so I'd rather pay by the phone (or maybe if we are both from Poland I can transfer you money in złoty on your bank account?) but still I don't know how to do it. Is there some special number (like 7***), on which I'm supposed to send sms?

Yes If you go to the Contribution page (https://maoasada.forumotion.net/donate - it's linked on the bottom of the forum), you'll find the Allopass option. After you click on it, you should be able to se a pop-up window like this:


(I blurred the number for security reasons. I'm not sure if the number's the same for every person, so I don't want somebody to send a message on the wrong number by accident )

It should automatically detect your country (if not, just choose Poland from the drop down menu) and give you the number you need to send the SMS to. After you send the SMS, you'll get a message with a code sent to your phone. Type it in the "CODE" field and click "OK". The points will be assigned directly to our forum.

Sending the donation via bank account to me would be also fine, but the SMS option is faster (and I tried it yesterday, so I know it works ). But if you have any problems with Allopass, just send me a PM.

And oops, they misspelled "otrzymać".

Tks, I checked the donation options to see how much it would cost for me, but there is no Brazil option

I think Maoasadaforum.com is great

Dani-Chan wrote:

Tks, I checked the donation options to see how much it would cost for me, but there is no Brazil option

I'm used to it.

It looks so beautiful!!! Exciting new changes

Since it seemed to be the most popular option, I decided to claim the maoasadaforum.com domain before someone else snatched it away... And it just got assigned to our forum! Wow, that was fast. I expected it to take 5 days or so. Big thanks to Forumotion for handling the domain change so quickly - and of course for giving us a free domain.

You can now access the forum using the new address and/or update your bookmarks.

(The old address will continue to work - but the new one is cooler. )

Now I need to change the logo.

Big thanks to all of you who have made a donation! We have 500 credits so far, great!

Thanks Okami, for all the awesome changes!!!

A new domain!! Wow!

If we have credits left over, is it possible to expand the sizes of the messaging mailboxes? I'm almost out of space and I'd hate to delete some of those messages....

alyssa wrote:

Dani-Chan wrote:

Tks, I checked the donation options to see how much it would cost for me, but there is no Brazil option

I'm used to it.

I don't have a paypal account either

Hi Okami,

I love all the changes that you've done in the forum, it looks really nice

maoasadaforum.com as a domain sounds good!!!! Easy to found in the web....

I really want to contributed with donations...but I live in Perú and I'm not sure if I can? I'll send you a PM asking for the donation options.

Thank you for everything you've done, Okami.

I just clicked on the link for our new address and it worked! Lovely!

Thanks a lot Okami!

Hi Admins!

Quick question--what are the points for?? I suddenly noticed them!

Batsuchan wrote:

Hi Admins!

Quick question--what are the points for?? I suddenly noticed them!

that's something I wonder about too

dawnsherearequiet wrote:

Thanks for everything you've done, Okami.
Try using Firefox with Adblock Plus plugin.

It's not necessary anymore - thanks to the wonderful users who made donations, I was able to disable the ads for both members and guests for the whole year.

Batsuchan wrote:

If we have credits left over, is it possible to expand the sizes of the messaging mailboxes? I'm almost out of space and I'd hate to delete some of those messages....

Sadly, this is one thing I can't do. I searched the Forumotion.com support site and learned that as of now the ability to send and store messages is limited, because many people used it to spam other members and send advertisements. It consumed a lot of the Forumotion servers' storage space and traffic, because while "normal" spammers are quite easily detected and banned (and people don't even bother to click on blatantly spam-my posts), it's more difficult to get rid of somebody who spams just through PM. Firstly, people tend to open their PMs out of sheer curiosity, so it consumes traffic; secondly, it takes longer to detect a spammer as sometimes people are away for some time and don't notice they have spammy PMs (and they just consume Forumotion's disk space) and thirdly, moderators/admins can't read other members' messages, so they really can't control the situation at all unless the affected members informs them about the issue.

That said, it might change sometime in the future if the staff figures out how to control the spambots. Forumotion is updated pretty quickly and right now it has a lot more options than back in 2007 when this forum was created.

Batsuchan wrote:

Quick question--what are the points for?? I suddenly noticed them!

Actually, I'm not sure yet. I'm just playing with the options. The points are mostly just for fun - they are awarded for things like posting, creating new topics, the length of time that has passed since the user's registration, etc.. The admins can change the amount of points given for a particular thing; for example right now the users get 1 point for every post done in the General Chat forum, but 10 points for creating a topic in the "Be Creative!" forum (because they are contributing something), and so on.

Another funny option is the "Kudos" system, which makes it possible for other users to thank the user who contributed to the forum somehow (translations, interesting post, posted some fanart or montages, etc.)

It's very unrefined yet and I'm not sure yet if this will stay. The options just caught my eye and I thought it would be sort of nice, as 1) the members that contribute could be appreciated somehow, 2) maybe it would encourage the users to post, which would be nice, as more activity on the forum = higher ranking in the Forumotion directory, and high ranking = free domain. It's actually pretty expensive, so I'm glad we got it for free this year, and I hope the forum will stay active enough to keep the ranking and get a free domain next year as well.

Ken Himura wrote:

maoasadaforum.com as a domain sounds good!!!! Easy to found in the web....

I really want to contributed with donations...but I live in Perú and I'm not sure if I can? I'll send you a PM asking for the donation options.

I just checked and the Allopass option is active for Peru (the cost is listed as "1.21 US$ Movistar, 3.50 PEN Claro").
But right now we have enough credits to keep us going for some time!

no more advertisements for a year and one month
we have more free space for pictures, avatars, smilies, etc..
there are some more options available for the Admins, I'm still trying to figure it out
I activated the Gallery, though right now it's still under construction (the only album that works is the Logo Gallery: http://www.maoasadaforum.com/gallery/Logo-Gallery/Logo-Gallery-cat_c39.htm)

There are still some options - I'm right now trying to decide whether they might be helpful, or just distracting. I'll make a post about new changes once I have everything figured out and ready.

Hi there Okami~!

I just wanna ask, I saw a + sign on your comment and clicked it because I thought it's the "Kudos" thing you were talking about. And then it said: "your vote has been cast" So did I do it right?

Quote :

I hope the forum will stay active enough to keep the ranking and get a free domain next year as well.

I hope so too! I love all these new exciting changes.

klarification wrote:

Hi there Okami~!

I just wanna ask, I saw a + sign on your comment and clicked it because I thought it's the "Kudos" thing you were talking about. And then it said: "your vote has been cast" So did I do it right?

Yup! Either "+" or the "Thanks" button is fine.

The +/- thing is for the post. If you feel that the post deserves a +, or recognition, press the +. It'll receive a level. The bigger the green bar is, the better the post is. =)

Yup, and it also adds points to the user's rep, which can be viewed on the user's profile.

Thank you, Okami for all your hard work! This forum with all his members is such a wonderful place. I'm so happy that I found it two years ago. Without you all I wouldn't know anything about the figure skating world (and especially Mao's of course) ! Just a big THANK YOU for that!
But I can't understand one thing about these points: Why do other members (who wrote a lot of more posts than me) have less points? I don't post soo much here, I read more because sometimes I think you're thoughts are so good and deliberate that it would be kind of embarassing when I'd join to the conversation... But well... okay, I've nothing against a high number of points but it seems a bit strange to me!
Happy new year to you all!!!