Fillychan

>>689
While I'm not the person who can fully use your feedback, I have to point out that none of the articles written by me were written under the influence of EQD. If I were to track my influences, I'd cite MMO Champion, the old GameTrailers (r.i.p.) content, Joe Stevens' Equestria Inquirer and my personal Tumblr. I personally tried to have as little relation to EQD as possible. It's very easy for me to do nowadays, because I have no idea what the website (and the piece of art it's dedicated to) is doing these days.

>>690

I wanted point just that some columns between FuD and EqD seem similar: art collections, episode analysis/comments, and so.
Is not my worry here, becouse is what you expect from a fan blog, and I do the same for the one I kept.
The trouble is the manpower required when the comunity will become larger. I suggest to think about that now, than found fight later this problem.
"Moving" here the fan arts should also help this place to gain a function in the comunity.

>Funtasia *Daily* came from a joke on the fact bronies were annoying to bash something of different than FiM just... becouse different, and was a fun thing.

Bronies also bash something similar to FiM just... because it's 'plagiarism'.

I do like your idea of keeping things seperate though, with Fillychan being the fanstuff focused board.
I'd recommend Funtasia 'X' expanding for other things like DerpyHoovesNews did, if for nothing more than just a simple one-post mention.

Quick Post-scriptum:

>>689
>I: I think the name could be changed.

Is not possible use a redirect for the actual Funtasia Daily address? It should stay indixed in Google, but at same time a new "main address" with a new name is already active.

Sorry it took a while to reply and sorry that my reply here is not complete.

Honestly, I'm not sure myself what I think the future infrastructure of the fandom should look like (despite placing myself in a central role).

I do agree in principle that it is best to keep FuD focused on the official news. Right now, it wouldn't really be a problem to post art - the fandom is small enough to post all the art it produces and the site updates so slowly that the art doesn't drown other content - but if the fandom grows (which I hope it does), then we'll rapidly run into the problem of having to judge who gets the exposure. I'm completely art illiterate so I don't trust myself to do that, and I don't really know who else could do it. At that point, it might be best to redirect that community elsewhere. That can either be here on Fillychan or somewhere else.

About the name - yes, it is possible to do a redirect, I would simply have to buy two domain names (well, and update the facebook page, twitter page, the feed for those two pages, the RSS feed (it exists!), the IntenseDebate settings, and maybe something else, but it's still effort I'd be willing to make), but what I am worried about is how it will affect the google rank of the site. Right now, the site has the #1 spot when you search for "filly funtasia" on google. Except for videos, it's then followed by the tvtropes page (eh...), the official website (still just an uninformative image), the imdb page (empty), two pages from the old fillywiki (informative, but poorly updated), followed by two dumb EqD articles which are just barely kept off page 1. I honestly don't quite know how google treats redirects for the purpose of page rank and when searching for this information, I got conflicting statements on it. But what I do know is that both inlinks and content is important, and having a redirect would put the content on a different domain than where most of the inlinks point, and that could potentially be a problem for the rank.

Now, it might seem selfish that I think this is important, but for people who are interested in what Filly Funtasia is and if there is a fandom for it, simply googling it is probably what they are going to do to find out. If the results after FuD were other active FF fansites, it wouldn't really be a problem for me to drop out of the first spot in favor of another site which could act as an entry point for new people curious about the fandom. But now, the site is followed in the results by sites which are rather poor entry points.

When I started this site, it was as a way to store information that were gathered in Filly Funtasia threads in brony communities in a more permanent place, and I will admit that I was rather irreverent in the beginning instead of treating it as seriously as I do now. But it is going to be hard completely severing the ties between this new fandom and the brony one. Most people actively involved in the FF community are current or former bronies, and realistically, the brony community is going to be where the FF fandom can get its initial growth after the show launches. Sure, the name is a bit dumb and I would pick something else if I went back in time to 2013. I mean, the site doesn't update daily or even anywhere close to daily so if anything it's definitely false advertising.

I know that many bronies are incredibly dismissive towards Filly Funtasia (pic related), and exhibit very strong brand loyalty towards Hasbro (every time the subject of C&Ds comes up, a bunch of armchair lawyers immediately come to Hasbro's defense using the same old tired myths), but I'm quite sure there's still a lot of decent people in that community (especially the more casual fans) who would be interested in other girly shows as well and might expect something familiar in their new community. As for the angry people - well, whatever we do, they will find a reason to be angry. I don't want to take them into account when making decisions - we should do what's best for our community and for the open-minded people who could be interested in joining it. However, I'm not completely sure what the best thing for these people are.

>>695
Hmm, how much time do you think it'd take to get a freshly renamed site to that point? Got any numbers we could compare things to?

>>698
So, according to Google Webmaster Tools, Funtasia Daily has a grand total of 639 inlinks originating from 74 unique websites. That's not too shabby for a small niche site, though a lot of the links are from sites which themselves are quite tiny (smaller site: less valuable links) and over a dozen are from archivers/scrapers.

Amusingly, FuD gets a decent amount of inlinks from brony communities, and a lot of those inlinks come from people who submitted the site there to complain about it. They're actually helping me by doing so!

Now, I do have control over some inlinks: for example those from this website we're on right now (see that link in the menu to the left?) and those on FillyWiki and a few other places. The other inlinks won't be possible to repoint and it'll take a while until the site rebuilds that amount of inlinks organically. Now, is Google smart enough to fully credit the new site with the old's inlinks if I redirect it? That's been hard to find out. How much of the site's rank is because of the inlinks? That is also hard to know, because Google is very secretive with their exact PageRank formula and they tend to tweak it a lot to avoid people gaming it.

Now, let's use Fillychan as a comparison. This site is also loaded with Filly Funtasia keywords and has a decent amount of textual content, yet is nowhere to be seen on the Google results.

Fillychan has a total of 213 inlinks from 27 unique sites, but 150 of those links are actually from FuD! (It counts the link below the site banner once for every unique page.)

And of the 26 remaining sites, a lot of them are very low quality archiving/scraping sites. (and thus the links aren't weighted very heavily) It's linked to a few times by Reddit, Youtube, Fillywiki, and from only a handful of brony sites.

To summarize: The only real answer I have to the question "how much time would it take for a renamed FuD to reach the same spot as the old one" is "I don't really know: Google is a fickle mistress".

>>700

Why does the site have to change its name at all? “Funtasia Daily” is generic enough that it doesn’t have to have anything to do with My Little Pony, and even the Equestria Daily staff temporarily ran a non–pony–related news blog called “Desu Daily.”

>>700
The name is the minor thing, but if you plan to change it maybe "Funtasia Gazzette" sounds a nice one.
Another possibility is looking if there is some name from the setting for use it.

>>701
Yeah, I agree that is not a vital matter, but at the same time, I remembered that the first time I ran the Italian brony comunity and I needed to name it, I thought that I wanted something that reminded me a thing from the cartoon that I liked, instead of a general name like "MlP Ita" (and I went for the "Cutie mark crusaders").
So yes, the same here. I suggest something that reminds us something of our about what we do, than something done for joke or that reminds something else, and I grow the impression that "Daily", for some reasons, reminds too much the brony blog.
I think I'm wrong here, but also I wonder if give the impression to some outsider that FnD is run by the same staff of EqD just becouse the names are very similar, or that is a trick for getting audience (yes, I know that don't works in this way, but I think it gives that impression), and is another thing that I think to avoid.
Or that we can't come up with something original by our own.
I could think a couple of other reasons that make me feel that having a similar name with something much more knowed can give a bad impression, even maybe those could not happen.

You know the people: they are ready to grab the smaller things to smear you.

>>700
I waited some time to for summarize better this thing, becouse was better talk about that apart.

When I opened this post, I wasn't though much about the brony fandom or such, but more around pratical problem to run a blog; but if we thought that is an important point to touch, here some things that my experience tought.

There are two kinds of communities: those who venerate a common interest, and those who venerate themselves.

My second biggest interest is the retrogaming, and here the main things are the machines. If you do a new game, you can gain popularity, but you are perceived anyway as one of the crowd and your stuff an addition to other many things loved here. I want say: you aren't more important than the machines, that are at the center.
Usually this should be a community that venerates a common interest.

Brony fandom seems venerate its own self appointed celeberities and memes, sometimes disconnected from the show itself.
Hard tell why that happened. I'm not sure if pointing about being a cartoon, becouse I then point that furry fandom is another comunity that focus more the people that compose it than the main theme.
One reason could be that, in spite of itself, FiM attracted guys that thought was cool to boast they watch a girls cartoon, just becouse the creator thought that there aren't enough girls cartoon around, although they have not culture in this stuff. They are more fond to the idea to being different than to the cartoon itself.
Could be also that the fans found limited the format of the show, and preferr a context without such limitations, therefore put the fandom over the show itself.
Americans seem have this tendency to make fandom cartoons in this way, so isn't just a question of FiM.

There is also to say that FiM suffered from the behaviour to use it as launch pad to push own popularity than sincere love for it: if you do something pony-related, you can be sure that a "herd" will notice you and grab new audience. I can criticize that not just to the fan, the FiM staff has this guilty. I think the "Brony documentaries" were more a tool to booster the popularity of DeLancie (that produced it) than something to explain the good qualities of the show to external people.
Too many people today still think is a good idea booster their own image saying "I'm brony!".

And instead to being remembered as a good show, FiM will be remembered as a circus of weird and awkward guys. Probably in the next two years, nobody will even care to remember to have said to being "fan" of it.

Probably happens also when a thing is taken outside the genre/context where it belong; focusing on a single cartoon ignoring the others of the same kind.
I don't see the extreme behaviour in the retrogaming world (and there is also much more creativity) becouse, I think, this theme is very general and cover much different stuff (you have the games, the music, the hardware, etc); therefore the comunity is very varied with different experiences, but connected by the same theme, therefore we tend to get interest in more than one thing and being attracted more by new activities, curiosities or experiments. The world of 8bit home machines was all an experiment and exploration of what could be with the machine, after all.
Cartoons fandoms usually haven't much flexibility, a single story focuses only to a certain theme and stereotypes for characters, therefore there is the tendency to stray from the bonduaries to keep the ambient alive.
What matter is if the cartoon remains at the center of the fandom, or its celeberities take its place.

I think controlling this is outside the ability of anybody. Is a collective thing that depends from the story, characteristics of the thing, origin of the people, and such. Too many factors outside control.

Things that could help, I'm not sure. Probably the question is avoid to expose the fandom too much than the show; instead Funtasia should be the first and last thing that every outsider should see. The fan arts or the artist aren't the problem, and in the right contexts, they are the lifeblood of a comunity.

The real problem, I think, stays in the behaviour of the brony fandom that pushed the idea that watching a cartoon means automatically embrace some kind of moral layer and mentality. You find the same thing in the furry fandom, where they love boast the concept that a furry is an "open and completely tolerant mind toward differences and should accept anything and anybody".
This is, let me say in this way, an utterly bullshit.
You watch a cartoon becouse you like it, the reasons are yours and nothing more.
There is no high purpose, no special role, in that.
We don't believe in nothing.
We don't preach nothing.
We don't expect nothing from nobody.
If you aren't here just for the fun, you should not be here.

The fact the show is european, maybe this alone should avoid a lot of troubles; Americans seem don't give attention to nothing that isn't American or Japanese.
But if we want avoid some unexpected twists in future, we should kill this thing if it shows up.

This is a necropost but I love Greyfeather's avatar.