Rewind a couple of years and the He Moves Me Differently forum was buzzing with people wanting to discuss my Death Note fan-fiction. That's back when I was crashing the counters on places like MangaBullet, receiving upwards of 300,000 hits within the space of about three months.
The website itself was a gift to my readers, voted into being as part of a poll post-The Mello Code. I promised to produce something special, if I reached 6,000 hits on that novel. It hurtled way beyond that amount in about three days. Then the forum was tacked onto the end, circa Annals of Fear 2, due to a request from Animeprincess.
But that was then, this is now.
More recently you could practically see the tumbleweed blowing through. Then suddenly, without any discernible warning at all, the place livened up again. I don't know which external forum or segment of cyber-space bigged up my stories, but it brought the people flocking to join in the chats.
Which meant that I really should update the blessed site, fix all of those bugs and ensure that the infrastructure was fit for purpose.
Naturally, I promptly crashed the whole thing.
Several hours of wrestling with it later, all was working after a fashion, but I must have triggered some spambot alert somewhere. A veritable wall of spammers blocked the way into my notifications. The whole forum was at their mercy. I had them summarily killed and built up our defenses. All seems quiet now.
So onto fixing the multiple bugs I'd created in attempting to update it all in the first place. That's what's taken up so much of today. But the result is a brand new, cleanly installed infrastructure; forum categories expanded/realigned/messed with; users assigned appropriate groups; and generally everything set out nicely for folk to visit and enjoy. I hope.
Amongst the new features is the capacity for Death Note fan-fiction other than my own to be under discussion. Plus I'm creating a way for such tales to be added to my own website's library. (In an exciting development for me, that includes other Death Note writers penning stories in my own universe! There's already a couple of tales in there!)
Hopefully that will give the whole forum much more longevity and provide a place - above and beyond my own works - for folk like me to while away the long summer hours.
Now all I need to do is fix the bloody header. As in - I can't get it to show up. Any ideas?
And if you used to be a regular on the forum, then may I recommend that you nip in again? You might find much more going on than when you left. All are most definitely welcome.