Hello, you jolly reprobates. There are many months of the year, and this has definitely been one of them. Not since April has so much happened in such a short space of time. It's not often that a talent threatening to commit suicide is an event so minor compared to everything else going on that it gets drowned out almost immediately. I've had to spend all-nighters sorting through DMs, trying to figure out what to focus on and what not to bring attention to. It hasn't been easy. There is still stuff I haven't had time to work on yet. So stay tuned for even more autism in the coming few days.
Here's the long and short of it; TVA is rapidly inclining in ways I never anticipated in my wildest dreams. Though our userbase has not vastly increased in the past few months, we are now officially 'on the map' in terms of our reach, name recognition and impact on proceedings. Vtubers with no accounts here have been DM'ing me on Twitter about things minutes after they've been brought up on the forum. Posting 'I hope my favourite talent doesn't see me saying this about them' is no longer an in-joke; unless your favourite talent is in a big corpo, they've likely at least heard that TVA exists at this point.
I bring this up not to brag about how vtubers know about us, but to highlight how we have been perceived by the vtuber community. Without exception, the people who have contacted me have said they like this forum. When I asked members to be nicer to a certain vtuber in one of our major threads at the moment, I fully expected to be told 'lol no, and now I'm going to call her even worse things because you cared'. But instead, members actually went out of their way to apologize for their past remarks, something I never even asked them to do. I won't lie; my heart grew three sizes that day.
Enormous credit goes to @reinigen @Johnny Jambalaya and @thhrang my beloved for being endlessly helpful to me throughout recent events. I would be a rapidly disintegrating puddle of stress if I was doing all this alone. It's unbelievably hard to find reliable people on the internet, but something about TVA just seems to keep them coming forwards when I really need them. Supplementary thanks goes to @LastOfTheMohicans and @Fucking YTs for consistent tech support, and to all the demented no-life archivists out there who have preserved many things that guilty parties would dearly love had been buried for all time.
Now, all of this new attention has been distracting. I promised revisions to things like the rules and CoC recently, but I've been so distracted that has never gone much beyond the announcement and making thhrang a janny. As soon as things calm down, I'll reprioritize these clarifications. In the meantime I'm eternally grateful for the people who've demonstrated their trust in me by mucking along without complaint.
But I didn't make this announcement just to talk about the aforementioned stuff. In fact, the main reason is the following; We are (finally) moving off the cloud. I am planning to order a dedicated server within the next couple of weeks at most, as we are now at the point where we desperately need the physical space of a proper high-capacity hard drive to contain our collective autism. I am principally looking into incognet.io as they have an excellent reputation for privacy and security, though it appears they can only offer EU-based servers right now. If you know similarly-priced options with other companies who have a similar stance on free speech, let me know immediately.
Likewise, if any tech-heads are out there with experience transferring data and operating remote hosts, I could very much use the help. I do have helpers, but I prefer having as large a talent pool available as possible, so that I don't end up stressing out any one volunteer with endless requests to put up with my idiocy.
I have already contacted Xenforo and begun to grill them about moving. They assure me this instance of the forum will stay up until I cancel my cloud plan, so what I intend to do is use my last billing period to make sure the new host is working properly before formally transferring over to it. That means that for a little while there might be two versions of the forum live simultaneously. Things might be a bit weird for a while, which is why you should all be following me on Twitter for updates, and/or at least have burner accounts on Matrix/Discord so we can all stay in contact in an emergency.
That's all for now. Thank you for being a community I can feel proud of.
Here's the long and short of it; TVA is rapidly inclining in ways I never anticipated in my wildest dreams. Though our userbase has not vastly increased in the past few months, we are now officially 'on the map' in terms of our reach, name recognition and impact on proceedings. Vtubers with no accounts here have been DM'ing me on Twitter about things minutes after they've been brought up on the forum. Posting 'I hope my favourite talent doesn't see me saying this about them' is no longer an in-joke; unless your favourite talent is in a big corpo, they've likely at least heard that TVA exists at this point.
I bring this up not to brag about how vtubers know about us, but to highlight how we have been perceived by the vtuber community. Without exception, the people who have contacted me have said they like this forum. When I asked members to be nicer to a certain vtuber in one of our major threads at the moment, I fully expected to be told 'lol no, and now I'm going to call her even worse things because you cared'. But instead, members actually went out of their way to apologize for their past remarks, something I never even asked them to do. I won't lie; my heart grew three sizes that day.
Enormous credit goes to @reinigen @Johnny Jambalaya and @thhrang my beloved for being endlessly helpful to me throughout recent events. I would be a rapidly disintegrating puddle of stress if I was doing all this alone. It's unbelievably hard to find reliable people on the internet, but something about TVA just seems to keep them coming forwards when I really need them. Supplementary thanks goes to @LastOfTheMohicans and @Fucking YTs for consistent tech support, and to all the demented no-life archivists out there who have preserved many things that guilty parties would dearly love had been buried for all time.
Now, all of this new attention has been distracting. I promised revisions to things like the rules and CoC recently, but I've been so distracted that has never gone much beyond the announcement and making thhrang a janny. As soon as things calm down, I'll reprioritize these clarifications. In the meantime I'm eternally grateful for the people who've demonstrated their trust in me by mucking along without complaint.
But I didn't make this announcement just to talk about the aforementioned stuff. In fact, the main reason is the following; We are (finally) moving off the cloud. I am planning to order a dedicated server within the next couple of weeks at most, as we are now at the point where we desperately need the physical space of a proper high-capacity hard drive to contain our collective autism. I am principally looking into incognet.io as they have an excellent reputation for privacy and security, though it appears they can only offer EU-based servers right now. If you know similarly-priced options with other companies who have a similar stance on free speech, let me know immediately.
Likewise, if any tech-heads are out there with experience transferring data and operating remote hosts, I could very much use the help. I do have helpers, but I prefer having as large a talent pool available as possible, so that I don't end up stressing out any one volunteer with endless requests to put up with my idiocy.
I have already contacted Xenforo and begun to grill them about moving. They assure me this instance of the forum will stay up until I cancel my cloud plan, so what I intend to do is use my last billing period to make sure the new host is working properly before formally transferring over to it. That means that for a little while there might be two versions of the forum live simultaneously. Things might be a bit weird for a while, which is why you should all be following me on Twitter for updates, and/or at least have burner accounts on Matrix/Discord so we can all stay in contact in an emergency.
That's all for now. Thank you for being a community I can feel proud of.
