News & Updates

Shirts are here!

Hundreds of sites. Tens of thousands of cels. Zonky servers. Lobster machines. Wind. Rain. Sleet. Snow. Dogs and cats living together. You were here -- click the link below get the shirt. It's the first of many. If you're lucky you might snag one of the few remaining limited editions...

http://www.rubberslug.com/shop/shirt.aspx

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Chat Online

Browser-based chat room now online. Flash, Java, or any other nonsense like that not required.

http://www.rubberslug.com/chat

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Bandwidth Ahoy!

We're finally getting a very fancy and high-tech connection piped into our server rack tomorrow. That's a definite thing barring cancellation of an appointment with the snooty ISP guys. Fiber is very expensive stuff so they spent the two weeks doing that "measure twice, cut once" kinda thing.

Please report any weirdness either in the forum or directly to us via e-mail. I'll report in when we are switched over and running smoothly.

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Features Done?

Okay, so all features that have been submitted to me before today should be done. If you have submitted a feature and it has not been done, please e-mail us at the link below and scold us.

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New Search Engine

I figured I'd make a public announcement that work on the search engine is basically done for the moment. You can now search by any number of terms. For example, "sakura" will get you 1000+ cels of a certain intrepid, rollerblading adventurer, but "sakura tower" will net a few cels from the episode staged near Tokyo Tower.

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Doing Our Little Part

All Rubberslug donations for the next two weeks (until Jan 22) will be donated to the American Red Cross for aid in South Asia. It's a real mess. While we probably won't have a massive sum to contribute, at least it's food and vaccinations for possibly a few dozen people.

Don't forget that sponsors will still get nifty icons and all the benefits of being a site sponsor, including site rankings and early access to the online shop.

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Community Shop Test

We're testing out a rough draft of the Community Shop and would like your input and feedback. Sellers posting to the shop probably want your mula. Please drop in for a visit or check out the numerous forum threads requesting feedback.

   Visit the Shop and Feed the Cel Book

The shop is available for straight purchases or trades. Auction formats are not yet available but may be implemented at a later date.

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Ratings Revisited

Ratings calculations have been redone. They are now based on weighted averages and take into account sitewide voting patterns. You can manually recalculate your rating at any time by either voting for yourself or by power-cycling the switch that determines whether or not your gallery is ratable.

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The FAQs of Life

Thanks goes out to E and Flippy, who decided to work around the lazy admin
and rewrite the Frequently Asked Questions themselves.

Questions and answers include numerous forum threads pulled from the Rubberslug Help section and a few additions of our own.

Did we miss anything? Please let us know and we'll try to get your vital additions thrown into the mix as soon as possible.

Check it out here:

   View Frequently Asked Questions

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Say Hello to Startyde

Hooray for Startyde, Moderator Extrordinaire.

Due to an radioactive experiment gone horribly wrong, Startyde has obtained powers far beyond those of mortal man. Blessing... or curse?

You make the call. Sound off in the forums to say hello, demand extra points, or otherwise make Startyde's day more interesting.

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Anime Cel Links

Hooray for E.

We have a new links page listing everything from where to get cel collecting supplies (books, bags, etc.) to where to go to purchase stuff you want.... includes cool galleries and some recommended viewing as well.

Check it out below.

   View Links Page

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New Switches

Sponsors can now show/hide sponsor link in directory and Rubberslug link on their home pages. Also, sketches can now be separately password-protected. All of these options can be found in the "Gallery Settings" panel on your account page. Sponsor options will only be visible to sponsors. If you make a change to sponsor icon settings, it could take up for 15 minutes for the change to go through because of the way the site is designed. Let me know if any of this is broken.

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E-mail Verification

Updated: If you were having trouble getting verified before and had a space or other special character in your name, please try to verify yourself by logging in again to get another e-mail. If it doesn't work this time, forward me the e-mail via the feedback form.

We now require accurate e-mail addresses.

How does it work?

The next time you log in, you will be taken to a page that will send an e-mail to the address you have on file. This message will contain a big long link. Click on it. You're done.

E-mail not correct? Don't worry, as long as you log in correctly, you can change you e-mail from the Verify E-mail page you get taken to. Simply enter your new address in the blank and click "Submit" and another e-mail will be sent your way.

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Shared Background Gallery

Thanks to a great suggestion by one of our intrepid forum hounds, we now have a shared background gallery. It's a little simple right now but I'll be working on it in the next week or so to polish it up a bit.

What's a shared background gallery? It's a place for Rubberslug members to upload high-resolution scans of their personal watercolor backgrounds for other collectors to use in framing and display. Downloads are available to any random passerby to this site. This may change in the future if the bandwidth crunch becomes too much, but for now it's open season.

   View Shared Gallery

Making suggestions works! Leave feedback in the forum to get your wishlist items on the agenda.

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Zen.

We now have a funky points system to rank site participation. Someday, these points will be able to cash in to something useful. We still have to balance it out so don't be alarmed if your points fluctuate madly up and down for the next week or so. The formula is super duper secret, but just about everything you can do on the site will eventually play some part in your point total.

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Autoscaler + Memory Boost

You may have already noticed, but we have a new feature that automatically scales images down and splits them up into 4 pieces. This is designed as a deterrant against image thefts and also as a way to make your site more friendly to lower bandwidth connections. You can select from your gallery preferences menu if you want this feature on and off and the level of control you want over your large scans (scale size + password protection).

Another feature is the password protection for full-size scans, which has been requested for quite some time now. If you turn this feature on (it's off by default), visitors will be required to know the gallery password before they are allowed to view full-size scans by clicking on the "medium" size scaled down scans. This functionality does not apply to anyone who has turned the auto-scaling feature off.

As a side bonus, the server now has 5x the memory that it had fifteen minutes ago. *cheer*

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New Server Installed

It's Omoikane, mostly because the Kanji translation of "simultaneous thought" seemed very elegant. Sorry for picking my own suggestion. Totally unintended. I'm such a tyrant. =/

The new server should be functioning at 100%. Thumbnail making is fixed with a component I spent most of the day writing and should be fairly solid. Let me know if it breaks. Interesting fact of the day... This server tops out at around 30-40% capacity under even the highest loads so far. Average is around 5-10%. It's missing about a gigabyte of memory that's yet to be installed to boot. In comparison, our old server ran at 70-100% regularly and made things very difficult for me to work on. New stuff should be coming along at a regular pace from here on out.

Since this site is in need of cash right now, our next project after I get done with feature images and gettings old features working will likely be a fund raiser. It's either going to be making stuff for Rubberslug to sell (shirts, stickers, etc.) or working a way into the system for you all to sell stuff. Just want to give you something to look forward to. Thanks again for your patience over the last few months.

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D-Day

Something has come up to move our timetable up a few days. We're going to be switching out servers tomorrow, Wednesday the 10th, sometime in the afternoon. We predict that the site will be down for about 4-5 hours while we make sure everything works as it is suppoosed to. I will make an effort to keep the server status page updated if something freaky happens that delays our server swapping adventure in any way.

With any luck, the server swap will go without incident and the site will be up and running tomorrow in a stable condition. We've also got some extra parts on order but they probably won't arrive in time. Once we get everything in the system it should be much faster and more reliable than our current klunker. Cross your fingers.

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New server

Our new server arrived on Thursday. I've been working on getting it up to speed most of the past two days. I know I'm really behind on feature galleries and such but I promise I'll get to them soon. (Apologies to patient people who have been waiting a few weeks...)

Rubberslug is still using the old server and it has been crashing again lately. You may have to refresh pages several times to get them to load for now.

Switching the new server out with the old one will likely happen on the weekend of Feb. 15-16, 2004. Just a little advanced warning...

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Server Status Page

As expected, server died again sometime yesterday morning at around 11 AM. Until we get a new server, if you can't get to the site visit the following page on a different server for server status information: http://www.orchidflux.com/rs.asp. I'll post what's going on should the server fail again before we get the new machine up and running.

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Server Crashing, Admin Developing Nervous Tick

Server is randomly doing that "connection reset" error thing again. We're shopping for a new server. Do you have any spare parts?

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New Link Module

New module available for your personal galleries: a links page.

It's deceptively simple, but it's the first module using (parts of) the new system being worked on to replace the current aging site design tool.

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Housecleaning

Any gallery buttons over 10k have been replaced with a simple black graphic. Please be considerate of your fellow collectors who do not have broadband connections and make your gallery buttons as efficient and small as possible. A good size would be somewhere between 3K and 6K.

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Server Fixed

Howdy. The site should be in perfect working order once again and work will continue tonight on some delayed features. If you notice anything strange still happening, please let me know. Thanks.

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Sponsorship Program

We're starting a program to recognize site members who have been generous enough to donate to the site. You may have noticed a few changes already, mostly in the form of new icons under feature images, gallery listings, and a new gallery catagory.

For the moment, we have three tentatively named sponsorship levels: silver ($10), gold ($20), and platinum ($50). Keep in mind that all donations from one user accumulate over time, so feel free to pace yourself. Of course, if you'd like to give us enough to name a scholarship after you, then by all means please do.

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Colors Galore

Member pages were sorta overhauled, so the last trace of rs 2001 -- except for the gallery layouts themselves -- should be gone now. Didn't feel like redoing the formatting to the new page size, but I'll probably get around to that soon.

The bigger news is: no more dopey limited crayon box to pick colors from. New color picker allows you to select any color you can put on a monitor. (Mac support is wonky, will fix at later date.)

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Login Saving

Logins should now save as advertised.

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