Weeaboo Review
From WeeabooDB
The Weeaboo Review is a website that provides anime reviews and community discussion for anime lovers.
Contents |
History
The Weeaboo Review's history is directly connected with the history of The Republic of GBHQ, as it is one of the few splinter organizations that have been created in the time period since the first ragequit. It is also arguably the most successful splinter project to date and the only one that currently remains in development.
The Prototype
The concept for the review was created sometime in May 2007 from a series of IRC discussions between the three heads of the Council of IRC; Cazesudo, Madd, and Shere. The project was intended to be another revival attempt for The Republic of GBHQ which was all but dead at the time. The focus of the project was decided to be an anime review/community site that would provide tracking of current series releases as well as reviews on the series in an attempt to help users steer clear of horrible shows. The concept was most likely Shere's brainchild as he is by far the biggest weeaboo of The Republic (causing him to be an avid ADTRW reader) and already wrote mini-reviews for various web forums where small groups of weeaboos were known to gather. Cazesudo supported the idea because he was in somewhat of a weeaboo mood at the time and was more interested in just finding a concept that would work for a revival. Madd was also for the idea, being a lesser weeaboo than Shere, and was the only one of the three that could bring the concept to fruition being that he had assumed the role of Republic Codemonkey long ago. The name for the project, Weeaboo Review was suggested by Shere sometime shortly there after and finally accepted when no better alternatives were generated.
Features suggested for the prototype included forums, series reviews, fansub group reviews, series blogs, a random IRC quote function, and torrent aggregation for series releases.
Prototype layout concepts were created by Cazesudo between May and June of 2007 while Madd began programming for the site during the same period and a minimally functioning version of the prototype was deployed on June 08th to begin testing and finalization of the look and feel of the site.
One of the biggest issues the prototype had was the lack of an aesthetically pleasing homepage banner. While Cazesudo was capable of creating color schemes and envisioning a layout for Madd to produce, The Republic lacked a true graphic artist that was capable of producing digital graphics needed for a proper banner. After enlisting the help of EsRubio, a long time Republic member, some concept banners were created but a banner that was acceptable by the Council leaders could not be created and development on the project came to a halt.
The hiatus
Interest in the project waned and eventually the Republic shifted is resources into the development of GBHQWC and NocturnalRO during the remainder of 2007 and through the end of 2008. As it turns out this would end up being one of several blessings in disguise for the project, as GBHQWC ended up being a very successful tool to rebuild the depleted ranks of The Republic and form a larger user base for the small community.
During the long hiatus a pseudo-reboot of the project was briefly considered with a new more compact "web 2.0" feel to the site design that looked like a sort of media player skin. This is incredibly ironic because at the time playing of actual anime on the site was never considered but would eventually become the centerpiece of version 2.0 after an unrelated development introduced the possibility to the project.
Just as it had many times before however, GunBound would lose the Republic's interest and lead to the next blessing for the abandoned review project.
Weeaboo Review 2.0
Sometime in early December 2008 Shere was informed of a Steam user that was streaming the English Dub one of Shere's favorite anime of all time (Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha) online using a combination of software and the Mogulus web platform. Shere thought "hey that's neat" and while enjoying the broadcast run decided to try the technology out for himself. Shere brought this discovery back to The Republic's IRC division and began to stream series he had access to (reportedly 1TB of anime) which served to rekindle the weeaboo spirit in the Republic. The initial broadcast on the WeeabooReview Mogulus channel is thought to have been an episode from the first season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumia, while the first complete series aired was the English Dub of Azumanga Daioh. Shortly after the initial broadcasts by Shere, Madd was also able to acquire the requisite technology to broadcast via Mogulus and the two began to build the WeeabooReview Mogulus channel into a respectable weeaboo hangout.
The use of Mogulus was a great addition to The Republic but initially it suffered from quirky performance that left Shere and Madd the only ones able to make use of it. The quality of the product also left much to be desired, broadcasts were sometimes very pixelated and the default player hosted by Mogulus was almost too small to be enjoyable.
In early January 2009 Madd was working on the AutoPlay library and was digging around in some of the administrative functions in the Mogulus Studio when he stumbled upon the possibility of embedding the Mogulus technology in a separate site and improve some qualities of the player such as the resolution which was reason enough by itself to pursue. Madd found he was easily able to move the platform onto The Republic controlled webserver and increase the player size to its current 600x600 resolution.
At the time Shere was broadcasting the English Dub of Fate/Stay Night which he had received for Christmas, in the series one of the main characters uses a type of magic called projection magic, that he combines with his ability to analyze and reproduce any weapon to produce weapons used by him in the show. This process is depicted in the show as a sequence of integrated circuits being triggered, and after being shown a super high resolution vector version of one of the circuit paths Madd decided to make the circuits an integral part of the new site's design, which changed from the prototype blue to the circuitry's black, gray, and neon green. The original vector became part of the banner, and the theme was spread through the site's navigation and content sections to tie the elements together as they appear in the current version.
Along with the new graphical design the underlying structure of the review changed also with a new database structure implemented to provide the content management for the site.
The project may have received a new look but the mission was still the same, to provide anime reviews and related services for the weeaboo community but from this point on the site would also be able to actually share the viewing pleasure of anime with the weeaboos.
Initial development was swift, and the homepage complete with expanded Mogulus features was completed by mid January, the site however did not provide the expanded functionality of a complete review system or any of the other planned features at this point in time. Having a functioning platform for broadcasting anime seemed to be such an important new feature that development once again began to stagnate and by mid February development had once again ceased, even though broadcasts continued.
The cessation of development combined with political strife within The Republic of GBHQ saw the deletion of the Republic hosted copy of The Weeaboo Review 2.0 along with the hijacking of the www.weeabooreview.net domain name, and the exile of Cazesudo from the Republic in what came to be known as The WR ragequit.
Weeaboo Review 3.0
The destruction and theft of the project outraged Shere and Madd, who vowed to restore the project with the original files kept by Madd on a new webhost where it would be safe from any future interruptions. The change of webhost caused Madd to begin a new code branch which was internally known as "WR3" in order to ensure that the original 2.0 source files were not manipulated in such a way that they could not be recovered.
By March 25th 2009 the project had been restored, although the theft of the domain was unrecoverable as all attempts to reason with Cazesudo over the transfer of the domain were unsuccessful, so the site was restored at the current URL of www.weeabooreview.gbgl-hq.com.
Madd still enraged by the ordeal, compounded with the act of being exposed to the source of the project again in the transfer and the timing of the rebirth (which coincided with a new season of anime) once again began development on the Weeaboo Review project. Over the next few weeks he worked on the project, expanding its functionality greatly by redesigning the database to support the newly conceived review structure which would provide a better user experience by allowing for sortable reviews. By mid April the site possessed the ability to add series complete with a wealth of information on the series, a linked review system that allowed reviews for a series to be viewed on an episodic or complete at a glance basis, site administrative features to edit and maintain the reviews, and a newly upgraded review input system that automated the formatting of tedious sections of the review process such as image embedding.
After nearly two years of development The Weeaboo Review project had finally reached a point where it provided a majority of the functionality originally conceived with the prototype and was given a warm reception by the remaining members of The Republic. Within weeks of 3.0's release the site had built up a database of nearly 50 series reviews, with some new series even being reviewed in episodic detail.
Development once again was put on the back burner as Madd had to shift much of his effort into helping provide content for the site along with Shere, although a few additional features that had been associated with the project all along like fansub group reviews and torrent aggregation have received partial implementations or development.
Weeaboo Review 3.5
As the spring 2009 anime season began to draw to a close The Review began to switch some broadcast slots over to the massive backlog of anime available to fill some gaps created by the completion of new shows. At some point Madd and Shere devised the idea of doing "theme weeks" of shows such as retro week, while viewing the backlog of shows some conversations in IRC during broadcasts by viewers led to the proposal that Madd and Shere should "write a book" containing all of their weeaboo quips generated by shows. After a few days pondering the concept the two agreed that the Weeaboo Review project should be expanded with a (this) wiki, so that material that didn't fit into reviews could still be posted while also expanding the content generation capability to the rest of the Republic's weeaboos.
On July 8th the Weeaboo Review Database was unveiled to The Republic and has been in operation since.
Weeaboo Review 3.6
August 2009 brought with it another upgrade to the review, bringing the version to 3.6.
Version 3.6 was special for the site because unlike all previous development which focused on core components of the site, version 3.6 provided mostly new features that were never in the original site concept. These new features focused more on the community aspects of the site instead of administrative elements, the most notable being the addition of the Widget onto the front page. Along with the Widget the ability for regular community members to actually partake in the reviewing of shows was implemented, every series page now linked to a page where users could give the series a rating and post comments about shows they were following. The average of all user ratings is calculated and listed back on the main series page as the 'Weeaboo Average Score'.
Rather than deal with the hassle of having all the members create yet another login for the site, Madd used the SMF API of the site's forums to use the accounts already created by the community to authenticate with the Widget and to track ratings and comments for the user reviews section of the site.
The Widget saw with it the launch of the Currently Airing Schedule which listed reviewed shows from current and past seasons that were still being followed by the WR team. In order to continually expand the capabilities of the site Madd wrote the back end of the Schedule app in AJAX, more of a proof of concept than any real necessity. While only the listing of current shows appears in the Widget, the schedule app contained extra features which were initially intended to be able to function as a way to track aired/unaired episodes so users could follow along but as of yet have not been fully implemented due to complications with the concept and a somewhat lukewarm reception.
A few small core feature upgrades of the site was also in version 3.6, the ability to add Fansub group reviews finally received a full implementation and was added to the reviews section of the site along side the series reviews. This feature also received a less than warm welcome and has gone wholly unused as Madd and Shere have not found a way to devote the extra time required to review even more things. The front page also saw the expansion of the recent reviews headlines from 3 posts to 5 in an attempt to give more coverage time to reviews during busy spells when the team would produce several reviews in a short span of time.
The addition of the Currently Airing Schedule generated demand for a way to track which community members were actually following a show in order to help better plan the broadcast schedule to serve everyone best. Madd would push the development of this feature to the top of the list and begin work on it almost immediately.
Also on the list of features for future development was the addition of a custom site search function, a button for which had been part of the site since its inception. The growing list of series would begin to be unmanageable even with the upgraded sortability if searching wasn't implemented eventually.
Weeaboo Review 3.6.1
Development of the site was mostly quiet through the end of 2009, but January 2010 would bring big changes to the site. By mid January the site had produced more than 3,000 viewer hours of material and the staff had reviewed some 60 plus series in a little over a year. Version 3.6.1 is only an internal identifier for this update, as no true version change has been made publicly but the amount of development and change that occurred from the site is worth being separated from the previous update also due in part to the large time span between the changes.
A lot of things in the anime world had changed along with the site since the modern version was introduced in December 2008, most notably the quality of the material the team had to work with. Much of the early broadcast material available was essentially backlog anime that predated the site by several years and even the current decade, however as the site matured the focus switched more to currently airing shows. The switch brought with it the era of High Definition as an ever increasing number of series in the late 2000's began to air in 720p on stations in japan, providing a higher quality of RAWs to the fansubbing community. The increase in quality ended up proving to be a bit of a Catch-22 for the team.
Obviously the WR team was all for better quality material but would soon find themselves faced with several problems due to complications stemming from the new HD material. The biggest problem facing the team was the fact that Madd and Shere were predominantly using technology that pre-dated the HD era, Madd's system soon proved to be unable to handle the demand of both playing and broadcasting 720p material while Shere was able to handle most episodes depending on the encoding techniques used. Even the maturation of the Livestream Procaster into a stable platform didn't have much effect, but would play an important part in other eventual changes in version 3.6.1. This lack of computing power would lead Madd to the construct GENESIS over the holidays, and push Shere towards upgrades of his own in order to ensure the future of the Review.
Now that the team had the hardware to support the process, the site would need an update to bring it into the era of HD. The embedded site player ran at a 600x600 resolution for the 4:3 screen ratio of broadcasting, with HD however the aspect ratio changed to 16:9 and ended up with bread-boxing and reduced overall viewing ability. While doing research on the Livestream platform Madd came across some information about converting the channel to a native 16:9 format which would allow him to upgrade the embedded player to an impressive 850x553 resolution. This particular resolution was deemed to be the largest acceptable format that would still fit on the majority of current screen resolutions when combined with the other elements of the site and not cause horizontal scrolling. This did however mean the Widget which had until now floated free off to the right of the media player to fill empty space would need to be moved to make room. The only obvious choice was to move it down below the player next to the recent reviews listing, which lead Madd to envision changing the player from a free floating object to a part of the site's integrated circuitry theme to better tie the new homepage together.
The Future
Continued development of the project is currently intended, with priority given to the existing partially implemented features such as fansub group reviews and torrent aggregation.
Since the site began using the Mogulus platform, Mogulus has since changed it's name to Livestream (although it's still referred to by the Republic as Mogulus) and has itself undergone some upgrades. Livestream released a downloadable client to be used with the Livestream broadcast platform that replaced the web based studio and provides for a higher quality stream to be broadcast than was previously possible. Unfortunately the Livestream client does not meet current broadcast standards by the Review team (it has desync issues and is not as user friendly as it could be) so it is only used for testing purposes. Hopefully with further development by the Livestream team it can mature enough to be usable by the project.
Proposed Developments
The original Mogulus broadcast page had a flash based webchat associated with the broadcast window which while useful, has caused it not to be implemented on the embedded version of the Mogulus player as The Republic maintains its own chat presence in IRC which is the primary method of communication during viewing. The ability to integrate the IRC chat into the Weeaboo homepage for easier use when viewing broadcasts is a feature that the team would like to implement and possible solutions to that end are being considered.
