The Birthday Where R51 Doesn't Quit

I briefly debated just re-posting last year's CoN birthday message. I'm awful lazy. After nine years I'm allowed to be, right? Caves of Narshe has now been a part of me for over a third of my life. I think I've earned it.

But really, the reason behind it is more that the results of this year are not dissimilar from those of last year. Some good stuff, some rough stuff, all the same stuff. Of course, I like talking about the good stuff. So, since I'm posting this in the news forum, let's start with our news coverage. Since last birthday, we've had three and a half pages of news posted here in the default forum view. That's somewhere on the order of 100+ threads started by our news staff in the last year, an average of one every three days or so. That gives you guys a lot of great information to learn and discuss, and it's all thanks to our great news team (all added in the last year!) - Silverfork, Karasuman, Laszlow, and Zero_Hawk.

We've increased our rate of fan media on the site as well, again thanks to some new staff, in this case Mimic, Kappa, and Del. Now you needn't see new art on the site only once a year, but more like twice. Or three times. Hey, you want more, you submit more! Really, though, we're as pleased as can be with the submissions we're getting both in terms of quantity and quality, so definitely keep it up and we'll do the same.

Chat recently has been pretty explosive, we're starting to turn around the numbers for that part of the site as well. If you've never chatted before with CoN or even anyone, it's actually worth your time. We've got people online most all the time now; I and the Britons of the site tend to anchor down the American morningtime (it's the best way for me to avoid work), and then a large collection of staff, members, and thoroughly random people stop by all hours of the day to join in. And after I take my old, decrepit self to bed, I assume it's some sort of scary after-hours sort of get-together. Climhazzard won't tell me what all goes on. It seems that what happens in CoNChat stays in CoNChat - unless it ends up in our collection of #narshe humor, CoNQMS. We're not all Final Fantasy all the time, and a visit to chat will definitely confirm that for you.

Now the site, the site. Well, as most of you probably know, we crossed the one-hundred-thousand post mark here at the forums since our last birthday, and we're rapidly closing in on 125k as I write this. We also have just crossed the barrier of 2700 members signed up. And now due to some upgrades to the signup process, we're pretty sure the new folks aren't spambots, either! So you new folks, maybe you might want to consider making your first post right here in this thread to give your congrats, and then head off to the Greetings forum to tell us a bit more about yourself.

The content areas of the site, where we still give you the best Final Fantasy coverage you can find for the classics, are still getting better. Of course, I don't have quite as much great stuff to say as in the last message about our content because frankly we've slowed down a bit from our torrid - as if - pace of adding Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy VII in 2005. We did, very recently, though, upgrade most of our Final Fantasy V data, improving by leaps and bounds what might have been our weakest content section. We have more to come for FFV, so stay tuned. Also, it's a thinly veiled secret that we're also doing some work on upgrading other content, notably Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy IV. And Djibriel has been hard at work behind the scenes with some Final Fantasy VI tweaks, too. You'll know more as we finish, of course. We do like to trumpet such things from the minarets and all.

And, of course, you'll actually be able to see all this great stuff as it finishes, because we've had six months of nearly rock solid server performance, too. That's a far cry from where we were 365 days ago, isn't it? Since we moved in late January, our downtime has been virtually nil - we've been, on average, up 98.5% of the time, and we've had 99.5% or higher for the last two months. You don't have to worry about not coming here due to downtime, or not telling your friends about us because they won't be able to get here anyway, because it just won't happen now. Reap the fruits of my out-of-pocket expenses.

I've decided to bury the boring stats bits a bit lower this year just in case I'm the only person who cared. But thanks to our increased forum traffic and reliable server, we're having a massive year so far in terms of traffic. July's numbers won't be final until about 24 hours after I've posted this message, but I've extrapolated the numbers a bit to find that July of 2006 will finish at about 80% higher than January '06 (the month in which the server was worst-behaved this year) in terms of pages viewed, and 44% higher for both unique visitors and bandwidth pushed out. Now, when you consider a more normal month, this time last year, we're up a more standard number, roughly 20%. While that may not sound like much compared to January, imagine a corporation that grows 20% a year, as we have done the last two years running. You'd be looking at one amazingly successful and wealthy business, let me tell you.

So that's where we're at after nine complete years of being both a site and a group of individuals brought together under one banner. We'll make ten years. After that, who knows? Fifteen? Twenty? Will we be here, from nursing homes, with our brainscan PCs, thinking out horrible topics about why Sephiroth could, like, totally crush Kuja even if, OMG, they switched outfits and Seph was in a hot bishie thong? Lord, I hope not. Let's, instead, just take each year as it comes and enjoy the things that make us different, and maybe even a little bit better than other sites out there in the ether? My staff and I are turning the corner and getting motivated again after a year of general downtime, so definitely stick around and watch what we've got coming up. We'll thank you for it then just like we're thanking you right now (thanks, by the way).

Enjoy the site in the way that we enjoy presenting it to you.