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• New website and highlighted features
• Recent Issues and Resolutions
• Premium Goals and Traffic Stats
• New Year Goals
• Acknowledgements

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As most of you no doubt already know, 2023 is the year we finally released our updated website. It was a very bumpy launch, but after getting past the server issues it has become a much needed change. We now have a fully custom code base which makes future changes much easier.

While most of the changes were in the back-end, some of the new features that have become available to users are:

• Site-internal Notifications
• Filter by Tags & Tag Blacklist
• Animated Video Previews
• Sort by Popularity and Trending Score
• Create Polls
• Switching over to Markdown
• Dark mode (and Light mode)
• (Brought back) Follower & Following list
• User Blocking (premium account only)
• Animated Avatars and profile header (premium account only)

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Of course, not everything worked out the way we wanted to and there are a few issues that we need to address.

Issue: After migration, the website had become unusable.
Resolution: Updated website infrastructure.

Our new backend took a much bigger toll on our servers than we thought it should. As a result, our database server was unable to handle the load. Even after greatly increasing our database server's power, many hours were spent on server optimizations before we finally got everything running smoothly.

Issue: Moderators overworked.
Resolution: Community Assistants.

As our website has grown, so too has the effort required to enforce our rules. The introduction of Community Assistants has helped tremendously with the flow of reports and actions taken. Community Assistants help us by reporting rules violations and other problems directly to moderators. That way the moderators can concentrate on handling reports while Community Assistants can focus on finding things to report.

Issue: Confusing Rules.
Resolution: Rules page reformation.

We are trying yet again to clarify the rules pages. This is challenging when dealing with multiple languages. The rules are now written in such a way, that each rule is smaller and that there is less overlap between rules. The rules are also ordered in such a way, that the first 3 rules (

,

Account Rules

,

Rules of Communication

) apply to any account and all other rules only apply when posting content to IWARA. Hopefully, this should make it easier to understand the rules.

Issue: Streaming content has been difficult lately
Resolution Part 1: Content server "Mikoto" had a failed HDD replaced.

Resolution Part 2: Many fast-Ring content servers have been added and expanded to handle videos well beyond the first couple of days. From 170GB to 2.5TB of the latest content uploads. More are in progress to be added by the start of 2024.

Resolution Part 3 (pending): Content Servers "Mikoto" and "Hime" will be brought into the same datacenter so they can split the load between themselves. After that is completed, we will purchase parts to add a third server for additional capacity in the event of server failures.

We have been dealing with this one for a month now. Sadly, this has only gone on for as long as it has due to the datacenters not replying to us. Likely due to holiday vacations. Without physical access to the server that was down, all we could do is wait on them.

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This year, we have seen ~140 million visitors with a combined total of ~1.7 billion pageviews. Just for the "Fast Ring" Servers alone, 20-23Gbits of bandwidth are used during peak times (around UTC: 15:00-18:00, 16:30 peak). We recently bought and deployed 20 new servers to the "Fast Ring", in order to include recent videos up to ~45 days old. (before, the "Fast Ring" only streamed videos less than ~3 days old)

Based on the expenses of the current servers and the need for a full time developer, we have the following premium goal:

Primary goal threshold: 2,500 monthly subscriptions/renewals.
Current active subscriptions: ~850, or ~34% of the goal.

Our goal of 2500 stable monthly subscriptions will ensure that we are able to hire a full time developer which allows for better and faster updates to our platform. These updates should be beneficial for all users, including both creators and viewers. Updates like quality of life changes, bug fixes, and much desired features like "complex search". At the same time, it also ensures that we have plenty of funding for any additional servers we need, like the new "Fast Ring" servers or another big content server like "Mikoto" and "Hime".

Please consider buying Premium to support us! (If you need help with buying Premium, feel free to reach out to us through the shop contact form, or the other contact options: Support Center & Discord) Alternatively, you can also support us by disabling your ad blocker for IWARA, as our ads pay us by impressions. (Example with uBlock)

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So far, we have primarily been occupied with fixing current issues instead of developing more features. Our primary goal for 2024 is to make sure we are able to introduce our Creator Incentive Program. This will allow users to donate to their favorite creators using a token based system!

The Creator Incentive Program requirements has two separate parts. Receiving donations, and withdrawing for payouts. Requirements are subject to change, but we want it to be widely usable at first.

Minimum requirements to receive donations:

• "Verified" Account Status.
• 1 video or image upload.
• 100 followers.
• Active in the past month

Requirements to request payouts:

• No recent account actions, such as warnings or temporary bans.
• $75 minimum withdraw value.
• Paypal or Payoneer account (more options in the future).

Our secondary goal is to make some progress on an improved tagging system. The current tagging system lacks multi-language support and needs better tag moderation. We would like to introduce community tagging as well.

Lastly, we want to use the rest of the time to improve certain aspects of the site (like "Search", "Playlist", "Notification", etc.) and also introduce more premium features for non-creators. Currently, the premium benefits lean a lot towards creators, but making new premium features for viewers, without taking away features is a bit difficult. If you have any suggestions for premium features, feel free to let us know!

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I'd also like to take this time to appreciate our Iwara team.

Role	Staff	Text
System Administrator	tomaa	@tomaa has dedicated an exceptional amount of free time towards building and maintaining our infrastructure. His efforts are invaluable to our cause.
Main Developer	Woodscrew	An equally invaluable member. @woodscrew has worked purely off his free time for many years to develop both the old and new/current website.
Assistant Developer	tyron82	Introduced to the team this year, @tyron82 has already shown himself to be an amazing member, and I can't wait to see how far we can go together.
Moderators	WS MMD , Sachi , Enieu ,	These lovely people have made sure our website stays as spam and rulebreaker free as possible. Many hours are donated every week in an attempt to keep Iwara from falling into deep waters.
Discord Moderator	Yoshi777	Arguably not as well known as the site moderators, but still undoubtedly needed to keep the Iwara Discord clean of spam and other troublemakers.
Community Assistants		As mentioned above, our moderators wouldn't be able to do their best, if it wasn't for our Community Assistants. They have have been a tremendous help, especially with all the recent translations they have done for the new IWARA Pages, but also with difficult language barriers when trying to moderate and contact users.

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