SheepishPatio 2 Years Anniversary

Hello everyone and happy November. For most of us its the month before Christmas, but for SheepishPatio its the month of the anniversary of the site!
I'd like to celebrate another year and get people involved, more details towards the end of the blog!

Lets do some little updates and appreciation for our site friends/linked sites before going into our 2 year celebrations+reflections:

Wapchan

Wapchan, one of our oldest 'site friends' has undergone a transformation. They are now using vi-chan in the backend. This means that if you are an imageboard fan you can use 4chanx and wapchan is supported.
Currently it seems like this update is early days and judging by figamin's history, he'll probably tweak it a lot in the coming months to get the wapchan flare.

AgoraRoad

For one of my favorite corners of the internet, I have a confession... I've only just made a 'Lumeinshin' account on there. It is beyond overdue but you can now find me there at that username as well. (provided IlluminatiPirate forgives such a sin)
As far as I am aware though, there aren't any big updates for agora.. which is not a bad thing

BasementCommunity

Orchids has continued developing his software for his forum and implementing all the little bits people don't think about until its there, especially when its hand written. @'ing people and it grabbing the username in creating posts has been added! A real luxury treat!
(that wasn't sarcasm. very cool stuff)

Skyshanty XMPP (Mine)

Nothing major to report, although I did get image sharing working peer to peer finally... (yes really, after 3 years...)

Sushigirl

Sushigirl is an icon and has managed to stay the same for YEARS. It really has kept the same feel as when I first found the site (in a good way)

Hikari3

Not much to report for Hikari3 that i've seen, sites chugging along well
I should post more on there

We love our site friends. Feel free to check them out if you haven't before!

Now onto the anniversary rambling:

Reflecting on the past year

I'm not sure about you all, but I've had a very busy year IRL, I can imagine a lot of you are sick of hearing about it. Even though its been a busy year I think we've managed to come out of it alright.
I have to admit that I haven't been as productive or attentive to the site as i'd like to have been, or as much as last year. This has been partially good in that the site isn't intensive to maintain at the moment, although it means some of my plans have not been looked at or progressed as much as i'd like to have.

Stats

If you think it is interesting to know some of the sites stats as far as the numbers go, this is the little section for you. Last year I gave the graphs mapping activity but didn't really give the numbers. This year i'm going to list the raw numbers and some reasoning.
Feel free to skip this if its not your cup of tea.

users:

We've had a good amount of users join in the past year, especially since I have not been experimenting with different advertising options or spent quite as much money on that aspect in 2024.
At time of writing we have reached 623 users total. This is up 276 from last years 347 users.

Discussions:

This past year we've seen a lot less discussions created, 103 which is 50% down from last years 224.
This is somewhat expected as of course a lot of the 'generals' were made last year and I think currently we don't tend to make new threads if we can reply to an existing thread.
This is something that I think once we have a series of more specific interests shared by a group of users on the site we may see that change. None of us can force this though so we will have to wait and see

Posts:

Number of posts wise, we had 2.1k posts this year which has been a good amount. I'd say we've had some more quiet periods than last year, but the quiet periods haven't been too bad themselves.
Similar things can be attributed to this, the lack of advertising being one as well as some of the more general threads, ie the intro thread having users already replying to it last year. Can't really post about yourself in the intro thread twice can you!

The next Year

Profile Comments (OUT NOW)

We actually have just added a new Work In Progress Profile Comments extension. This feature allows people to leave a little message on users profiles.
This feature is still in very early days, so please let me know via the community + suggestions/feedback tag.
Since the feature is so early on, it may change function or the way it looks in the coming months. If there is anything major I will be sure to include information on follow up blogposts.

Direct Messaging

That's right, after far too long, we will be getting direct messaging officially as part of the forum software.
I've had apprehensions about using extensions to achieve the functionality in the past and its worked out well enough as many of these extensions that have been made available over the year have been abandoned.

This feature will be coming in the flarum 2.0 Release which will be happening sometime in 2025. For now XMPP is the best way for people to talk to eachother outside the website.

Site Iconography

This year we got a new logo, i'd like to continue this with original emotes/stickers for use on the site as well as some more artwork on the site as a whole. We have a couple of characters from when I've commissioned artwork and i'd like to get them used in the banner ads and such. I'll hopefully have some more to share on this in the coming months.

on this, i'd like to offer stickers and other little things that people can be as a way to support the site. I definitely don't want to put a sticker of the site on my laptop
I think creating appealing images for use on the site and that would also serve as nice stickers would also be ideal, and further cement the sites iconography.

I have put a couple pages together.. partially for my convenience but also might be of interest to others

Logo's and Information relating to image sizes

Previous Commissions and EVENTUALLY character sheets

Events

Something that has been requested and I'd like to do is website events.
I've written my thoughts on creating new events before and the complications with doing so, as well as difficulties with attendance. In short, it seems much better to get involved with other events primarily, with making our own new events where there are gaps.

That said, in order to do so we need to have a goal of what kinds of events we are after and the overall interest level.
Personally, I think a book-club would be good, since we do have a large chunk of the user base that enjoys reading and the format suits a forum well. I am aware of another online bookclub but i'd worry about stepping on their toes and I believe that they prefer users to have their own websites/blogs to post their reviews/thoughts on book-club books on.

Since we're at the second anniversary of the website, i'd like to have some sort of art competition in order to celebrate. Let me know if you would be interested or have friends who would be and we can arrange it soon for details.

A Huge Thank You to everyone who has used the site this past year

This site could not exist without your continued support and use of the site. Hopefully we can have a great upcoming year too. Hopefully I haven't forgotten anything..

For detailed discussion on this, please visit the following page

2nd Anniversary feedback and Meta Chat page

I slacked reaching out to comm a celebratory image for this month, so for now please accept a lumeinshin special

Check us out on Twitter, where we post site updates and otherwise post random bits

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Forum page archive (old ToS and PP)
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