Mega Announcement: The Big Update!
Article Image Credit: 米倉ちき。

This announcement contains a brief overview of the information about the big update; including revealing to you all what our secret updates were. There are a lot of areas and sub-areas to cover, so much in fact that I will include a list and get straight to it. We would love to hear what you think, your feedback, any comments and questions, there is no such thing as a stupid question, seriously. This topic is very picture heavy, so it might take a while to load on slower connections.

I can confirm that Project: EcchiDreams 2014 - was the intermediary between the much older version of EcchiDreams and the Big Update, we've collected all the data from our open beta’s and put it to good use. All screenshots shown, show things that might not look the same in the final version as they're from the Beta. Without further ado; let’s begin.

Forum Software Changes

EcchiDreams will be using Invision Power Suite 4 (IPS4); which is by far the best software Invision Power Services have released to date. Although we're still waiting on an third party theme (Which I then have to edit) and a third party modification (iCredits) which again I have to modify for use as EcchiCredits. This is an update on Invision Power Board 3.4 that we’re currently using that introduces a lot of modernised and new features. I will attempt to cover the monumental list of changes that affect EcchiDreamers. We have to give Invision Power Services credit here; they did a fantastic job in IPS4.

If I quote them here you can find their quote by searching the internet for the entire quote, as a source.

Fully Mobile Compatible and Responsive

Previously we could only do partial support for Mobile devices, this was in part due to limitations with the Invision software. Now, however it’s built into the core and operates just as well on a desktop or laptop as it does on a mobile (and even some handheld gaming consoles!). Anything we add in will be as close to mobile compatible as the software will allow us to make it. With more and more mobile devices browsing the web this is a most welcome feature indeed.

Our site should seamlessly switch from portrait to landscape, redesign and shuffle itself to fit your browser window (responsive design) which you can test on a desktop PC by simply resizing the window. The interface is designed for both tap/touch and mouses.

Profile Overhaul

Thanks to the guys over at IPS, the Profile Section has been overhauled so much that it’ll be virtually unrecognisable when you first go on it, and yet it’ll be so easy to use and intuitive I’m sure many of you will love it. Your profile is "a powerful tool", and it’s become a lot more useful. First I will go through IPS changes; then changes that we’ve made to the profile, on top of that.

Header Images

In our current version of EcchiDreams the Header Image is something we introduced to replace the monstrous background image, which was implemented by IPS in 3.x, even by their own admission this “didn’t work well when the software was integrated into an existing website design” and no,  it really didn’t. This and the Avatar (Which is circular now) was something we covered in an informal announcement back in February to show how easy it was to upload images from a desktop or laptop, of which I did a 39 second video demonstrating how easy and quick it was.

Reputation

The reputation of the user is shown in the profile like before; but now it’s shown across the community too. Comments, EcchiTexts, Reviews, Posts, you name it - your reputation is open and transparent across the community, it serves more of a purpose. You can earn Reputation by making posts that people will press the “Like” button for.

In the roleplay section as a "good habit" and a form of acknowledgement between the people you're roleplaying with it's used the most. To say "I read the post, I liked it and you should do more like this." Not everyone does this, of course. But it's one example of many that it's used for, at the end of the day it's still (and should always be) up to whomever taps/clicks that like button.

We have made the conscious decision not to revert back to the Negative/Positive reputation buttons that we had in 2009, that said if there’s a post you like - press or tap the like button. Both you and the person who gets their content liked should (at least currently, anyway) get EcchiCredits for it.

Warnings

Your infraction sheet is visible to you; in the interests of transparency. Without leaving your profile you can look at your warnings and see why you got them, who by and such. Currently the warning system is semi-transparent; meaning in most circumstances we will not make issued warnings public or allow Dreamers to see each other’s warning points and/or reasons. You’ll be able to see when the warning expires, how much points were applied to your account and what punishments if any were applied as well. Warnings can (finally) be revoked by Senior Staff and/or Community Administrators, as you can see in the image below, it’s short, sweet and tidy.

 Followers

Invision Power have replaced “Friends” with Followers, but they’re not the same - which is why everyone is starting with 0 followers. Both IPS and EcchiDreams understand that some people might not want to be followed for any given reason, and this can be turned off and back on again from your profile. When you follow someone you’re notified of content they make.

A knock on effect from this, is that it affects the EcchiChat Bar. As the button that read “Chat (?)” with “?” being a number only displaying how many of your friends are currently online, will now display all users that are online, including staff. So asking a question to a member of staff has never been easier, and hopefully this will improve response times providing we’re actually online and/or not idling. Again this too can be turned off for whatever reason. If you don’t wish to appear online, you can of course turn this off.

“About Me”

Your “About Me” is still in the profile, but instead of it being displayed as the first thing inside the profile it’s moved to it’s own tab within the page. If you haven’t filled it out; it won’t appear. Thus keeping your profile tidy.

Recent Visitors

Shows your most recent profile visitors; which you can enable/disable at will. You either click “Enable” to enable it or the “X” in the corner of the block to disable it.

Follow/Message Dreamer Buttons

You can send an EcchiText other Dreamers from the profile without leaving their profile page, as well as follow a Dreamer by clicking the follow button; if they have these features enabled.

Your Content

In addition to the activity stream which shows content any given user has posted recently, you can also view every single piece of content they've ever done (If you’re able to see it publicly, IE If you have the permissions for it in the first place). It is done within the profile; again and transitions smoothly and easily. You can even view all the albums and images the given Dreamer has posted to the gallery, again if you have the permissions for it.

Status Feed

As I had already somewhat informally announced; you are now able to make your statuses coloured, bolded, underlined, etc. I don’t know if anyone remembers but once; a long time ago you could like Statuses, but we lost that ability in EDC 5.0; about three years ago because of severe bugs and compatibility issues. It is now apart of the Core software and counts towards reputation, so it’s actually a returning feature for us. A great request by the community and something I wanted to see done, there is (finally) no longer a limit on comment replies. Although I am working on a way that will only load a few lines and have a “READ MORE” if it’s over - say... Six lines, I will make a follow up if I can indeed make this possible.

Staff Directory

As a replacement for the Moderator Team page which is quite unintuitive we have a Staff Directory which allows you easy access the list of all staff members on EcchiDreams, their roles and contact information.

General Changes

Announcement Changes

The traditional way in which we deliver announcements is changing, back in July/August 2013 we started trialing a new system of delivering news and announcement updates to the EcchiDreams Community as a whole. Granted we haven’t made an announcement (in an official sense) for over a year, mainly because all of the development energy has been directed towards the Big Update with exception to bug fixes, minor changes and security updates. Instead of posting in a forum (The Announcement Forum) all senior staff, and community administrators will be able to post articles which can be commented on, and rated (through a simplistic five star rating). The Announcement Forum will be removed completely and all registered Dreamers will be able comment on said announcements.

We hope to keep people up-to-date more often, but sometimes there might literally be nothing to report. Although we have got plans from some new things to roll out over the course of 2015 and 2016; where we will shift our focus on to content creation rather than development; as announced in “Updates 3: Staff Applications System, One on One Roleplaying and Project: EcchiDreams 2014 Announcement”.

All old announcement articles will be removed due to incompatibilities, and all other articles will be messaged back to their respective authors to repost in the new system as I will explain later in the announcement.  

Radical Staff “Reforms”

The Staff Structure will be changing, before we had staff separated by sections this worked well at first, however the effectiveness didn’t last long for the Gallery Section at all, then the Forum Section started suffering and although it took longer for this structure to fall through it stopped working for the Roleplay Section, it also never worked for EcchiSocial either.

The new system is simpler; easier to understand for all parties involved and has flexibility to expand as we expand.

This is how it looked before hand:

• Site Administrators
  • Site Moderators (Global Moderators; with more power than sectional Administrators)
    • Forum Administrator
      • Forum Moderator
    • Roleplay Administrator
      • Roleplay Moderator
    • Gallery Administrator
      • Gallery Moderator
    • EcchiSocial Administrator
      • EcchiSocial Staff

How the new system will look:

• Community Administrators
  • Senior Staff
    • Staff
    • EcchiSocial Staff

Under the previous system; no one had power over certain sections of the site over than the sectional staff that were assigned to it. This left quite a number of us paralyzed in their responsibilities and unable to do anything about it, although we are more than aware that there are certain individuals (previous staff) who were just never active; at all. This will be changing under tough new rules for all staff present and future, and all staff will be retrained again until it is gotten right. Being a member of staff here is voluntary but it’s also a responsibility; one that hasn’t been taken seriously in the past. That is going to change.

Performance Enhancements

On top of IPS’s performance enhancements, we’ve also done some major improvements, for example the homepage is more controlled in terms of what images are displayed on there and how, which means download times are decreased which means quicker page loading times. The huge image slider is gone and replaced with a much smaller, much lighter version that just displays less images, and gives you just about as much information. It also contains a clear and visible warning; that this site is for adults only. 

Above tests are the before and afters which was ran on the homepages.

Performance has been a strong concern from some Dreamers in the past; and it had been a concern of mine for a very long time, you see... EcchiDreams has a Bandwidth Addiction problem, and we're putting it into rehab. Each update with EcchiDreams since has been to speeding it up without compromising security, the Big Update is no exception. Whilst there’s plenty of room to improve - this will be done in subsequent updates. What the above mentioned tests didn’t tell you was the total page size after the first image of the image slider.

Size of first image on the image slider in the first test: 150 KB (153,688 bytes)
In total the images on the image slider in the first test total: 1.34 MB (1,410,544 bytes)
Corrected fully loaded “Total Page Size” of first test: 2.48MB (2,600,469 bytes)

Size of first image on the image slider in the second test: 95.8 KB (98,172 bytes)
In total the images on the image slider in the second test total: 179 KB (183,557 bytes)
Corrected fully loaded “Total Page Size” of second test: 620.2KB (635,085 bytes)

Total reduction: 1.87MB (75.57%) - the kick to this is; this is going on the data provided by the Beta, which is subject to change on the live version. My point stands; it’s an improvement and it is something I want to keep that way.

Full Emoji Support on Desktop and Mobile Devices

We’re replacing our Emoticons completely in favour of Emoji; and to assist with cross compatibility between mobile devices and desktop/laptop devices. Yes there are over 800 to choose from and they’re all uniform across all devices (which means they’ll all be the same drawings no matter what you’re using) supplied by EmojiOne (Open Source).

SSL now uses Modern Cryptography

EcchiDreams now uses “Modern Cryptography” rather than “Obsolete Cryptography” for the SSL security of our website, at the expense of supporting older browsers that wouldn’t be able to render our site anyway. This was applied before the Big Update for security reasons.

We still have no interest, and now no incentive to revert back to the unsecured “HTTP” system that we were on before, as most of the system is now built around the fact that we use “HTTPS”.

On the 7th May 2015 we had to make an emergency change to the Terms of Service surrounding images served from non-HTTPS sites. To quote: “All external images posted to EcchiDreams in (but not limited to) signatures, profile, comments, must be served over “HTTPS”. If this isn’t possible then please download the image to your PC and upload it to one of your albums on the Gallery, and post the image that way. Posts that contain external images served over "HTTP" will be removed.” Broken SSL is a bad thing.

In the Big Update this will no longer matter, as it has the ability to detect if the image you’re posting has a HTTPS accessible version, if it doesn’t it’ll serve the image through a SSL proxy, which means it won’t break your secure connection to our site.

TL;DR:- HTTP is insecure. HTTPS is secure. This is a great thing.

Roleplayer Preferences Section -

This was already announced 21 April 2015 - 06:00hrs (GMT) although we’re somewhat stumped at the response it’s gotten and has ultimately bolstered our cynicism on if this announcement will even get a response. Custom Roleplay Owners and Custom Roleplay Players will have badges in their Preferences Section.

The new system is by no means perfect; but it’s much better than before and we hope to improve it as time goes on. Yes we will monitor it and assess how it’s being used and what we can do to improve it; but of course we rely on your feedback too.

Notification of Planned Updates (Informally Announced)

We will be notifying all logged in Dreamers whenever EcchiDreams goes down for scheduled updates or maintenance, with at least 6 days notice, from now on we will always book these scheduled downtimes with at least a week in advance. You’ll be able to see these on the Calendar. They should appear prominently on the Forums.

Mood System Changes

The mood system has been overhauled and contains a more simplified array of faces, which display in various areas throughout the site like so:

As you can see in “Hovercard (2)” and “Profile (3)” you can set a piece of custom text you can also see it on desktops when hovering over the icon in “Postbit (1)”. The custom text is limited to 48 characters; so be creative. xP

This is where you’d set it:

Ability to *poke* other Dreamers

No I'm not kidding. I’d be interested in seeing how this plays out on our community.

Roleplay Changes

The big update has a lot of changes to the Roleplay Suite. Things have been added, changed and removed. The aim was to give Dreamers a Roleplaying experience that suits their needs, and tastes while also giving them a challenge. Before, there was simply the Roleplay Suite with the Scenario Roleplays that Dreamers could enter. Then there came the One on One Roleplaying, which allowed Dreamers to advertise to other Roleplayers about their desire for more private roleplaying. Now the roleplay section is getting a complete and total overhaul. The list of changes is long, but well worth the read;

Suite Wide Changes

Previously the “Roleplay Suite” was just the Scenario Roleplay section; everything else was external to it. Not anymore. The Roleplay Suite is all the Roleplay Sections on EcchiDreams tied into one. There will be four sections of the Roleplay Suite; EcchiText Roleplays, Independent Roleplays, Scenario Roleplays and Custom Roleplays.

• Posted Guides for all roleplaying sections.
  • EcchiText Rolelaying and You
  • Independent Roleplaying and You
  • Scenario Roleplaying and You
  • Custom Roleplaying and You
• Defined Difficulties
  • A set of difficulties have been defined for the new Roleplay Suite. “Casual”, “Beginner”, “Advanced”, “Expert”, “Hardcore” and “Overkill”. Each EcchiText, Independent and Custom Roleplay must be tagged and set as prefixed (So it appears next to the title listing). Below is an example of what I am talking about - the ones that have red “X” next to them are examples of not how to do it.

Old example taken from Guide (it was updated since this screenshot, but it gives you a rough idea).

EcchiCredits for Roleplay Advert

If you have an EcchiText, Independent or Custom RP* you can advertise your roleplay with the Community Roleplay Adverts. This will be available to all EcchiDreamers for 1,000 EcchiCredits**; however there are few restrictions. One Advert per Roleplay, if you have two roleplays you can advertise both of them, but one advert per roleplay. There’s no preference; for example Premium Dreamers won’t have their ad four times more likely to show, and active members won’t either. You have to come up with a 280x280 image, (I guess there could be an EcchiCredit market for people to make adverts for you if they so wish). The advert can only point to your Roleplay on EcchiDreams; if it’s hosted anywhere else - the ad will be rejected (Hey, you’re not paying real money for it). Adverts cannot break Terms of Service, or the Terms and Conditions of the Advert.

We’re actually quite excited by this; and we look forward to seeing what our clever and awesome community can do with this new feature.

* Custom Roleplay must be public. Invite and Private Custom Roleplays cannot be advertised.

** Price locked until January 2016. Feature’s Introductory Price - Only.

EcchiText Roleplays

One on One Roleplaying has been renamed to “EcchiText Roleplaying”.

Independent Roleplays

Now; this was our secret. The New Independent Roleplaying Forum are for those who wish to make their own roleplays without making it private. It comes complete with an OOC Discussion area, Side Story, Character ID and Extra Information subforums. This will allow you to create your own Roleplay, although there are stark differences between an Independant Roleplay and a Custom Roleplay.

Scenario Roleplays

• Changes to the Scenario Roleplay Rules (These rules only apply to the Scenario Roleplays only)
  • Removed Character Limit. Roleplayers are now allowed to make as many characters as they wish.
  • Stricter rules on post length. Posts are now required to at least be a paragraph long.
  • Tougher rules on those that do not respect Location thread restrictions.
  • Side story inactivity closure time has been extended from one month, to six months.
  • No single character will be removed for inactivity. As long as you are active with at least one of your characters, all characters will be considered active.
• The Roleplaying Guide has been moved to the Scenario Roleplaying section of the site, and has been re-written and renamed “Scenario Roleplaying and You”. This contains the rules, and Character IDs.
• Changes to the Scenario Roleplay Character ID. It now has several more fields, however they are optional. The Religion field has also been made optional.
• Opening posts of the Scenario main threads had been improved.

Blackberry Falls

Blackberry Falls is no longer a co-owned island between the UK and the USA. It is now its own country, with its own currency, the Blackberrian Dollar which is similar in value to the GBP. The Thorndown University Information Pamphlet has been re-written. It has also been changed to Thorndown University Brief Prospectus.

Craethiel Kingdom

There are no specific changes to the Craethiel Kingdom Roleplay

Utopian Curse

Utopian Curse will now be free and available for all Dreamers, not just Gold and Platinum Dreamers. Utopian Curse has a new Overview thread, containing information of the Roleplaying Environment including a new map.

Andromeda Galaxy

Andromeda Galaxy will now be free and available for all Dreamers, not just Gold and Platinum Dreamers. Andromeda Station has a new Information thread detailing about the Station, inhabitants and the environment.

OOC - Out of Character Threads

Re-written and changed the OOC (Out of Character) threads for the Scenario Roleplays. Each now reflect the Roleplay that they are tied in with.

• Renamed OOC Discussion (Blackberry Falls) to “Blackberry Café”.
• Renamed OOC Discussion (Craethiel Kingdom) to “The Creaky Tavern”
• Renamed OOC Discussion (Utopian Curse) to “Palm Beach”
• Renamed OOC Discussion (Andromeda Galaxy) to “The Red Velvet Club”

Custom Roleplays

If your Custom Roleplay has News, Events and special conditionals you can request an Article Section; based on “Community Articles” what categories and such you want will be created for you by a Community Administrator. These Articles will fit the same restrictions as your Custom Roleplay.

Removed Features

I suppose I should get around to this too… This is the list of currently confirmed dropped/removed features or dropped support.

Arcade

The list of reasons I’m dropping this is extensive, I have nothing against the developers and their works has been exceptional. Unfortunately they seem to cling on to a relic of the past and that is Shockwave Flash (SWF) instead of more modern HTML5 games, something I won’t support on our servers. Secondly their code is completely encrypted (Ioncube) which means I cannot edit it, I cannot manually fix any code which might be broken, I can’t verify that it’s secure-as-possible and I certainly can’t vouch for it in anyway shape or form, the server also requires me to have Ioncube Loader installed on it just for that one application. The last big reason is that it is not mobile friendly, or compatible, in most cases.

Link Exchange Program

As I said previously and this is my official statement on the matter:

“Our Link Exchange program was done in good faith. For a time back in 2007/2008 - Kari’s Administration, 2009 - Illogically Logical’s Administration on EcchiDreams it was a good thing. It had good intentions and it was all free. However during NekoLust’s Administration (2010 - 2011) there were heavy problems in that some of them were becoming virus/malware infected sites, or they removed our link in violation to the agreements that we had. This meant that anyone approaching us for Link Exchange had to do so through his contract; one I honoured in Good Faith.

However…

As of 1st May 2015; all the websites that were tested for compliance - failed. Three of them contained malware and viruses which automatically downloaded onto people’s machines. This was wholly unacceptable to me and I pulled the plug on the whole thing immediately. There has been no interest since our last signup in 2011 (Before I was granted control over EcchiDreams). There has been no interest since. We'd rather not take that risk ever again, so we're not doing it anymore. Simple as that. I don’t see why I should have to spend the time that I don’t have, chasing these people up for compliance; and to be honest when something sweet is abused like it has been; it becomes very bitter. It was something that was with us since 2007, and on May 1st 2015 it died and became history.”

Personalised Font Settings (Customised Fonts)

This was the setting in the User Control Panel where you could go to, to set up your “default” font across EcchiDreams; as in when you make a post or reply it allowed you to do so without customising your font colour, text and size every single time you made a post as it did it all for you. Currently only one or two people use it. Therefore an update has not been developed for the Big Update, and it’s likely to be a canned feature all together.

Support for Internet Explorer

EcchiDreams should still work on Internet Explorer; but if you have problems with it and EcchiDreams well… If I can fix it not that the expense of other users then I will try. I’d advise a different yet more up-to-date browser, there are plenty out there. It does seem to work in IE11 though. So yay?

Just because I am dropping official support for it - doesn't mean it won’t work and will never work. Chances are it’ll always work if you keep it relatively up-to-date.

Support for Old Browsers

If you can’t get on and can’t find the site at all - you’re using an old browser and the server refuses to communicate with it because (most likely) your SSL capabilities are outdated and pre-historic. I doubt it’d even display the page if we weren't on HTTPS because of all the new HTML5 content we use.

Friend System

See “Followers” (up at the top there)

YouTube and MP3 in Profile

As stated previously in the announcement you will no longer allow you to attach an MP3 to your profile; because of legal complications and we no longer have a dedicated block for YouTube Videos - instead you can put them into your About Me section, as we support YouTube (and various other video site) embedding. We also support Soundcloud Embedding which you can do in the About Me to.

You can actually do this right now if you liked.

Character ID Shop

(Character ID for EcchiCredits) due to lack of interest.

Rainbow Links

Might be back in a future update; we’ll see if there is any demand for it and what it would look like implemented on there now. Although it does seem to work best on the Dark EcchiTheme, so it might be something for that, or site wide again. - We’ll see what the demand is like for it.

In Closing

This is just a brief overview of the new features and exciting times ahead for EcchiDreams and the Big Update. It’s been in the works for a long time and soon, when we wrote this in Google Drive it was just shy of twenty pages long, and we tried skimming it down a little and breaking it up to make it easier to read.

There’s plenty to come and we would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this. Of course if you have any questions; then don’t hesitate to ask!

~ Leave of Absence Improvements ~
EcchiDreams Update

Hello EcchiDreamers!

Over the next coming months we’re going to be slowly start rolling out further updates to return our site back to feature full. As time goes on we’ll be returning old features and announcing new and changing features, here in the new announcements suite. Every aspect of EcchiDreams has been modernised, thanks to Invision Power Suite 4 and we’re excited to use this to better our second homes. :P

The Leave of Absence has had a complete overhaul, it was once a forum on the site that people could post their Leave of Absence topics, usually roleplayers telling other roleplayers that they’ll be gone for X period because of Y reason. This was quite confusing sometimes, especially for people who didn’t know about Leave of Absence, and wasn’t very well implemented.

Although it worked there was always room for improvement; and now, we’re able to implement this more coherently. Starting Wednesday 15th July 2015 the Leave of Absence forum will be read only, and will be removed by Saturday 1st August 2015.

Instead; Dreamers can go to this link, and set this and disable it themselves. Unlike previously you made an LoA thread and people had to have looked in that thread to know you were on LoA. This is more subtle well… Kinda. Because it’s also more obvious.

You fill out a short reason or something as to why you’re going away. You can enable/disable the status whenever you like. When you’ve activated and saved it; it will show up in multiple places:

Posts:

Prominently in your profile:

And a subtle link will sit on the top of all your pages reminding you that it’s set, so you can unset it.

Article Image Cover Credit: Kantoku (カントク)

With hundreds if not thousands of changes since we updated in July, the EcchiDreams Beta is going very well (Despite the one or two hiccups, I will get to them later). We did not stop updating in July, although I did stop reporting on it after the 15th of July when I released the Leave of Absence Improvements announcement. Whilst this wasn't intentional this has left many people in the dark about what's going on, save unhelpful or insightful statuses I've randomly posted. The truth is I've been very busy working on EcchiDreams since the update and this announcement will hopefully catch everyone up and inform you of new features released today. The reason is that our change log almost changes daily during a Beta cycle as we're hot on the trail of bugs, and what not. 

Big Changes from The Last Announcement:

This is a summarised list of changes from the last announcement. It is not the complete list as most of the changes have been little tweaks and edits to pave paths for the bigger updates.

We have a new default EcchiTheme

EcchiDreams a long time ago once had eight or nine themes, with our main theme being dark, over the years however this is been proven to be unnecessary. After NekoLust became the site administrator for EcchiDreams we had a very blue theme, a dark theme, a mobile theme and a lite theme. I kept these maintained because it was ours. Now that we no longer require a mobile theme (Because our site should now be fully responsive) we have just two themes. The "Default" EcchiTheme, and the "Lite" EcchiTheme. 

So why have we limited choices? You might be asking, and that's a fair question. From the outside it does look like we've reduced the options. But let me explain about the key features of our new theme. The new theme has a user controlled colour pallet, twelve (12) options for primary colours, twelve (12) for secondary colours, this makes one hundred and forty-four (144) different combinations which is by far more options than we've ever had combined. Once more everyone gets a uniform theme, and you have full control on what colours it uses for you. 

New Chatbar Software

Previously we used ArrowChat for our Chatbar needs, however with all the incompatibilities that cropped up and quite frankly shoddy, poor security coding, which just never got fixed. We've switched to an alternative method. Whilst the features are pretty much the same; the look and feel of the chatbar isn't and there's one or two features you might be interested in, such as handwritten messages, deleting messages, view chat history, saving conversations to your device, reporting conversations and even blocking individual people who you don't want talking to you. We'll be constantly updating this to make sure it brings you the best service possible. 

EcchiChat Page

Again, will only work for logged in members, it's a large version of the chatbar, check it out. - https://ecchidreams.com/ecchichat/

Activity Feed

You may have noticed that at some point we lost the "View New Content" system. This isn't actually the case; it's been replaced with the Activity Streams section, which allows you to create and share your own activity feed and control what you want to keep an eye on. We have several defaults at the moment, so please check it out when you have time. Some of the default streams are (All Activity), (Unread Content) and so on.

Community Help and Tutorial Section - Brand New!

Opening today is our new Help and Tutorials Section, something based off a suggestion that @Whoreo had for EcchiDreams and something we've done in the past, kind of merged together. Introducing our Community Help and Tutorial Section (Only available for logged in dreamers) - https://ecchidreams.com/help 

If there is a feature you're not sure about on the site or you're finding it hard to get started please checkout this new section. If there's no tutorial of it, ask in our Community Questions Forum! If you know your way around the site, you can help those that don't if you so wish to. All fellow dreamers can respond. All staff can respond to, this is a community driven project.

You can finally deactivate your account - Brand New!

We have changed the system involved in the deactivation of ones account. Previously you had to ask a staff member to deactivate your account and it wasn't the best system to have in place. Ultimately it led to users having no real control over their account, and had to rely on staff to do the whole process, which was difficult because only Community Administrators have that level of ability. We now have an automated, staff reviewed system in place, that allows you to deactivate and re-activate your account at any time! Please read our Tutorial on it which shows you how it works and how to do it. Sure it'd be sad to see anyone leave but now people actually have the choice, rather than having to do it the long and horrible way -- it puts you back in control of your account.

Current Known Problems:

As you may have noticed not all of this has gone swimmingly; there are a number of problems that are still being addressed. 

EcchiText Security Problem

There is a known fault with the EcchiText system that allows an attacker to remotely execute javascript on to a target (victim) computer(s) via EcchiTexts. This message when sent to other people, and if they have notifications enabled, triggers a remote piece of javascript on the targets (the victims) machine.

This XSS (Cross Site Script) exploit has been noticed by us before it was used on EcchiDreams, so thankfully no one has been affected by this on EcchiDreams. After testing I confirmed that we maybe vulnerable to this attack, and as a precaution I have disabled the EcchiTexts system until the problem is patched. I want to make it clear - there's no need to panic, there's no need to change your passwords and dump all your files and nuke your computers, we've not been hacked or anything like that. We'll have this problem solved soon and it'll be secure and online again.

Emojis

We've had a bit of a problem with the Emoji's and emoticons on EcchiDreams lately, and as such the whole feature has been removed until we can work out what's going on. Unlike the previous fault this is not a security problem, although the coding that the third-party developer did was simply shocking and wrong, and the whole thing has to be re-done from scratch. Something I've not been happy about to say the very least. We'll keep you informed.

Missing Features

The EcchiCash/EcchiCredits and Awards/Achievements systems are still not complete; and way behind schedule. There are a number of reasons for this, on our end we're waiting for third party developers, and on their end they're waiting for proper documentation, and so on. I will keep you up-to-date on this, however I anticipate release early/mid 2016 (I am not promising this). Of course once the actual applications are released by the third party developers, I can then start working on them to adapt them to EcchiDreams. I have been Beta testing them for the third party developers in a closed beta, and I can confirm it is definitely being worked on, but I cannot talk more specifically about it.

Upcoming "Things":

There are a few things we've currently got in the works, and are being developed such as;

Resources Navigation

We're making page menus that have icons on them to take you to the relevant places on EcchiDreams, like RP Adverts, RP Preferences, etc, etc. These will consist of simple pages with 300x150 images on them as well as a title that will take you to the section when you click/tap on it. Sounds uncomplicated, and it really is. It'll be easily maintained and allow members something that might make their navigational experience easier. We will announce when this is done and we will welcome all feedback on it, as usual. 

Rules, rules, rules... More sodding rules

Er- no actually. We plan relaxing the rules even further! Not only that but our Terms of Service will be tweaked and bettered and our Community Guidelines will be getting a complete re-write because of how out of date they are, and they're supposed to be the layman's version of the Terms of Service. In addition our Privacy Policy will feature a "Laymans" version as well as a technical version, which will also be brought into the year 2016. 

In closing...

I am not very good at these announcements. But as always if you have any questions leave them in the comments below, and I will try to answer them. Also feedback and constructive criticism is invited.

Greetings everyone! 

One of the common complaints we've had from one to one communication with our fellow Dreamers is about how hard it is to navigate EcchiDreams, and finding the things you want to find. Ease of browsing (As well as Dreamer interaction) is something we're still working on, but we hope this will help immensely; so without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to the Community Dashboard.

We wanted to make something that was clean, responsive, and will work on all devices that are compatible with EcchiDreams. We went for a minimalist, and rather clutter free design for ease of access. The buttons are unique to the thing you're looking at, and hopefully over the next few days I will give each dashboard it's own colour theme, for the icons (Like the Community Dashboard has except for buttons going to another). They're also quite big, but not too much so, for people who use touch screens. 

The Staff here really do listen; so as usual if you find any bugs, spelling mistakes or complete cockup's please direct your complaints here. Likewise if you have any Suggestions, Comments or Feedback about this please post in this thread. It'd be very much appreciated, thank you. 

If you made it this far; it's a short announcement. To fill it up some more, we'll level with you all, about another feature we're working on bringing back. EcchiDreams, before the Big Update had an achievements/awards system for doing things on this site. We're bringing this back in, with much overhauled system, like it's done properly. It'll also pave the way for future events, and competitions, which we're fairly excited about and starting to somewhat plan out already. We thank you all for being part of EcchiDreams.

Sweet Dreams,

EcchiDreams Staff

PS. The following button will only work, if you're logged in.

Community Dashboard

Greetings, fellow Dreamers!

Following up from our massive update, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes during this Beta period to bring most of our functionality back online. In many ways, EcchiDreams has evolved considerably during this phase. Now we’re starting to look at bringing certain sections up-to-date. These past few weeks we’ve been working on the The Roleplaying Suite.

Over the years, our Roleplay section has expanded and changed to update itself to the demands of the Roleplayers on EcchiDreams. It started as a single small, pre-determined scenario driven roleplay. Thorndown University; which went on to include other roleplays that eventually came together to become Blackberry Falls, which is supposed to be a slightly more technologically advanced modern city. After that, Blackberry was joined by Craethiel Kingdom; a medieval roleplay, Utopian Curse; a tropical island that seems like paradise on the surface but is a deep survival based plot, and Andromeda; a purely Sci-Fi driven scenario.

Then, with the suggestions that came forth from Dreamers in the community, the Independent Roleplays came into existence. This was a feature that intended on allowing EcchiDreamers the chance to make their own roleplay scenario, rather than be forced to conform to specific settings. This allowed people to create their own roleplays, and set their own balance of control and quality.

But, during the Beta Phase I talked about at the beginning, we have found that with the Independent Roleplay section, we no longer really need the Scenario Roleplays. And thus, we have decided to move them into the Independent Roleplays as their own, Independent RPs. As she was the one that worked on them for all these years, they will be under the ownership of Neptune. Unfortunately this means those roleplays will be restarted when they’re moved, as some of you will have found out when you received an EcchiText on the subject.

There will also be a name change from here on out;

EcchiText Roleplays will become Private Roleplays, and what that means for the section is that nothing changes. You go there to announce Private Roleplays on EcchiDreams (This can be over the Chatbar or through EcchiTexts).

Independant Roleplays will become Public Roleplays, and what this means for the section is that almost nothing really changes. It’s where you make your own roleplay or join one you want to be apart of.

Custom Roleplays will become Premium Roleplays, and will remain something only Platinum members can create (which allows you to set your own permissions; either Private, Invite Only or Public). Contrary to popular belief, we have no intention of monetising this (with real money). This is purely paid for with EcchiCredits (Contribution based currency; which is still offline at the moment).

This encompasses most if not all forms of roleplayers. The Public Roleplays will have difficulty ratings which will allow people to find their level of roleplaying easily, of course these will be easily searchable too. So Joining and Making your own roleplay has never been easier, and the rules are pretty simple and easy to follow.

Over the coming weeks we will be adding guides to our Guides section for Roleplaying. If you click on the “Follow” button in there you’ll be notified as guides are posted.

As always we’re welcome and open to feedback.

Image Artist Credit: Liru by 春夏冬工.

Greetings, fellow Dreamers!

Following up from our massive update, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes during this Beta period to bring most of our functionality back online. In many ways, EcchiDreams has evolved considerably during this phase. Now we’re starting to look at bringing certain sections up-to-date. These past few months now, we’ve been working on the The Roleplaying Suite but this is finally coming to an end as the Roleplay Suite Overhaul is nearing completion. 

We’ve made changes to how the Private Roleplay topics are displayed; as such we will message everyone with their Private Roleplay adverts and encourage them to repost them on our new Private Roleplayer Bulletin Board system, which allows people to search for the roleplay they want - effortlessly. We’ve also released a number of guides to help you get started on EcchiDreams as a roleplayer, and we’ll continue releasing guides, although you too can take part if you want, and release your own guides. 

We’ve also created an area called the Sandbox. This doesn’t just have to be used for Roleplaying. The Sandbox is the place in where you can design your topics before you post them publicly to get the formatting you want, and to make it look perfect. Only you and staff can see your own posts, so if you do need any assistance, we can help you out (Just ask!).

In addition to roleplay updates, we’ve made changes to the homepage for both logged in and logged out dreamers. Logged in dreamers will see several of the features that used to be around on the forum index, whereas logged out dreamers will get a more modern homepage which informs them of what our site is about and what we do. We’ve also made large scale changes to the Terms of Service; which basically re-affirms our stance towards Free Speech. 

Lastly; EcchiDreams will be coming out of Beta on the 6th September 2016. We look forward to your comments, feedback and criticisms in the section below. 

Sweet Dreams~!

Hello fellow EcchiDreamers! 

In July of last year, we started the process called ‘The Big Update’ Open-beta, where we set out to finish our major update to the community now that it was on the IPS4 software made by Invision Power Services. Today, 6th September 2016, we come out of Beta into “Full Release”.

I want to thank members of the community who did come out and give us feedback, as well as the other members of staff who’ve all been working hard during the past year in this heavy developmental process. We expect that updates will continue; however, the main bulk of this big update is now over, and we can actually start getting back to what we love more.

Other Features and Updates

There have been so many changes, some of which didn’t stay for long during the beta period, and I apologise for not getting announcements on those during this time; I’ve also been quiet on the announcement front, so I hope to correct this and cover as many new features as possible in this announcement. 

There are changes that did get their own announcements as planned, however:

• Leave of Absence Improvements - This is where we discussed the evolution of our LoA system; where we turned what was once a “post as a topic” thing into an account setting option.
• Help Section and more Updates - In this announcement, we talk about the new community help section, as well as information on our EcchiTheme Update, Chatbar (EcchiChat), Activity Feed, Account Deactivation and so on.
• New Feature: Community Dashboard - A still somewhat new idea to improve on with feedback. A friendly GUI navigation menu, that is mobile and desktop compatible.
• Roleplay Suite Updates - Major changes to the scenario roleplay area, and grand overhaul of the entire section.
• Roleplay Suite Updates (Part 2) - Did I mention… Grand overhaul? This announcement focused on the Private Roleplayers Bulletin Board, as well as a new ‘EcchiApp’ called a Sandbox.

Community Help and Support Area Updates

https://ecchidreams.com/help/

The Community Help and Support area has been radically updated since this announcement, and it’s become the one stop place for everything involving help and support on EcchiDreams. There is a new feature as well as an old feature that have now been blended into these sections. 

FAQ Section

https://ecchidreams.com/faq/

The Frequently Asked Questions section is something we had tried to do before, back in 2011-2013. We’ve tied this into the Community Help Area to help those that might be confused a little when they first sign up, as well as veterans to EcchiDreams who might not have been on in a while alike. 

Bug Tracker

https://ecchidreams.com/help/bugs/

The bug tracker is somewhere that Dreamers can post bugs they’ve found. Usually there is a bounty in the form of EcchiCredits for each one found. We are always vigilant for bugs, and attempt to correct them as quickly as possible. We thank everyone who reports them and we welcome these mistakes being pointed out to us with open arms. Bugs are classified in a number of ways: 

• Spelling/Grammatical Mistakes - If something is spelt incorrectly or words don’t flow correctly, then we welcome this and will update them as quickly as possible.
• Permission Error Bugs - Something that you should have access to, but don’t. Or something you shouldn’t, but do. 
• Application Faults - An App that has gone wrong or doesn’t function in the way it should.
• Security Flaws/Faults - Something that allows you to do something you’re really not supposed to do, which causes security issues. Things such as being able to hijack other accounts and read other people's EcchiTexts for example (These are exceptionally rare - and offer the biggest bounty)
• A link (that isn’t in a post) that doesn’t work correctly. 
• And so on...

Major ToS Updates

https://ecchidreams.com/rules/terms-of-service-r1/

The Terms of Service on EcchiDreams have been radically updated, and now goes in the complete opposite direction to a number of sites online today; specifically one of our major changes, Section 15 under Offensive or Inappropriate Posting:- 

Quote

The term “Offensive Post” is subjective to an individual, and EcchiDreams promotes free speech and free expression. Your right to free speech on this site only ends when you call or advocate to violate other people’s individual universal rights. If what you're saying is promoting or endorsing the violation of rights of another individual it may not be posted here. We do not consider ‘the Right to Not be Offended’ as a valid universal right. We are all adults and we can all be civil; with that said, disruption of topics can be moved elsewhere by staff and the report button is available to all members. Freedom of Speech is a core principle of what EcchiDreams believes in, it’s the freedom to make a fool of yourself, and it’s the freedom for others to tell you you’re being a fool, in an open marketplace of ideas.

This protection doesn’t rely on the First Amendment of the United States Constitution; instead we are going to call upon Article 19 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We don’t expect to be perfect; we expect mistakes to be made, but we will try to minimise these mistakes and correct any that are made as soon as possible. We also outlined some of the new features and updated the roleplay section. 

Lastly, from now going forwards, all documents in ecchidreams.com/rules will have the document’s last updated date in an effort to be more open and transparaent about changes. The last updated signature will be located at the top of the document:

EcchiCredits

https://ecchidreams.com/ecchicredits/

EcchiCredits has made a come back, although it’s not yet up to the same level of features as the previous one. With the above link you should be able to see the transactions of the entire community (as this is an open and transparent system). We aim to slowly improve on this over time, making the EcchiCredit system more useful as an internal contribution-based economy within EcchiDreams. So far, the only thing you can really use EcchiCredits for on this site is the Roleplayer Adverts, or if someone is selling their on site services for EcchiCredits. https://ecchidreams.com/help/tutorials/roleplay/more-information-public-roleplaying-r26/

Homepage Improvements

https://ecchidreams.com/

The Homepage has had some very major changes since we opened back up a year ago into Beta. For a start, we’ve made the homepage for guests more informative, and much quicker to load. We’ve explained as best as we could, whilst keeping it concise, what goes on on EcchiDreams, as well as what we do and why. 

For people who are logged in, the homepage is useful for another purpose, although this is still experimental, and we hope to improve it with feedback as time goes on. When you’re logged in you will be welcomed by site depending on what time of day/night it is; we hope to eventually make this change on an hourly basis. At the moment it contains everything that used to be on the community index page. Such as:

• Personalised Greetings Message
• What staff are online right now.
• A userbar that shows a piece of your profile cover, avatar, “dreams” count (posts on the Forums/Roleplays and images in the Gallery), as well as reputation.
• Dreamer of the Month widget.
• RP Advert
• Latest public and custom posts and topics (With Private ones coming soon)
• Dashboard buttons
• Latest Gallery Uploads
• Recent Status Updates (with the ‘Read More’ option that I touched on in the first announcement)
• Who’s been online in the last 24 hours. 
• Who’s online right now.

We have also made sure to make it as mobile and desktop friendly as possible.

Further Roleplay Section Enhancements

https://ecchidreams.com/community/forum/68-roleplay-suite/

There have been a number of updates to our Roleplay Suite, as we’ve now finished the bulk of it and even most minor tweaks. The section has fundamentally changed since EcchiDreams first started, and even since we first went into Beta last year because of the Big Update. As such, we’ve written a handful of guides to help you get started, as well as made some enhancements.

Roleplay Adverts Enhancements

https://ecchidreams.com/dashboard/roleplayers/adverts

Last year, we introduced Roleplay Adverts; the idea was that people who wanted to advertise their roleplays on EcchiDreams could do so. You might be thinking “I bet I have to pay for this…”, and you’d be right… though we only accept EcchiCredits. We’ve made this system better, so you can keep a track of all roleplay adverts running on our site:

Each one also contains a log including things such as when it was last active, when it last ended, how many times it’s been run, and an advert status, as seen below:

The statuses are:

• Awaiting Approval - Each advert is manually approved before being put into the advertising system, which then goes live on EcchiDreams. This is the default setting when submitting an advert.
• Awaiting More Information - It was manually checked; however, there are pieces of information missing or unclear. We’ll send you an EcchiText in these circumstances.
• Rejected - The advert in question violated our advertising policy, and will be hidden from all members but you and the staff. You’ll either get an EcchiText explaining why it was rejected, or a comment will be left.
• Approved - The advert is accepted and is currently running on EcchiDreams.
• Approved, Not Started Yet - The advert is accepted, and will begin running on EcchiDreams on the date you specified. 
• Expired - The Advert was accepted, and ran for the duration of the advertising period without problems. 
• Campaign Suspended - This could be for a myriad of reasons. If the advert is reported for false advertising for example, and it’s been confirmed by staff, then the advert will be suspended. If the roleplay goes under construction, or the dreamer has been banned or they’ve had to leave on an emergency Leave of Absence. It’s not necessarily wrong doing. If you didn’t literally ask us to suspend the campaign we’ll tell you that it has been.

In the future we’ll inform you how many views and clicks your advert got during its runtime. 

Public Roleplay Tags

https://ecchidreams.com/community/forum/78-public-roleplaying/

During the Roleplay Overhaul, we changed the tags of the public roleplay section, so that they mentioned their Difficulty Rating. However, a Dreamer brought up an issue we hadn’t considered while doing it. We’ve since changed these, and have updated the guides to reflect the changes. 

The new prefixes that go near the topic title are as follows: 

• Open - Open to everyone.  You would require your roleplayers to fill out a Character ID. This doesn’t stop you from putting in your own restrictions though. For example you could only want human characters or something, it just means that people can make a Character ID and start roleplaying with no troubles.
• Invite Only - If you're setting up an RP for a group of your friends, or you'll be inviting others to the roleplay, then this is the option for you. Dreamers might still ask if they can join; and should take no for an answer, if that's your choice. If you want you can choose to put “I will ask you, don’t ask me.” Or something to that effect in your opening page, under the rules.
• Apply to RP (Open) - You want people to apply before roleplaying. Great for higher difficulty roleplays, where you want to screen roleplayers, for quality reasons first, there’s no reason why you can’t even ask to see a Roleplayer Preferences sheet as in theory, if filled out correctly this should contain a lot of information you’ll want to read in order to decide if that person is good enough to roleplay with. You'll need to put the detailed application instructions in your OOC or Extra Information Topic, wherever you feel it's appropriate really and link it from your opening post. You can take applications over EcchiTexts or the OOC, which ever you are more comfortable with.
• Apply to RP (Full) - You wouldn't and really shouldn’t start with this. When you have everyone you need to start the roleplay, you can edit your first post and turn it from open to full. 
• No CID Required - This is rare; outside of casual and cannot be used with Intermediate Roleplays or higher... Usually.  If in doubt message a staff member first.

Game Masters Corner

https://ecchidreams.com/community/forum/118-game-masters-corner/

The Game Master’s Corner is a brand new feature to the Public Roleplaying Section. The idea behind this is to be a place where you can talk with fellow Dreamers when setting up a roleplay, to bounce ideas, and even get people who are willing to join the roleplay. 

Sandbox

https://ecchidreams.com/community/forum/9-sandbox/

If you are trying to design your page for the roleplay section, write a guide, store a note, or maybe get to grips with how our editor works, and so on, and you’d like somewhere to test or build it before making it live, this is the forum for you. Only you and staff members can see your topics here. We highly recommend against using the sandbox to store passwords, accounts, and personal (considered) private notes for two simple reasons: as mentioned before, staff can see this forum and all topics within it, and it's just not a very smart idea in general.

Roleplay Guides

https://ecchidreams.com/help/tutorials/roleplay/

We’ve added a fair few roleplay guides to get you started with our Roleplay Suite; they are extensive, fully detailed guides, written by roleplayers for roleplayers. Of course, you are free to make a guide if you want to as well; you’ll be credited as it’s author and shown automatically as the poster of the guide. The guides we’ve included so far are:

•  Public Roleplay: The Game Master’s Guide - This is an extremely large guide that is great when you might be stuck for ideas, or what to do, when making your own public roleplay. We talk about the things you should consider here, such as what the guide covers, stuff to think about before you start making your roleplay, what the premise, plots and storylines will be, how your universe works, the characters and NPC’s within the story, opening post formats, tips, tricks, and protips. It’s an all encompassing guide that will help you get started making your own roleplays.
•  Introductions: Crash Course in Roleplaying - If you’re new to roleplaying, or new to EcchiDreams, and would like a ‘crash course’ where we explain what roleplaying is, what it’s about, define what the abbreviations, terminology and roleplaying jargon is on the site, start here. We talk about the ground rules, and what most people expect, or don’t like or want in their roleplays, how to join a roleplay on EcchiDreams, and even briefly touch on how to create a roleplay on EcchiDreams. 
•  Private Roleplaying and You - This brief guide tells you, in a simple enough way, how to create a Private Roleplay. It also outlines some baseline rules in regards to the section.
•  Premium Roleplaying and You - Same as the previous, except for the fact that it’s for Premium Roleplays.
•  Public Roleplaying and You - Same as the previous two, except it’s for the Public Roleplays. 
• Roleplaying Etiquette - A guide that helps you with the etiquette when roleplaying, and interacting other roleplayers like making sure to read posts properly, and to not have your character suddenly interrupt the interaction between characters when it is unwelcomed and not discussed before hand. This is especially handy for newer roleplayers, who want to know how to treat other roleplayers.
• How to make a roleplay character - A guide that helps you with the process of creating a character. It goes through a step by step process of creating a character that shows you some tips and tricks to make a good, detailed character.
• More Information: Public Roleplaying - Something that is linked to the homepage under this topic. It’s a basic informational page that goes into more information about Public Roleplaying.
• More Information: Private Roleplaying - The same as the previous; except it goes into more information about Private Roleplaying.
• More Information: Premium Roleplaying - The same as the previous two, except it pertains to the Premium Roleplays.
• EcchiDreams Standard Character ID - This is adapted from the Character IDs from the old Scenario roleplays. Its purpose is to be a default that Game Masters can use for their own roleplay. It’s not a rule to have to use this, but it’s a good point to start from. Add or take away from it as much as you like; you’re free to use it.
• EcchiDreams Standard Roleplaying Rules - Again, this is adapted from the Rules of the old Scenario Roleplays. Like with the Character ID, its intended purpose is to be a default set of rules that a Game Master can apply to their own roleplay. Rules can be removed, or added depending on what the Game Master wants. It’s not a rule to have to use this, but it’s a good starting point. Please note that, regardless of the rules you use for your roleplay, you are still bound by the standard rules of EcchiDreams.
• Roleplay Difficulty Guide - This outlines the difficulties found within the Public Roleplays. It also gives you an idea of what to expect from a roleplay of that difficulty, such as detailed character IDs and extra information for an Expert Roleplay.

General Navigational Tweaks

Site Wide

We’ve made navigation slightly easier on EcchiDreams; for example, clicking ‘Explore’ will no longer take you to a page, as this was frustrating for many EcchiDreamers. In addition, we’ve made the navigational menu follow a certain, logically set behaviour, to make it less of a nightmare. In the most recent beta update we also gave each menu its own icon, as well as turned ‘+Create’ into a pencil, and gave everything under that its own icon too. 

A little while ago, we also enhanced the search button to make it easier to search for things on EcchiDreams. As you start typing in what you’re looking for, it will scan the indexes and find the thing you’re looking for based on what you type in. The more you type the more accurate it becomes. In a way, it predicts what you might be looking for in a similar way to autocomplete.

We listened to the numerous complaints about how navigating EcchiDreams was like ‘trying to navigate around a Kraken’ and, well, we hope that this helps you tell the tentacles from the tits. 

Activity Stream

https://ecchidreams.com/discover/

A feature of IPS that we simply love. Discover the latest and newest dreamers, posts, topics, images, and other content (or ‘Dreams’) with our Activity Stream. It is an evolution and enhancement of our VNC (View New Content) system from before the update. If you, for example, have an RSS feed on your phone or computer, then you can stay up-to-date with everything EcchiDreams through this feed. All the lists update automatically, and can easily be expanded and condensed. 

There are several streams you can choose from such as:

• Site Wide Activity
• Only Unread Content
• Content you Started
• Content you Follow
• Content from Dreamers you Follow
• And so on.

And if you think we were done there, then boy, do we have a surprise for you. In addition to our default streams, you can also customise and make your own streams to better discover the content you want, which you can even share with other Dreamers; for example, if you want a stream when someone posts a new roleplayer preferences sheet, or if there have been any updates in the news and announcements area, or even if someone posts a private roleplayers bulletin notice - you can totally do that, and all of them have their own RSS feeds too. Our Activity Streams is extremely customisable and powerful. 

EcchiText Security

https://ecchidreams.com/ecchitexts/

If you’re sent an EcchiText by a member of staff on this community, you are treated to this verification badge that allows you to easily check and verify that the person who sent you the message is indeed a member of staff. 

Gallery Updates

https://ecchidreams.com/gallery/

The gallery has had some new categories put in, such as Character IDs and Extra Informations. The idea is that you can create albums in there as appropriate, so you can easily find them later. The gallery has also been somewhat opened up again. Unlike previously; you can have a practically infinite number of albums to upload your images to, rather than just three like you used to have. 

Languages

Site Wide

One of the major criticisms we had was the classic American/British English divide, where the site would spell things like ‘Color’ as ‘Colour’. Obviously this made the American Grammar Police shit their bed; likewise, when we changed it to American English, we had problems from the British Grammar Police. Well, in order to settle this once and for all, there are now two languages you can chose from: English (USA) and English (UK), although it doesn’t change spelling within Dreamers posts or anything like that. What it does change is the date format (MM/DD/YYYY > DD/MM/YYYY), which can be quite confusing for some, especially on a day like 05/06/1990 which could be either the sixth of May, or the fifth of June, and 06/05/1990 which has the same problem. 

If you’re from the UK or used to UK Formats, then selecting English (UK) will get rid of this headache for you. Likewise if you’re from the USA, set it to English (USA) 

Dreamer of the Month

https://ecchidreams.com/dotm/

Dreamer of the Month is something new we wanted to try out. Dreamers are elected by others in the community to become the Dreamer of the Month for the next month, and the person with the most votes becomes Dreamer of the Month. We plan on introducing awards (profile trophies) to be given to Dreamers who win this.

Plans for the Future

Despite all of this, there are many plans of the future, some of which we will share with you today. It’s largely dependent on feedback we get (if any), and we look forward to further empowering this community to do more. Some of the improvements we’re prepared to talk about today are...

Improvements to Roleplayer Preferences

We have some ideas penned out for an update to our EcchiApp: Roleplayer Preferences. At the moment, this is rather basic, albeit very functional; however, we want to bring more information, settings, and customisability to it, while keeping the interface easy to use and intuitive. The basic idea is that you’ll want to spend ten or fifteen or so minutes filling it all out, and yet only take a fraction of that time actually reading it, because while you might not be editing it everyday, it could be read everyday. 

We are currently working on an update to this, although we don’t have any time scales or release deadlines, as the improvements are in the very early stages. 

Community Help and Support Unification

Hopefully before Christmas 2016, we’ll have made an update to the Community Help and Support Section, to help Dreamers better get the help they need. By this time, we hope to have more FAQs in our new FAQ system, as well bring in the bug tracker to be a part of the section. By January 2017, getting help and support should be a lot easier and more intuitive, as well as being mobile and guest compatible.

Bug Bounties

We aim to be more open as to how many EcchiCredits people will earn through reporting bugs, in the interests of openness and transparency. This should be more clear in the bug tracker section before the end of October. 

External Site Link Information

Hopefully, by next week, we should have a new system in place that alerts you that you’re leaving EcchiDreams when clicking a link that takes you away from this site. This will also host our disclaimer that we’re not responsible for the content of the site you’re being linked to, nor is it to be considered an endorsement, yadda yadda yadda… You know, all that ‘legal’ stuff, and information that should basically say something along the lines of ‘If you believe this link to be malicious, spam, or otherwise in violation of our ToS, please go back and report the post so that it can be reviewed by staff.’

Award System

To gain little profile trophies for doing tasks on EcchiDreams; like ‘Achievement Get’ things. This is in very, very early stages of development, and isn’t likely to come about until after EcchiCredits are a lot more useful. And finally…

EcchiCredits

We realise there isn’t a lot you can do with the EcchiCredits at the moment. This is something we’re looking at further working with a third-party developer to make better. The current system is primarily in place so you can earn EcchiCredits for when the system does get its own major overhaul. We fully intend on making this worth it in the end, and will happily take suggestions on what to do with them. There is no roadmap for this, or any fixed timelines, but I promise I will keep you up-to-date as things develop, with full announcements even if it’s not good news. 

Article Image Credit: Wolfy-Nail

Hello fellow EcchiDreamers! 

As promised I'm making another announcement although it's probably going to be a small one, to keep you up-to-date on the changes we've been making to EcchiDreams over the last few weeks. There's been no major changes that's going to require re-learning of everything, just little changes here and there to look and be "More Presentable". 😄

In the last update I spoke of a few things that I knew needed to be fixed or changed in someway in "plans for the future" so what I will do is report on these fronts first before getting into the other cool changes. 

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Improvements to Roleplayer Preferences

We have some ideas penned out for an update to our EcchiApp: Roleplayer Preferences. At the moment, this is rather basic, albeit very functional; however, we want to bring more information, settings, and customisability to it, while keeping the interface easy to use and intuitive. The basic idea is that you’ll want to spend ten or fifteen or so minutes filling it all out, and yet only take a fraction of that time actually reading it, because while you might not be editing it everyday, it could be read everyday. 

We are currently working on an update to this, although we don’t have any time scales or release deadlines, as the improvements are in the very early stages. 

Not that much has been changed here; the forms are still the same format and so on, but we have included a few things that I personally think is good to have on the page in that section for both mobile and desktop users alike. I've put some stuff into the sidebar of the Roleplayer Preferences that are relevant to what roleplayers are looking for as well as a roleplaying advert (Link requires being logged in), as well as the latest roleplays from our Public Roleplaying Section, and latest BBS posts from our Private Roleplayers Bulletin Board and finally a Dashboard button for easier navigation. Of course I should point out in being completely honest: When I spoke of the changes in the last announcement, I spoke of bigger changes that meant an easier time actually filling out the form; and viewing other preference sheets. This is still being designed, worked out, and there is still no date. 

Similarly the Private Roleplayers BBS has had a few changes done to it too, specifically in the sidebar. 

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Community Help and Support Unification

Hopefully before Christmas 2016, we’ll have made an update to the Community Help and Support Section, to help Dreamers better get the help they need. By this time, we hope to have more FAQs in our new FAQ system, as well bring in the bug tracker to be a part of the section. By January 2017, getting help and support should be a lot easier and more intuitive, as well as being mobile and guest compatible.

This is still being worked on, and I'll be working through November to get this done by the promised deadline. I will say this however - we've scrapped the bug tracker system. So, this is obviously a big thing that I will need to discuss next, but before that... We have a lot of avenues for getting the support you need, as quickly as possible. You can:

• Use the "Contact Us" link at the bottom left of our page.
• Send an EcchiText to any of the staff members.
• Ask a question in the Community Questions forum; this is where anyone from the community, or staff can answer you. Popular questions will even make it to our FAQ's.
• Try and find a tutorial. Or even make one.
• Read our FAQ's.

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Bug Bounties

We aim to be more open as to how many EcchiCredits people will earn through reporting bugs, in the interests of openness and transparency. This should be more clear in the bug tracker section before the end of October. 

This is complete but it also has been pretty much scrapped all together. "Pretty much" being the operative words there. I have decided to do away with the bug tracker (at least from the public point of view) because it either made more confusion for everyone involved, and because most people sent Manni, Neptune or even me an EcchiText saying they 'think' they've found a bug. That seems like a pretty simpler solution to me, and boy do we need simpler solutions for things. With that said I will still be handing out 'rewards' or 'bounties' in the form of EcchiCredits to those that tell us these things and we deeply appreciate it too. 

The bounties are as follows, for non-security related bugs:

• Badly worded/Grammatical/Spelling Mistakes - Variable
• Low Severity - 100 EcchiCredits
• Medium Severity - 250 EcchiCredits
• High Severity - 500 EcchiCredits
• Severe Severity - Upto 1,500 EcchiCredits
• Critical Severity - Upto 2,500 EcchiCredits

The bounties are as follows for security related (which are extremely rare) bugs:

• Minor Security Flaw/Bug - 2,500 EcchiCredits
• Major Security Flaw/Bug - 5,000 EcchiCredits
• Critical Security Flaw/Bug - 10,000 EcchiCredits + Bonus

To report a bug; just send any of the staff an EcchiText, you'll be credited in the bug report. The first person to report a specific bug is the person who will get the EcchiCredits; as a result anyone who reports a pre-existing bug will be told that we know about it, but thank you. I think this system is very fair. 

IMPORTANT REMINDER!

When you tell us of a bug, any screenshots, the page URL and your browser name (and version if you can help it) would be valuable information to us for tracking it down. Steps you took to get to the bug is very important to us; as it allows us to try and reproduce the bug.  Thanks! 

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External Site Link Information

Hopefully, by next week, we should have a new system in place that alerts you that you’re leaving EcchiDreams when clicking a link that takes you away from this site. This will also host our disclaimer that we’re not responsible for the content of the site you’re being linked to, nor is it to be considered an endorsement, yadda yadda yadda… You know, all that ‘legal’ stuff, and information that should basically say something along the lines of ‘If you believe this link to be malicious, spam, or otherwise in violation of our ToS, please go back and report the post so that it can be reviewed by staff.’

This system is now up! Test for yourself with this link:- https://google.com/ you should get something like this:

Maybe I can apply a little humour to it? Like you are now probably leaving the dark corners of the internet. Lol.

There is no updates to the Awards and EcchiCredit systems; other than we updated the EcchiCredit one to fix some bugs that staff picked up on.  Now we get down to what I didn't announce would be changing but has in fact changed other than the myaid of tweaks and fixes no one wants me to bore them with. 

Homepage Changes 

On our homepage (when you're logged in of course) I've made a number of changes that has radically altered the layout of the page.  Such as latest news articles has a prominent feature under the userbar. 

The sidebar has also been re-ordered, so that the Roleplay Adverts appear above the fold. 

Profile Changes 

The profile cover is now slightly larger! @Neptune pointed out that the profile covers were too small, and as such it sucked as to what images you could put in there and how much of the image would be displayed. This has now been increased so you can make more out of your image of choice to make your profile, your own.

Site-wide/Non-specific or Misc Changes 

We, proudly, use a "Skin" from IPSFocus, called Shift, which I've heavily modified for use on our website, who have made a number of improvements since the last update, such as tweaks for mobile users with the colour picker and general optimisations as well as minor tweaks. You may have noticed axes, spiders and bats around - this is because (built into what you get from IPSFocus) seasonal things during Halloween, Christmas and Valentines Day. We've always (except for last year) done something over Christmas and this year we'll be doing something beyond flicking a switch. 

The Roleplayer Advert Terms and Conditions have also been changed to increase the amount of days you get with an advert post from 14 days to 28 days at the same cost. 

Post Counts 

A lot of you will have noticed that your post count has plummeted (including mine which was at 9,200 odd and now is down to 4,600 or so...) This is because of a cleanup that removed topics that haven't even been visible for a better half of this year (such as when we did the roleplaying changes). Of course I've also cleaned out my old development suite which had lots of posts and such that were made during the Beta period, which was never (and never intended to be) public. This is more of a correction to the record, rather than just us arbitrarily going on a deleting spree. 

News Articles

Our news section has had massive changes. Previously our articles were in the same format as much of the site, and it wasn't that great... Now they actually look like articles rather than in the exact same format as the tutorial section. Obviously we'll be making tweaks over the coming weeks but this is an example, which you can see as you read this too:

Because of the changes to the news articles and their altered the formatting: Limits that were originally placed, such as the fact that we only used JPGs that were 200x200 (doesn't look good on the new format) have been lifted. I plan on rolling this out to the community articles section by next year as well, so we can see better quality things coming out a lot more frequently in future.

And that's pretty much it, in the spirit of keeping to our facebook stuff I will be doing something else different at the end of each News Article, depending on if its wanted or not (Leave a comment). I use images that I pick up from places like Pixiv, Yande.re and so on, as such these images have copyrights which absolutely belong to the respected artists. In the keeping with our tradition though, I'll be giving more than just an image credit by saying what I personally like about the image, why I chose it and where you can go to find more of their art. This - I hope - will be seen as a sign of respect rather than "OUR IMAGE NAOW!!!" which is not what it is at all. I want more artists, and I want the artists that have done a good job on something to get the credit they're due, and to funnel people who genuinely like their art to seek them out. That said if you're an artist and you're not happy with this - please get in touch with me and I will add you to a DNP (Do not post) list that will apply here on EcchiDreams, and on Facebook (or wherever else we do this service). 

Image Credit: 

Artist: RedEyeHare
Links: ArtStation | Pixiv | Deviant Art

Other than the fact that it was relevant I used this picture because it's exactly what I was looking for when I thought 'Ecchi, Halloween, Good Quality and Potentially Triggering' and I really like it. I think the level of detail and yet not looking complicated, is something that seems to be a dying art. I think it's perfectly balanced and absolutely reasonable. The colours work well together, and of course the rather devilishly attractive lady is very fitting for the picture. It's very well drawn, indeed! It's certainly something I appreciated looking at and I hope you do too. I highly recommend checking out their art - I've had a look myself and I've found a few other pictures I really liked the looks of too. 

Thank you for reading. We're EcchiDreams, wishing you a very Ecchi Halloween.

Hello fellow EcchiDreamers!

We've just completed an update, so our site now uses Invision Power Suite 4.2, which has added a lot of new features and improved already existing features such as the like system. I've also updated quite a number of EcchiDreams Specific Modifications (with some big ones still to come) as well as the applications and plugins we use to provide our service. 

Over the next few weeks I hope to have the bugs ironed out, but if you do find any please, let me know! Even if you're not sure, I can let you know and it doesn't bother me in the slightest, because it allows me to help you out. You can contact me via the contact form, EcchiTexts, or if I'm online, over the chatbar. There is no bug tracker anymore, that was referenced in the Halloween Update (2016) because it was a feature only enabled during the Beta of the big update, but the same bounties apply.

To highlight some of the changes made to EcchiDreams:

• Clubs (Coming Soon)
• Complete Your Profile!
• Device Management
• Gallery Improvements
• Leaderboard Enhancements
• Richer Embeds
• "Our Picks"
• Reactions

Clubs

The clubs application (New in IPS4.2) is a way of supporting sub-communities within our site, it's a kind of social group function. However EcchiDreams being EcchiDreams; this could be used to replace the public roleplaying suite because it's exceptionally powerful at what it does and lets club leaders control what goes on in their clubs or roleplays. But it could also be used for the intended purpose, such as a Tech-Geeks club or Steam Gamers club, or even Pokémon Fan Club or Bible Black Fan Club (You get the point). We're currently not entirely sure how to implement it for our site because there are a load of options and not much in the way of clear answers (So we'd appreciate your feedback!) 

There are four types of clubs: 

• Public - Anyone can see it, and post in it without even joining the club. 
• Open - Anyone can see, and join but they can't post unless they're a member of the club.
• Closed - Clubs that anyone can see in the directory but joining must be approved by a Club Leader or a Club Moderator. Non-Club Members who view the club will only see the member list - not the recent activity or content areas. 
• Private - Clubs that do not show in public and users must be invited by a Club Leader or a Club Moderator. (Staff can still see them, obviously)

For closed clubs there is an approval process, that is exceptionally simple and straightforward "Accept" (Tick) or "Reject" (Cross). Leaders (And I think Moderators) get a notification when a Dreamer requests to join and the Dreamer gets a notification if they've been accepted or rejected.

Club Users:

Each club has three levels of user, this is why we think it is exceptionally powerful for the roleplay suites, because it allows the Club Leader to moderate the content, and the roleplays they'd run under this system, as well as appoint a single or a few club moderator(s) to do the same. However I do not believe that you can have more than one leader, the "Club Administrator" if you will. 

• Leader - A leader has all of the permissions of a moderator, and can add other moderators. They can also add content areas, which I'll get into shortly. The club owner is automatically the leader of it. 
• Moderators - As the name implies, Club Moderators have the ability to moderate content posted within the club. The actual permissions of the moderator is currently not set at this time, and can only be done from a Site Administrator level (Read below). 
• Users - Anyone else that joins the clubs.

The Moderator permissions feature would be perfect for large roleplays as this is currently not possible with the current format of doing it on the forums (As the topic starter is required to send an EcchiText to a staff member to deal with problem Dreamers) This why we're going to have to think about how this is implemented because what we set has to be universal across all clubs for (as far as I can tell) Club Administrators and Club Moderators. A follow up announcement will be posted explaining in detail (In the interests of transparency) what the permission sets are for Club Moderation. 

The current permission settings are as follows:

None of these permissions are currently active, but this is what we have to work with, so any feedback is appreciated, as a Club Leader cannot pick and choose, as I said it's universal across all clubs. If you'd like more information please ask in the comments below, I will endevour to answer them. I will add my personal recommendations, and explain why I think this way. Club Leaders should be extremely careful about picking Club Moderators, if it's someone you can't trust - they shouldn't be a moderator, at this time there is no way of distinguishing permissions between the two as far as I am aware. The only difference is the Leader can appoint and fire moderators of their club, not the other way around, and a moderator can't do that to other moderators of the same club. 

• Pin Content - This makes a topic within the club appear at the top of the topic listings, much like how pinning content works on the Forums. Perfect for rules and such.
• Unpin Content - Self explanatory. 
• Edit Content - Ability to edit other people's posts. I wholly recommend that this is left off for obvious reasons. 
• Hide Content - Hiding something doesn't mean deleting, it's more of a shadowban of that post. Hidden posts would flag the Community's Senior Staff Member, if asked or required to delete said content.
• Unhide Content - Unhiding hidden content. 
• View Hidden Content - This allows the moderator to see content they've hidden. I think this should be turned on, it will allow the Club Leaders and Moderators to view the hidden content inline (As it appears, and it should obvious when it's hidden).
• Set Future Publishing Dates - Content that will remain hidden until a set time/date. I'm not sure at all what this should be set to, because I cannot currently think of a reason why this is needed - at all. Perhaps for special events? Even then I'd assume that the club leader should be responsible for that.
• View Content with a Future Publish Date - Basically it'll be visible to the Club Leader, and Moderator if enabled. If you can do the above, I think you should be able to see it otherwise it'll vanish until the date set, thus not giving you time to re-proofread your content. 
• Move Content - To move something from one area of the club to somewhere else within the club. I personally don't think this should be enabled, because it can be quite destructive, but this is why I want to hear your feedback.
• Lock Content - The ability to lock a topic within the Club. I think this should be enabled. 
• Unlock Content - The ability to unlock a locked topic. Likewise I think this should be enabled.
• Reply to Locked Content - So you can lock immediately, and worry about adding a reply later. Perfect for situations where it's so heated that there is a new post every second or something. Or to add rules, or something. I wish we could separate the two permissions of Club Leader and Club Moderator, because I think that should be up to the Club Leader but I'd love to hear feedback.
• Delete Content - To make content within the club disappear, forever. I do not believe this should be enabled because in a "Rogue Moderator" scenario they would be able to effectively destroy your club. Hiding content, is in my opinion the best way to go, that and if it's something serious (ToS violating, such as someone posting someone else's dox) then Community Staff need to see that for evidence to take appropriate action, as we do not accept screenshots due to the fact that tech savvy individuals can alter things on a page using a browser console, which can be used to frame someone. We act on hard evidence.
• Split and Merge Content - If someone double posts, or makes a similar topic then it allows one to merge them together. I do not believe this should be enabled because it is destructive if used by a Club Moderator who's gone rogue, this is why I recommended hide content rather than deleting content because I don't think Moderators should have access to potentially destructive tools, Community Moderators don't even have this ability. Hidden content can be made visible again, merged content on the other hand -- not so much. 

What is "Club Content" and why do you keep saying it?!

Club Leaders can add a varity of content areas to their club(s). Forums, Calendars and Images (Exactly like the Gallery). They will appear in search results and activity streams*, users can follow them, embed links to them and so on. If a user has permission to see a forum (For example) within a club it will behave exactly like other forums they see, and the same for all kinds of content. 

Each content area a leader adds can have a custom title and will appear in the club's navigation menu. This means you can have multiple forums within a club and give each a different name.

* Depending on type of club.

I believe we can indeed do both Social Clubs and Roleplay Clubs, and have them searchable/filterable, and the club owner can select what kind of club it is. For example "General Club" for Social Clubs, "Fan Club" for well, fan clubs and "Roleplay Clubs" for Roleplays. I think this is the best way of doing it, honestly. But I am very interested in hearing ideas, and if you have a different kind of club in mind - then by all means talk to us, lets see what we can do. 

Complete Your Profile!

In an effort to make registration quicker and easier, we now offer a stripped down registration form that only asks for required information. You can either sign in with Google+, Facebook or Twitter which is exceptionally quick and should be painless. Or fill out:

• Display Name
• Email Address
• Password (And Confirm Password)
• Birthday (Because you have to be over 18). 

Then check a box that says "I'm not a robot", and that you agree to the Terms of Service, then that's it. You're in*. What it will then do is allow you to use EcchiDreams as normal, and you'll be asked to make a signature, upload a profile cover and avatar which you can do whenever you like. Simple! You even get a little progress bar in your Account Settings control panel. 

*Email Validation Required. Depending on SpamScore, Administrator Verification may be required. Terms of Service apply.

Device Management

When you sign in to EcchiDreams for the first time a special "Key", a Cookie (Not the editable kind, sadly), is created to recognise your browser on subsequent logins. Which allows you to say logged into EcchiDreams without having to put in your username and password every single time you come to EcchiDreams (because that would be annoying as fuck). This then stores said information for you to see in your "Recently Used Devices" under your account settings that allows you to do a few things. Firstly you can disable automatic login from the device you're on or - say if you've left your phone somewhere, you can use your computer to sign out. It also allows you to see if your account has been compromised, if strange devices from strange locations start appearing you can sign them out. -> Then change your password, and set up Two-Factor Authorisation, which we provide through Google's Authenticator application.

If someone does log into your account with an unknown device (or in an unknown location) then you'll get an be notified via Email - immediately. Please note: "Disable Automatic Login" does not disable the device from using the account, it merely means you have to log back in when you're logged out.

Gallery Improvements

The gallery has had some major improvements that should make using it much clearer to understand, such as picking an already existing album of yours to add images to. As is adding information to the images rather than copy and pasting information to every image, in a specific batch. To quote IPS directly,

Quote

Applying the same details to all of the images you are submitting has been made much simpler. When you begin entering the details for the first image, you can specify a template to use for the caption name leveraging a special replacement "%n". A small help icon next to the caption field label explains how to use this capability. When you are done supplying the details, you can click "Copy details to all images" and your submission will start instantly, using all of the details supplied for the image you are editing. You can quickly set tags, an image description and a caption name template (for instance "Aquarium %n") to all images using this new capability, useful when submitting 50+ images at once. Of course, you can still supply the details for each individual image as well, if you wish.

In addition to this a number of features have been added to the actual albums rather than per image, such as:

• Commenting
• Reviews
• Reactions
• Messages
• Featuring (Mod feature)
• Hiding (Mod feature)
• Locking (Mod feature)
• Reporting
• Searching

Also - if someone uploads (for example) 50+ images to the same album rather than getting 50+ different entries in the Activity Feed they'll all be grouped into one entry, reducing the clutter. 

Leaderboard Enhancements

Our Leaderboard just got a lot more powerful, it's well worth checking out. There are daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and even all time leaderboards, and for different sections. Getting on this leaderboard gives you a trophy in your profile that all logged in Dreamers can see. Yep we're competitive now, deal with it. 😄

You can easily search through the different categories and such within the system to see who's the top Dreamer. 

Richer Embeds

I'll just show with some examples, because it's amazing! Time for some shilling. (Might not show if you're not logged in):

A Gallery Image:

A Gallery Album:

A Topic:

A specific post:

Rules:

News:

YouTube (Not me, just a random video):

Twitter:

Facebook:

And you get the point, although at the time of posting this, I do not know why there are black boxes around it. That's a bug and it'll be fixed, if you don't see that then it's been fixed already. Moving on:

Our Picks

This is another useful and new feature with IPS4 that can be found in the menu under "Explore", Our Picks. It is content we've hand picked by the Community Administrators. It allows us to promote content, which is consistent, an advantage that community platforms like EcchiDreams have over social media platforms. The content on our community is generally speaking, going to always be here where as a social network is all about the right here and right now, if you blink you miss it and miss out. This will mean content put in Our Picks is posted on our Facebook Fanpage and Twitter as well (I will be testing it with this article). 

Reactions

Gone are the days of simply "Liking" posts, now you can react to them, we've always had requests such as "I wish I could love this" (I got that earlier before the update actually), and with this system you'll be able to do that. We hope to expand it but keep it manageable (IE: Not a million different reactions). It is also touch friendly (For our Mobile Dreamers). There are currently five reactions that play a part in reputation scores, they are:

• Standard Like - Adds 1 point to the receiver's reputation.
• Thanks - Adds 1 point to the receiver's reputation.
• Haha - Adds 1 point to the receiver's reputation.
• Confused - Doesn't add reputation.
• Sad - Doesn't add reputation.

I am thinking about changing the standard like to a thumbs up, and making the like icon to "Love" which will add 2 points to the receiver's reputation. There is some talk amongst @Neptune and I about adding negative reputation but we've not used this since 2010/2011 when it was abused to bully other Dreamers by a particularly nasty piece of work that racked up hundreds of fake accounts, as well as mass down-rep'ing a lot of people's posts using bot/scripts, and pretty much successfully managed to give nearly everyone that ever posted negative reputation for no reason. So I'd love to hear your feedback on that especially.

And that's it, there are many fixes and tweaks all over the place, and probably many new bugs (Because this update went way too smoothly) so be sure to check them out and let us know what you think in the comments below. I do read all of them and if it warrants it I will reply or at least leave a reaction, to show I've read it. 

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Article Image Artist: qbspdl (Yes, really)
Links: Pixiv 

I chose this image because it's an artist we've never covered before and they have some very good art. You should, if you like this picture, check out their other work on the above Pixiv link. It's got great attention to detail and makes a good use of the colours, with it being quite vivid and bright, and yet it's not over saturated. It also has a very 'picture' look, as if someone was taking a picture with a camera, as it's nicely framed by the foliage of the trees and flowers. Despite some details looking simplistic (such as the birds) it's still quite nicely done, and the use of multi-toned colours for the ocean is, in my opinion perfect for this picture.

Thank you for reading. We're EcchiDreams, wishing you a very Ecchi Summer.

Hello fellow Dreamers,

We have some more information on the clubs thus far and we're very keen to share these ideas with you, as well as keep you up-to-date on what's going on around the forums, as well as the future direction of the Roleplay suite, which was updated only a year ago. This is a' follow on' from the Summer Update news article we posted a few weeks ago. 

Thanks to the feedback we got on the article itself, in EcchiTexts and the Chatbar, and though internal discussions between @Neptune and I, we have both come to the conclusion that the clubs will indeed be kind of a multi-use feature on our community. For example, we spoke about the clubs different "Genre's" if you will, of clubs which is filterable in the actual application (We've attached some pictures below) these genres, are:

• EcchiDreams Specific Community Club - For things that are highly specific to EcchiDreams; such as "Poke War Warriors" for people who take part in Poke Wars, or for "American Dreamers", "British Dreamers" etc...
• Fan Club - Specific to a certain fandom, such as the Nekomimi Fan Club, Kitsunetsuki Fan Club, Startrek Fanclub, or I don't know: PHP Fan Club.
• RP Club - What was once either a public or premium RP, something we're going to talk about in a moment.
• Social Club - A good example would be general interest or product clubs, such as the Hentai Connoisseur Club, PS Gamers Club, or PC Master Race, Headphone/Audiophile, Anime Junkies, etc...
• - Other - - If your club doesn't fit into the above categories it'd fall under other. Although we will be listening out for suggestions and adapting as time goes on.

We'll look at how this useful feature evolves on our community, going forward and try to improve it based on real world use of it. 

There will have to be some changes however to the Premium Membership feature; that is, it's been two years waiting for a reliable Credits system; that allows you to earn Credits on EcchiDreams through contributing, (Posting, getting likes and leaving likes, coming on once a day, etc). Since the Big Update however this functionality has never materialised, and the developer of it seems to have attracted a lot of real life priorities that has left him unable to develop the next version. The one we have in place, the Basic Points that still lets to accumulate EcchiCredits has not received any feature updates either and thus has become remarkably useless and unusable. Less than 1% of our members are premium members, and a lot of that has something to do with points not being added to people's accounts (According to some reports I've gotten and are looking into) despite posting, liking and getting likes. So it's very on the rails at the moment as to what is going on in this area and I can only apologise. Premium members have next to no benefits of being a premium member other than a sparkling tag and increased Gallery Bandwidth limits.

We're also going to go into the process of moving all the Public and Premium Roleplays over to the Clubs system; luckily this affects absolutely no one, other than staff because Staff are the only ones with these in the first place, and no one has posted in there, yet. Premium members will still have some benefits over this; such as an option to have their own Articles System but there isn't much else. We will have to update our Roleplay Guides to reflect this change before it's released, but the Public Roleplay Forums and Premium Roleplay Forums are pretty much closed at the moment. We will also need to re-write parts of the Terms of Service; and fix things on the site as well as Ecchia's welcome EcchiText to reflect these changes. So please bear with us as this will take some time. That said we hope to have it online and running by the end of the weekend, with all the changes made too. (Sunday the 13th of August, or Sunday the 20th of August 2017 at the latest). 

Now that's out of the way, here are some screenshots of the Clubs feature and I hope to explain them as I go along. When you first go into the clubs you'll arrive to the front page as you can see in the image (Click to Expand).  

You can of course filter these, say for example you only want to see certain types of clubs, well with the button next to "Sort By" which in this picture above, is above the EcchiTown (RP), club, this will allow you to sort and filter the clubs so you can display only the ones that fit what you're looking for, we're thinking on having it that the Public Roleplay Link on the forums will redirect to a filtered page that shows only RP Clubs, but you can view all with exceptional ease. 

Making a Club, is exceptionally easy, and open for you to play around with, as follows:

Obviously the name; is the title you want to use for your club, your clubs name, if you will, the "Privacy" is the type of club you want, as you can see it lets you know what each setting means. The Description is the brief introduction which is seen on the Clubs Frontpage, the Icon (Although I recommend making the club first then setting an icon, although nothing stops you from doing the icon again) as it's like a profile picture. The reason I say that is because it squashes the picture where as if you change it after, you can crop the icon to fit what you're looking for. This way around works very well. The type of club, which as I stated earlier is the "Genre" if you will, and what features do you want to automatically create. I'll show you them in a moment. 

Managing your club is exceptionally easy; there is a "Manage Club" button that club owners can use to modify the club structure itself. Such as adding Topics, Images and Calendar features. You can edit the club settings, invite members, activate and edit the homepage (Which will split Home and Activity up and allow you to customise your clubs homepage), add members *Maybe*, change/transfer the owner of the club to another dreamer, change it's type or manage it's features, such as disabling sections, deleting them, or just re-organizing them, to put them into a new order (I will touch on in a moment). 

The Topics are useful for creating sections in your club roleplay, for example such as OOC, Roleplay, Extra Information and so on, as you can see you can again customise how you want the page to be displayed as if it was a normal post or topic on EcchiDreams. This allows a great number of options such as displaying the rules of your roleplay, or club, in this case the images above is showing it in an RP situation. In the previous news article, I discussed how moderators and even the club owner themselves can "Hide" content, this will appear as what you can see with "Rulebreaking Topic" in the second picture. As owners you should be able to pin any topic you want to the top of this, that will mean they will always appear on the top of the list above all other topics below regardless as to which topic is newer or more recently posted in, unless that is also a sticky... When you create the forum section of your club you can select one of two options "Discussions" which as featured above, or "Questions" where people can ask questions, and you - or other members of your club can respond. This doesn't have to be used for giving support to your members for your RP or club, but it could be used in a tech club for example as a place for people to ask tech related questions. What you choose to do with it, is on you. 

A club homepage is a great way of telling Dreamers who come to check out your club, what your club is, is it a RP club, and so on. I've, for this example, have shown the first page to the EcchiTown RP visible here, which tells people it's a Club RP, as would '(RP)' in the title, and as much information as I can for them to read and decide if being apart of that club is for them. You'll want to impress prospective users if you want them in your club, so making it look sleek, and awesome is the best way of doing this, as an ugly, janky and messy homepage will probably put people off. As you can see above, if you choose to turn the homepage on; you'll get an Activity Tab, which separates it from your club homepage (Which is default). The Activity Tab will also show a small "About the Club" for your club. 

Similar to adding forums, Image Areas are created for storing images in albums, or as is depending on your set up. For example if you have people who have multiple characters, in the above examples; of making an image area you have a few options. In the description you can pretty much do anything again, as well as set a standard as to how you want images to be posted for character IDs in your club. If you don't want people to post up a character ID with their images and you think it'll be fine to dump the images straight into the directory then you are more than happy to do so, you might not need albums for your needs so you can turn it off. You can also turn comments and reviews off; depending on your needs. For the above example. I have made character ID's non-requiring of Albums (that split up who's characters are who's) because EcchiTown will probably only see one character per person, due to design choices I made.

For something like Blackberry Falls however, you might see a system where people have to make an album for all their characters in your RP club and character ID's are posted with the images themselves - which is indeed possible for everyone under this system. For something like Extra Informations though; that's typically something that will be used for an Extra Information Topic so you might just make it a dumping place (and put it on the end of the club) and allow people to use it to upload the images they need for their threads - again that's completely up to you and how you organise your club. So make your club your own.

This is an example of changing the order; disabling or deleting any sections that you don't require; this makes editing your clubs no matter what the type of club you're hosting, easy. 

In "Closed" Club scenarios The first image above; is a request notification that I spoke about in the last update topic, once you click it you can choose to accept or reject. Accepting or Rejecting is as simple as a sweet short click, and is honestly as easy as it can be. As you can see above.

If you're trying to join a club that is closed, you're told on the home page of that club, that it's closed and are given the option (Twice) to join the club. If you've clicked that, but the request is pending, you'll be told on the club page (Above image) that you're request is still pending. As the message says if you're accepted - or rejected (Trying to say positive, lol) then you'll get a notification, that looks like this:

In other news...

We are aware of a number of bugs that have been present in our update; we hope that most of them are addressed as of today, such as the Leaderboards Bug when trying to filter by content type.  We're also looking at making the help section more intuitive, as well as putting in a process where people can appeal their infractions, and so on, so this is something we're looking at doing after sorting out the clubs and RP sections which are going to require some migration time. I wanted to keep you all up-to-date and hopefully by this or next weekend we'll have a better RP section on EcchiDreams, with something easier to understand, use and is much more controllable, by YOU the club owner. Finally I'd like to remind all dreamers; to please DOUBLE CHECK what images you are uploading, before you upload them, far too many people got their accounts banned or given infractions last week over major terms of service violations. We do not allow Beastility, Lolicon or Shotacon (Child/Minor in Nude or Sexual Situations). Thank you.

As always please leave comments, suggestions and feedback relating to this article below, I read every single comment posted and it's my pleasure to. 

Article Image Artist: Wolp
Links: Deviantart

There is no reason I chose this image, its not related to the article in anyway shape or form. I purely chose it because I like the picture and I think the artwork, something I'm not usually a fan of, but it's actually very well done. Such simplicity of detail oddly suits it, and I think the Artist has managed (with this and a few other pieces) of getting me to like a kind of style that not many can seem to do very well. It's a very stunning image, and I highly recommend checking his work out if you like it. It's in my opinion one of the best I've seen from this artist.