Hello fellow Dreamers,

I know I said this in the last announcement, but it bears repeating as I have made the same mistake… again. I am so very sorry that the last announcement was way back in April of 2020 (over two years ago!) I assure you - again - that this wasn’t intentional, at least mostly. We’ve still not gone anywhere either, so there is a plus. We’re still busy as ever. The only thing that I have done a better job of compared to the last announcement is trying harder to keep everyone in the loop, which I’ve done via Status updates. 

This announcement will cover:

1. A message from our Community Administrators
2. Terms of Service Changes
   1. Correcting the Record
3. Previously Announced New Features
4. So what new features are there?
   1. Achievements System
   2. Live EcchiTexts
   3. The EcchiDreams App!
5. The Future of EcchiDreams
6. Fixes

A message from our Community Administrators

In 2020 we stated that we understood the community’s concern regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, and we even shared those concerns. We were going through some truly unprecedented times which we’re still feeling the effects of, and are only just starting to feel the consequences and the ramifications of. Two years ago, we said “It is extremely important right now, in a time where we must remain apart, that we must come together in spirit. Now more than ever, we need to bring comfort and love to help and support each other.“ As a whole, on the most part you all did! We had a few bumps in the road… More than a few. But we all worked past it and made it through. Neptune and I want to thank you all for this, sincerely. Keep being awesome. 

We hope that this announcement, or newsletter, finds you all well (considering the circumstances right now) and we will try to make these more common. 

Regretfully, some of you lost family members during the recent events, and it wasn’t necessarily from COVID-19, but the pandemic still affected those of us who lost friends, close-friends, lovers and family. For you; we offer our sincerest condolences and we are terribly sorry for your loss. We know all too well how this could affect your life, as we were also affected by it. 

In addition; It's with heavy heart to announce, that I have been made aware of two Dreamer’s who have passed away. One of them has requested privacy and for us to just quietly deactivate that account. We will respect their wishes. But the other Dreamer was @Xander, who passed away on the 26th of January 2021 because of COVID-19. He was someone who wasn’t quite as public, but still engaged and interacted with his close circle of friends via EcchiTexts. I have spoken to his sister over the phone and she has allowed me to memorialise his profile. We are saddened by their losses and our thoughts go out to the families of the two individuals who were a part of this community in very different ways. I’m sure I speak for the entire community when I say: May you both rest in peace. 

Terms of Service Changes

You may already be aware of this, but we've pretty much completely overhauled our Terms of Service. However I've covered this in a separate article that you can view here: 

This includes a new feature under our Terms of Service called 'No Contact Orders' (NCO's) which helps victims of harassment from a specific form of unwanted contact, and it's well worth a read, even if it's a little boring.

Correcting the Record

On the topic of the Terms of Service, I can’t speak for the other staff members, but I have had some insane interactions with people on EcchiDreams in regards to the Terms of Service. Worse yet, I have had people melting down and going into a fit of utter hysterics (for lack of lack a better term) in EcchiTexts and even in the EcchiDreams Discord over a perceived notion that they will be outright banned for the slightest of infractions. Many take this as a zero sum game and then start going absolutely ballistic; thinking if they’re going to get banned for their comment anyway, they might as well go all out. 

I have no idea where this is coming from and frankly it’s patently absurd behaviour that I wouldn't expect from adolescents, let alone adults. 

We have a solid and refined Terms of Service and we can only take action against your account under those Terms of Service. The Terms of Service are deliberately written to be as unambiguous as possible, a lot of sites make their rules extremely vague and open to interpretation - we do not.

Also I’d directly challenge any notion that we’d ban your account for simply telling me something like “I don’t like the way X works” or “I think your site sucks” or for breaking a minor rule. This is not how we work. Every action we take against another account is open and transparent to all staff, and we all know that all actions have to actually be actionable under the Terms of Service. There’s even precedents set so we know what is heavy handed and what is lenient. 

Under my administration; no staff has ever banned or even warned someone just because we don’t like them. The idea that we do is utterly absurd and unfounded. There has to be a ToS violation and evidence of that ToS violation and even then, there are avenues of appeal and redress. No staff member is above the minimum standards required for evidence: not even me. All ban reasons are a matter of public record within their profile under “Ban Reason” in the sidebar. They point to the specific Terms of Service violation, as well as a brief summary of the rules violated.

Another problem that’s become quite commonplace is people who are very angry at us for enforcing our Terms of Service on the people that they’re role playing with. I don’t see how this is our fault, and I suggest that people take a step back and strongly reconsider their actions. We don’t ban for no reason. We’re not allowed under our Staff Policy Agreement to ban for arbitrary reasons. Each ban can be scrutinised by any of the staff, it doesn’t matter who made the ban and what their rank is. Even then, for some things we opt for a more informative approach rather than punitive. Take for example Section 18 violations; when someone posts loli or shota in the gallery, we delete the content and then send them a message to tell them that this kind of content isn’t acceptable here, and help them avoid getting in trouble with it in the future. There are many who can attest to this.

We also paradoxically have the opposite problem. Dreamers who aren’t violating the Terms of Service that everyone else wants to see banned. Again; unless they violate the Terms of Service - we will not do anything of the sort. We do not ban people we dislike, and we certainly don't ban unpopular people - just because they're unpopular and maybe because they're an asshole. Even if they make a single minor infraction, we won't take that as an excuse to ban them into the ground. It's heavy handed and goes against our core principles for moderation.

I hope this puts this to bed. I quite frankly find this situation, as I have said many times already, utterly absurd, completely baseless and frankly ridiculous. I have my EcchiTexts open to anyone who has questions, I listen to feedback, I help people, I do everything I can to be there and open to all Dreamers. I think all the staff do. We will happily listen to rational, calmly put feedback. None of our staff - including myself - however, should be expected to take hysterical abuse spammed over and over again, just because you don’t like the way things are done here. If you are that upset with the Terms of Service that you can’t agree to them, you’re well within your rights to deactivate your account and leave. We’re not going to force you to stay, and we’re not going to sit here and take rabid abuse either. In these situations we will just simply ignore you or tell you that the conversation is over. If it - like it has done in the past - enters the region of violating ToS (Such as Section 20, Sub-Section 2: Abuse Towards Staff Members or Section 10: Harassment) then it will be dealt with accordingly as if it was any other Dreamer.

Previously Announced New Features

Unfortunately in the last update announcement made back in 2020, I detailed three upcoming features that still have not been implemented. These were “Profile Items”, “Profile Enhancements” and “Roll the Dice!”. The reasons are:

Profile Items:
Image Licensing; I want to use images that I would need to purchase a licence for and I would like the images to be uniform (as in not radically different from one image to the next). The system is installed, it is in place and ready to be used. But unfortunately I don’t have any suitable images that I can use, and places that allow me to easily purchase a licence for these images don’t really have anything that I’d make full use of here on EcchiDreams. So whilst this project has been put on hold for now; it’s something that can be done here. It’s also incredibly basic.

Profile Enhancements:
I still haven’t been able to find a way of doing this in a format that I am happy with, and anything I’ve been able to draw up doesn’t work under the limitations of the IPS Framework. 

Roll the Dice!:
Never worked as intended, the RNG system was utterly broken. Let me explain.

I did these tests using the same conditions for each. Ten tests of 1,000,000 (one million) rolls of a D20 dice over five days for a ten million rolls total. I was expecting an average of 10.5; I know I wasn’t going to get exactly 10.5 but I knew it had to be as close to 10.5 as possible. Both tests were done on the exact same computer, under a Linux Operating System.

• The EcchiDreams version rolled an average of 7.8999148 which is a massive deviation of -2.6000852 from the expected average of 10.50. It also took a very long while to simulate these rolls on an Intel Core i7 8700K processor. 
• The other project that I’m working on which rolled an average of 10.4999328 which is -0.0000672 deviation from the expected average of 10.50, under the exact same conditions. It took next to no time to simulate these rolls on an Intel Core i7 8700K Processor. 

So use that then, job done! Right?! 

Well, no. Our server is not set up to run C#. EcchiDreams uses PHP the other project will be in C#. I’ve shelved it for EcchiDreams and I will be implementing it on the other project that I am working on; that I will talk about at the end of this newsletter (See EcchiDreams in the Future).

So what new features are there?

We did however release some new features over the last two years, and let's talk a little about them shall we? 

Achievements System

The Achievements System was introduced last year in an IPS Update and it didn’t exactly launch without an incident. It also required everything to be re-indexed and rescanned so that the achievements could be retroactively applied which took days. But it’s been working away ever since and has really become part of the community. We’re looking at expanding it in future, with more things to get achievements over so be on the lookout for that. 

We have tried to implement this before back in 2015, they were called “Awards” and “Badges” but the system never worked properly, and was developed by a third-party developer who has since gone on to other projects and so it was never updated nor maintained and never worked properly for us after the Invision Update. This is a core IPS feature, meaning you’ve probably seen it on other forums running Invision Power Software. 

In the interests of being completely open and transparent about this system; here is the list of achievements as of this update:

•  Great Support: No set goal, yet (Manually Awarded)
•  Helpful: No set goal, yet (Manually Awarded)
•  Superstar: No set goal, yet (Manually Awarded)
•  Great Content: Given out to people who's content is so good that it ends up on the homepage (under Our Picks, Manually Awarded)
•  First Post: Made your first post on EcchiDreams
•  Conversation Starter: Made your first topic on EcchiDreams
•  Collaborator: Made ten posts on EcchiDreams
•  Reacting Well: You have received five reactions
•  Problem Solver: You have provided ten answers which were selected as the best
•  Well Followed: You have at least ten followers
•  Dedicated: You have signed in (or been on the forums) for seven consecutive days
•  Week One Done: You have been registered for at least a week
•  One Month Later: You have been registered for at least a month
•  One Year In: You have been registered for at least a year
•  Very Popular: You have received one hundred reactions
•  Posting Machine: You have posted five hundred replies to any given topic. 

A badge is "Rare" if less than 5% of the community has that badge. There is a level up mechanic with ranks as well, but at this time I'm not going to go into that other than you can't earn more than 50 points per day.  

I might consider adding more to this later down the line, as a possibility. I might not, but the option is there and this is an IPS core feature, so it'll be interesting to see if this matures over time into a bigger feature or if that's it and the rest is left up to us. There is some customisability to it, but not a lot, which is a shame. 

Live EcchiTexts

As mentioned here (Status)

Implemented on Desktop versions of the site by default, Live EcchiTexts replaces the EcchiChat System. If you've been around long enough to remember EcchiChat, a live instant messenger at the bottom right hand corner of the site then you'll be delighted to know that this will hopefully be replacing it going forward.

In 2020 we removed EcchiChat from the site because of how heavy it was on server resources, often causing problems for everyone because it'd stop people from using the site when the server inevitably shat itself. If you also remember we had record breaking numbers of people online everyday (250 at one point, if I remember correctly) so it was hardly surprising. Over a million messages were sent back and forth between people in a single month and I had two options - hide it off the page and let people go to a specific link for it, or fork out hundreds of dollars per month just to keep it running and upgrade the server to prevent it from shitting itself. It was a tough decision but considering the site was - and still is - completely non-profit, not even donations, it had to go. Earlier this year it was quietly retired completely, and I attempted to replace it with this back on the 28th May 2022. 

People were... How do I say it nicely? Less than amused by how buggy it was, and how it invades the navbar at the bottom of the site on mobiles. Which was totally fair feedback, and completely warranted. If you're one of them and you're reading this I can safely say you are not the only ones who complained, people did it on Discord, on the statuses here on EcchiDreams and even in my EcchiText inbox. The feedback was universal and loud and clear. "Give us the option to enable/disable it on mobile!"

Well. Now you have that option. Mobile users won't see it by default, unless you go to Account Settings > Live EcchiTexts and enable it there. Desktop users can choose to disable it there too, and it will remember these details for your account. The third party-developer and I have also fixed the bugs that plagued the original. And I am happy to say that it is now in a releasable format. Play around with it, if you don't want it, disable it. If you do want it, enable it. If you find any problems let me know and I will listen to feedback. 

EcchiChat was never perfect, it was never part of the system, as such if you blocked someone on it, it didn't block them from sending you EcchiTexts. Likewise, if you ignored someone on EcchiDreams, it didn't block them on EcchiChat. It looked out of place and didn't fit with the core features, theme or really - anything - with the site. This however; does. It's properly and tightly integrated. It also gives you a feature that you don't get in the EcchiTexts. Indications if your message was delivered, read or not read, and if it doesn't have a tick; then you were not the last sender of the message. 

The EcchiDreams App!

As mentioned here (Status) 

A number of you wanted EcchiDreams as an app, and on the 29th of September 2021 it became a thing! 

Well, sort of. Only under Windows, Android and maybe Linux. 

You may have been told by your browser already (Especially if you're on Google Chrome) that you can install EcchiDreams as an app. It's essentially still your web browser; but otherwise it's what it is. I believe the technical name for it is Progressive Web Application (PWA). 

Anyway, once installed as an app, you can go to your notification settings (Here: https://ecchidreams.com/notifications/options/) where at the bottom you will see "Push" (If your browser supports it) a setting to enable push notifications. This means notifications will be pushed to your device as and when you get them. 

This will not work on Apple devices because... Well, Apple. Take it up with them, as it's 100% their problem. I am told that this might change soon, but I’m not sure. I have an iPhone as a developer phone so I will be able to check, with some luck. 

The Future of EcchiDreams

I can’t really talk about the future of EcchiDreams; without first painting a picture of the current situation. Please bear with me here. 

EcchiDreams currently runs on a piece of software called Invision Power Suite (IPS) from the folks over at Invision. Despite my many complaints, the software is extremely good at doing what it does, and it’s a fairly modern looking suite that is quite feature rich and relatively very secure. However… In order to get the software to do what we want it to do, to do what we need it to do, we have to customise and modify it in ways it simply wasn’t designed for. In the past being able to modify things to add features and functionality to the site was fairly easy, and the needs of our dreamers were met as best as possible by using third-party modifications available through their marketplace that we’d sink shit loads of money into, and then take those modifications and often times customise them even further, again, often using these things for things that they were not designed for. 

Over the last few years it’s gotten harder and harder to do this, and the costs to make it happen are starting to get to the point where they’re spiralling radically out of control. For example: Someone wanted $250 (USD) an hour to modernise and make our Roleplayer Preferences better, surpassing the quality and functionality of quite a few of our competing sites, and there was no telling how many hours they’d need to sink into it. I get that these people have families to provide for -- and I don’t begrudge them that at all! But then to have the cheek to want to sell it to others on the market place where IPS take a percentage and they get the rest, instead of developing it exclusively for the person who paid for it, was a very bitter pill to swallow. I kindly rejected that offer, of course. In addition updates from IPS seem to - at least at one point, seem to absolutely break everything, and how long will it be until the developer can develop and update to that modification? If they even do it all. And how much will that cost me? 

If that didn’t look bad enough; there has been in the last few years an exodus of good third-party developers from IPS, a few of them who have done modifications that we use, that get taken over by other third party developers (if we’re lucky), or are completely abandoned. One third-party developer, who, bless him, took over a good chunk of modifications that another developer sold him already had like 80 or 90 different modifications of his own that he had been either making on his own, or took over from other people. Updates from this developer are understandably slow, and this slows down our update processes. Again, I’m not trying to bad mouth anyone here. I think this situation that we are all in, is not optimal, to say the least and we’re making do with it.

I love the IPS software, I really like a lot of the third-party developers and I am extremely appreciative of their hard work. The time they put into their apps, the speed that a few of them respond to bug issues, it’s downright first class. But I have other issues and concerns that for professionalism's sake, I won’t go into in this announcement. 

What a lot of people, I feel, tend to forget is that EcchiDreams is run on a shoestring budget. It’s free for everyone - we take no money from our users, we don’t even beg for donations and we don't plaster every little space with adverts. Premium Memberships are earnt with EcchiCredits. Money made through advertising immediately gets spent on advertising our site. On the most part I’m okay with this, but I have licensing fees, domain costs, server costs, and now on top of that, over 40 modifications that require renewal fees if I want updates for them. It’s becoming a problem.

Those issues aside, I now come to the meat and potatoes of the issue. What we want to use this software for isn’t what the software is designed to do. We are hitting limits in what we can modify more and more frequently. Bitch-basic features like an actual blocking system that has some goddamn teeth for example. If I sound frustrated at this, it’s because I am. I have been using this system for well over a decade now. I know how it works, to quite a considerable degree. I am comfortable with it, I don’t want to change it… But I’m being pushed into a situation where I have to.

Which is why on March 26th 2021, I softly announced that I was teamed up with a developer outside of the IPS Ecosystem to write a completely custom job that is built and developed by us so that we can cease our dependence on IPS and their third-party developers and become self-reliant. I stated: 

Quote

I'm not even ready to announce the complete custom job yet or what it will entail, as it's perhaps years away from completion and yet is only currently in a private first Alpha build stage, with a private second Alpha build stage coming soon. Needless to say, I have noticed that despite the customisations, we're starting to hit a limit of what's possible with this software, as far as our needs with the site goes. I'm getting tired of saying "We can't introduce (X) as a feature because of the limitations of the Invision Power Suite (Also IPS)" where X is a really cool idea. I am also getting sick and tired of the instability, bugs, and server resource overhead caused by a lot of the modifications, as well as having to scramble to find support when a TPD decides to leave the IPS platform. Which as of late has been quite a few high profile ones. We are paying for these modules and when the TPD decides up-and-quit we're out of pocket, with a feature that is already riddled with bugs, or will be broken at any given IPS update. There is no release date set for this yet, however. But it is being worked on with a second private Alpha release being as early as next month.

This was then followed up on April, 29th 2021 with: 

Quote

Well... Alpha 2 was somewhat released as scheduled and we are happy to take on people who want to play with things and find where it breaks. If you're interested in looking at being apart of a very early build of the future for EcchiDreams please send me an EcchiText, and I will surely consider you. 

So far we've pretty much started on a fair few features. Character profiles, member profiles, a few themes, roleplay dashboard and such, comments, notifications, reactions, and it is somewhat localised in about 44 different languages. There is a lot that is not currently implemented yet but should be coming in alpha 3, or other later releases.

The main branch of development is paused now until September/October or so, that is when we will start work on Alpha 3.

Some of our future ideas include:

• A more tighter integration of a user, and all of their characters, roleplay preferences, etc.
• Profile Privacy: If you don't like the thought of random people looking at your profile and want it to be friends or followers only, this will be doable. We have already started working on it. This means that there will be Friends AND Followers.
• Better block controls: unlike IPS, when you block someone it will remove their content for you from the actual activity feeds.
• Some EcchiDreams features such as profile cover positioning, avatar cropping and so on.
• More control over your roleplays: make user groups (Roles) for your roleplays and set what permissions each role has! Currently with IPS and their clubs feature, we are extremely limited and all permissions are universal. This is no good for us, and has been no good for quite a few of you.
• Random Dice Roller App
• Push notifications. Our website will act like an app. Hopefully.
• And a heck of a lot more.

As you might be able to guess, I am excited for it. And eventually it's going to be the software, we hope, that EcchiDreams will run on, or will become. (Too early to say at this time).

So if you're interested, drop me a message!

Thank you, take care, stay safe, and as always have a wonderful day!

Well, since October, my brother-in-law and I have been working hard in making the third Alpha release. I’m going to be very cautious about what will and won’t be possible, at this time because I don’t want to build a ridiculous amount of hype so I will say right now to keep expectations grounded. Most of this software is being coded by two people from the ground up. We’re usually extremely busy working away at it every weekend (our spare time).

Alpha 3 of this will see some significant changes. We’ve already implemented a basic messaging system for it, as well as implementing a lot of the Account Settings functionality. It also already supports 40 different languages (Although user content isn’t translated, obviously) which is far more than EcchiDreams supports right now… Although the translations used Google’s API - so it’s a work in progress. The site will be built for both mobile phones and computers, as well as everything in between. We know that there are a niché amount of people who use certain modern games consoles to access EcchiDreams; and I’m not sure if we’ll be able to support that, but we’ll try. (No promises).

We’ve worked on a number of core features already such as character profiles. Character’s can have their own profiles that will look like typical user profiles but be marked with “Character Profile” in their actual profiles. This is somewhat what we wanted to do here on EcchiDreams but it never worked properly. This will allow you to enter out information specific to that character.

All roleplays would be created through the specially crafted roleplay manager; including private roleplays that would traditionally be done over EcchiTexts here. The messenger system is not really going to be designed or built for this, it would be built and designed for discussing plots and what nots, and then taking it to a private roleplay in the manager where you can invite as many or as few people as you like. The Roleplay Management suite is a lot like the clubs featured here on EcchiDreams. You can essentially create your own universe and have different collections of stories in them and if you don’t want to put some time in hand-crafting your own roleplay section there will be an option to create a lite roleplay. The more fuller feature should in the end allow roleplay owners (Gamemasters) to make their own user groups and assign roles and permissions and then assign users to those roles. Basically a fully customisable permission set. With some sensible defaults, so if you’re happy with those defaults you won’t need to worry about it at all. 

We’re both working on image handling at the moment for avatars, profile banners, and so on. It’s being worked on in C# and of course our plans have only gotten bigger. 

As for if EcchiDreams will run on it or become it; at the moment it’s still too early to say, but it could go either way. But at the moment it’s looking very much like it’s happening. 

We do want a tighter integration of Roleplayer Preferences with the user’s profile, in that your preferences will be displayed on your profile for all (who have permissions) to see. Later down the line we hope to make this completely searchable, so you can find the roleplayer you want rather than have to search through each preference sheet one by one to figure out if that person is right for you or not.  

Progress is happening and again, if you’re a Gold Member or Platinum Member and you’re interested in being a part of a very early build of the future for EcchiDreams please send me an EcchiText, and I will surely consider you. 

I appreciate that it might not be as well polished as EcchiDreams is (It’s still in early Alpha) and it may not be after release. But over time we hope to continually polish it, refine it and update it.

Fixes

• Finally solved the resetting premium membership problem 
• Whichever bugs have been fixed in IPS updates (spoiler: lots)
• Theme Issues (CSS/JS not loading sometimes)
• Server Configuration related Issues (Such as EcchiDreams wasn't serving pages on the H2 protocol, and just defaulting to HTTP1.1)
• iPhone specific page rendering issues
• Misspellings in the Mood System
• Unable to change avatar from profile (UI overlapped the buttons)
• Various other minor bugs that would fill this list out excessively

Additional Bulletins:

• Problems with Microsoft Based Email and EcchiDreams
• EcchiDreams now requires signin with Email Address, instead of Username
• The death knell for the EcchiChat Bar (The old one)

Image Source: ハリケーン (Hurricane)

When I started writing this it was spring, and when it was posted, it was summer. This picture reminded me of both. The artist makes excellent use of colour, the water looks and feels like it should be cold, yet the surrounding areas look and feel warm, and it summed up the first sentence for me very nicely. The amazing use of light and shadow gives the picture a surprising amount of depth and you can almost feel that this is not just a ‘thing’ that they do, but a labour of love. They seem to specialise in background illustrations and say that they aim for a “background that conveys the actual atmosphere” and I’d say they do the job well done here. I personally think that they are underrated. Why not give them a follow on Pixiv?