AS Birthday: One Year and Going Strong!
Anime-Sharing is now one year old! That's right, one year ago we first went public and we have come a long way since then. From having less than a hundred visitors daily we grew to serving over a million people every month!
During that turbulent first year we had to deal with staff from other forums trying to bully us, coordinated attacks, spambots, people using automated posting scripts to spam, hardware defects, and many other things. Throughout all that time we stayed here for you and steadily adapted to improve your browsing experience (some milestones and changes can be seen here).
We have indeed come a long way from the old eXalpha-Anime blog to the community we are today. And our continued growth is testament to us being on the right path and the vast majority of people coming back for more!
We not only grew in visitors, but also in manpower. In the very beginning there were only four former eXalpha users planning a new home for them and others. They were quickly joined by corocoro, firev1, Zero2DS, and gdragonx, which are all still around to this day.
In addition, we learned a lot about each other - Check's scary collection of hentai and sex toys, Ignis' unparalleled rori love, Tessu's playboy lifestyle, gc being the forever shy guy, coro not speaking about private matters at all (killjoy!), fire's shota love, Zero taking everything female, and gd being a guro lover pretty much set the theme for the future development of AS.
It doesn't come as a surprise that Check tried to convince ayanochanmkII to call him "Onii-chan" (like she did with Tessu) or how he kept asking ONC about how to show his Japanese teacher his hentai and eroge collection. This was before he eloped, mind you, so he might've been out for some extra-curricular activities. 
This was way back in the olden days when it was still planned to reopen as a new blog - but gradually the focus shifted to becoming a forum instead. After a few months of planning all available forums were tested and vB was chosen. Mostly because XenForo was still in beta and IPB couldn't handle Unicode very well (vB also had some problems with this, but at least those were fixable). While we still don't think vB is really the best forum, all others have even larger shortcomings to our site's focus.
The fun didn't end once the forum was open - one of our first users (and now AST member), alexsdu, would go to every thread in the Hentai Games section and ask if it was translated into English (shortly thereafter we added language prefixes). More examples would be the fun to be had in the war between the first and second generation of ham (details are in the old LPWs), and the rush to get the Overdrive badge - a feat achieved by only few. Anyway, we're sure there's still a lot of fun to be had in the future and we'll continue to enjoy ourselves here with everyone. Unless we're all talking in IRC, of course.
But this is not only about us, but about you. Without the great users we met along our way we never would've made it this far and things would've gotten quite boring quick. So we'd like to take this moment to thank you for your continued patronage and hope you'll continue enjoying your stay here.
Anyway, no birthday would be complete without presents! Ours were not really all that great with errors which kept popping up for people in different geographic locations at different times and, even worse, severe server issues causing complete unavailability only a couple hours ago. Since those presents are sorta shabby, we decided to just treat us ourselves and get new servers soon. This should improve performance and eliminate all those pesky errors - until then we'll continue to optimize everything we can and hope you'll encounter as few issues as possible.
As most of you might have noticed, we had quite severe errors on the site that were just fixed a few hours ago. Members would randomly encounter database errors, Cloudflare errors, or complete downtime - are they not nice birthday presents? 
Regardless, we are sorry for the downtime. We have also received reports that users located at different geographical locations seemed to encounter different errors at different times. We are working and finding ways to prevent such cases from happening again. This ultimately led us to deciding to upgrade our servers soon.
But there are also presents for you: We are looking into improving the forum experience in various aspects, especially community-wise. If you have constructive ideas to bring us forward we'd love to hear them.
Since people love presents, we decided to hand out a few more: There'll be a raffle where members can win 3-months premium accounts for Fileserve, Uploadstation, or WUpload. And while AS was online from the 16th forward, it didn't go public until the 30th - and that's when we'll hold our raffle! ^^
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Let's enjoy this birthday together and hope for many returns! We will continue striving to be the best Japanese media-related community on the internet and hope you'll enjoy the ride with us. 
All the best wishes you the
Anime-Sharing Forum Staff
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