#seems its a private number now from a quick google search

[yesornopolls]

does the phone number 718-498-1043 mean anything to you?

[rwby-redux]

Deconstruction

Worldbuilding: Traditions

I’ll confess to some indecision this past week, as I hemmed and hawed over which topic to write next. It was a toss-up between superstitions, taboos, and traditions, but ultimately traditions won out. Now that we’re officially into November (let that horrifying fact sink in) and entering the retail hell known as the Holiday Season, I figured, eh, why not. It’s nothing if not relevant.

Traditions, as a quick Google search will tell you, are the cultural transmission or continuity of customs, beliefs, and social attitudes from generation to generation. It’s a fairly accurate description, although it misses the mark somewhat by narrowing the usage of “generation” to the context of linear familial succession.

A better definition, supplied by Max Florschutz, would be this one:

Something that can be passed along and reinforced inside a specific group, from generations as groups to the next. [1]

When we think of traditions, we tend to view them through the lens of familial communities belonging to the same culture. But traditions can exist outside of that sphere. Friends can share traditions. Employees working for the same company (or hell, a department within that company) can have traditions. Academic institutions can upkeep traditions by means of initiating freshmen, year after year.

There’s no limit in either the scale or demographic for who participates in them.

As for what constitutes a tradition, it can be just about anything, really.

Pastimes. Rites of passage. Food. Gender roles. Etiquette. Any aspect of life which is ingrained into a group, in such a way that it’s subconsciously complied with out of a sense of pre-established convention.

Take, for example, the Western custom of proposing to someone with a gemstone ring (usually a diamond), which is then donned on the fourth finger of the left hand. You can find some variation in this practice—like a person swapping out the diamond with a different precious stone, or using a plain metal band, or changing which finger sports the ring—but the original remains the default.

And it’s pervasive, too.

The presence or absence of a ring on someone’s hand is often the litmus test for determining a person’s relationship status. Never mind the existence of an entire industry that caters to financing diamond rings through thousand-dollar private loans. (In no small part thanks to De Beers, whose aggressive marketing and tagline “a diamond is forever” further reinforced the trend.)

Now, ask the average person why they might want a diamond engagement ring, and they probably won’t be able to articulate an exact reason. The association—and the expectation—take precedence over a person’s ability to accurately explain how ring-giving became the norm. If a practice is deeply-entrenched enough within a group’s collective modus operandi, then saying, It’s tradition, becomes an acceptable answer in lieu of a personal one.

That response highlights one of tradition’s unusual traits—its enduring nature, and its ability to thrive outside the context of its origins. Even if the history is lost or forgotten, traditions can be passed along regardless, kept alive out of nostalgia, familiarity, or expectation.

Similarly, it might not matter if a tradition is impractical to uphold, because its socially-meaningful importance supersedes any inconvenience.

Given the ubiquity of tradition, it might seem unnecessary on my part to stress why its inclusion matters in works of fiction. You’ve probably already gathered as much. But there’s a fantastic passage I want to cite that really hammers home the point, with what might be the epitomizing example:

Fiddler on the Roof is a quite-famous musical about tradition, to the point that the opening number of the film (or play, I guess) is all about that, explaining how tradition gives this small town its sense of balance. […] If you’ve not seen the film, I do recommend it. It’s kind of a classic, and the concept of what tradition is, means, and how to keep it alive (or not) as life changes is kind of a core theme running through it.

[The opening number] illustrates the depth to which tradition can permeate our daily lives, as well as why it might. For the town in Fiddler on the Roof, tradition is everything. […] My point is that though your life, as well as the lives of your characters, may be steeped in tradition, we don’t often think of it as being such. Such traditions just are. They’re there, and we participate in them without considering them because that’s what we do. […] Cutting that aspect out of our worldbuilding, then, will leave us with a world that feels sterile and unreal. Cold. Inhuman. [1]

Put another way: Tradition is toasting someone as they rise from their chair. It’s drinking pumpkin spice coffee every autumn. It’s huddling under the covers while your elderly grandfather sits by your bed and reads The Princess Bride.

On a fundamental level, tradition is part of what makes us, us. Good worldbuilding obeys similar conventions.

Which brings us to the all-important question: When it comes to tradition, is RWBY’s worldbuilding good?

And for once, a simple yes or no won’t cut it because maddeningly enough, RWBY does have traditions that are explicitly defined and adhered to.

Well. One tradition, to be exact.

Color-Naming (Or, A Ruby Rose by Any Other Name)

A little less than a week after the finale of Volume 1 aired, Monty took to Twitter and shared an interesting bit of lore:

The official guidelines for RWBY’s color-naming rule, as defined by its creator. | Source: Monty Oum’s Twitter account.

Now, the practice of giving characters etymologically-significant names isn’t anything new. I mean, it’s a trope with its own subset of tropes. It was a little peculiar, however, that all characters (with the “exception of Ozpin”) in RWBY must rigidly comply with this standard.

Of course, myself and plenty of others were intrigued and puzzled by the conventions he set. More specifically, why? It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that the show’s animation style was already leaning very heavily on color as a motif, with its generous use of bright, saturated hues.

Above: Early concept art of Forever Fall. Below: Early concept art of the Death Stalker’s lair in the Emerald Forest. | Source: RWBY Wiki contributors user:Sorairo and user:Orange Kiwi.

With just how much emphasis was placed on color from a design standpoint, it begged the question: were the etymologies purely meant to be meta, or did they factor into the actual worldbuilding?

A year later, we had our answer:

Ozpin: Today we stand together, united. Mistral. Atlas. Vacuo. Vale. The four Kingdoms of Remnant. On this day, nearly eighty years ago, the largest war in recorded history came to an end. It was a war of ignorance, of greed, and of oppression. A war that was about much more than where borders fell or who traded with whom, but about the very idea of individualism itself. We fought for countless reasons, one of which being the destruction of all forms of art and self-expression. And as you are well aware, that was something many could not stand for. As a result, those who opposed this tyranny began naming their children after one of the core aspects of art itself: color. It was their way to demonstrate that not only would they refuse to tolerate this oppression, but neither were the generations to come. And it was a trend that is held to this very day. [2]

This might come as a shock, but I actually really like this concept, and the in-story explanation that drove it. It’s a clever way of integrating the series’ design philosophy into the lore, without coming at the expense of either. Not only that, but it fully justifies Monty’s insistence on characters complying with his rules for naming.

Ruby is a shade of red. Blake is derived from Old English blæc, black. Weiss is an alternative spelling of German weiß, white. And Yang is the romanized version of Chinese 陽 (yáng), a word originally used in reference to an area bathed in sunlight (and by extension, the color yellow).

Simple enough. Let’s see, who else’s name can we dissect?

There’s Fox Alistair, a character with a dark complexion and burnt-orange hair. Foxes are reddish-orange, right?

Well, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is. But since his name never specifies what kind of fox, it’s worth pointing out that there are 11 different species, all of which come in varying shades of yellow, tan, gray, and (in the case of the Arctic fox) white. Never mind the fact that Fox is from Vacuo, a kingdom situated in the heart of an extremely arid desert, to which red foxes aren’t even native.

Well, what about Neptune Vasilias, named after the eponymous planet and the god of the sea? His namesakes are both associated with the color blue—Neptune’s methane atmosphere absorbs wavelengths in the red spectrum of visible light, giving the planet its distinctive appearance. As for the god of the sea, well—he’s the god of the sea. A body of water.

Math checks out, right? Sure it does—provided you ignore that neither the planet nor the god exist in RWBY’s universe.

Okay, fine. Surely that throwaway character from Volume 7 passes the test. He has green eyes, wears a green scarf, and his name is Forest.

Remind me again, what does Solitas look like?

Concept art of Solitas, as seen in V7.E5 - “Sparks.” | Source: RWBY Wiki contributor user:NVDelta.

Does this look like a forest to you? Why the ever-loving hell would parents who live on a tundra name their child after a biome that doesn’t exist on the continent? Besides, didn’t we just prove several paragraphs ago that forests in RWBY can exist in colors other than green?

I know it sounds nitpicky—and I’ll concede that to some extent, it is—but the more that this show continues to rely on convoluted extrapolation and inapplicable references, the more its credibility breaks down. It’s asking the audience to fill in the blank through association, and lessening the impact that this tradition could actually have on the worldbuilding.

Or, put another way: RWBY has a very specific formula.

Example A: This character’s name is [word], which is a shade of [color].

Example B: This character’s name is [historical figure who fought in a battle while wearing armor that bore a species of flower that comes in five potential colors], which is a shade of [color].

Again, is it nitpicky? Sure. But I personally think that the nomenclature loses something when you deviate from the in-lore premise (naming kids after an actual color), and instead give them names whose references have no basis in their world, and are only loosely associated with color (and even then, you have to sometimes squint to see the connection).

Aspects of art should be exactly that—aspects of art.

Incidentally, it doesn’t make sense that the naming tradition is limited to just color. Depending on the art medium, there are multiple stylistic elements at play. Texture, flavor, shape, pattern, sound, arrangement—any one of these could be important enough to merit inclusion in the naming tradition.

Don’t believe me? Look at the culinary arts.

Take away the bay leaves, salt, pepper, allspice, garlic, onion, and parsley from a chicken soup and all you’re left with is tepid bird-water. The spices are part of the recipe; they don’t just elevate it, they transform it.

Art is the spices that go into a dish, or the textiles that are woven into clothing. Art is the instruments harmonizing before a crowd, or the arrangement of words into a poem.

By definition, it’s anything involved in the creative expression of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.

The Mistral-Mantle ban would have outlawed everything it deemed part of humanity’s creative expression, including things like music, prose, and culinary practices. Therefore, it makes sense that people would have retaliated by immortalizing those things in the names of their children.

Give me a small town in Mistral whose community is sustained by traditional weaving, and whose members were named after the fabrics they made, like Chiffon or Satin.

Give me a restaurant owner in Mantle whose business was shut down because the food she prepared “violated aesthetic regulations,” and “was made with contraband spices.” Decades later, her grandson, Fennel, oversees the restaurant’s grand reopening.

Give me a generation of children named for the music composed by the defiant, lonely musician who stood upon the rubble of a destroyed town, and in the aftermath of battle, played his illegal songs.

Just like with the engagement ring, traditions can have variation. Might it not make sense, then, for color-naming to also be one of several possible variations? Not only would this diversity make RWBY’s naming tradition more realistic, but it would circumvent the problem Monty faced when “finding a way” to give color to a name whose etymology had none.

You know, come to think of it, there would actually be canon characters whose names would fit better under this change. Like Velvet being named for a fabric, or Sage being named for a spice.

On a semi-related note, it makes sense for people in Mistral and Mantle to have a color-naming tradition. After all, it began as a form of protest to artistic censorship. It doesn’t make sense for Vale and Vacuo, however, to share that tradition, because neither of those countries faced the same cultural dilemmas. If anything, restricting color-naming to Mistral and Atlas would be better for the worldbuilding, because it would give them a sense of identity that’s unique, grounded in their history, and exclusive to their cultures.

Lastly—and perhaps the most sensible reason as to why the tradition should be adjusted—is because in its current form, color-naming has the potential of being…well, kind of problematic.

Please take what I’m about to say with a massive grain of salt, because I am in no way, shape, or form an authority on ableism. But it always made me uncomfortable that Fox, who has congenital blindness—as in, he was born unable to see—was named after an aspect of art that he has no way of experiencing. Like, seriously? His parents didn’t think it might be, I don’t know, insensitive to call their blind kid something that invoked color? Why couldn’t they have named him after something he would be able to directly experience, like music? Maybe he could have been named after a style of dance that was popular in Kenyte. Or a musical instrument that was invented in Vacuo centuries ago, that had cultural significance to his tribe.

It might be something worth considering. Though if anyone reading this post knows otherwise, and I am in fact completely misinformed, please don’t hesitate to correct me.

This is admittedly far from everything I had to say on the topic, but it covers my main points. In an ideal, more nuanced version of RWBY, it would have been nice to see not just variation within the color-naming tradition, but the existence of other traditions that didn’t have anything to do with naming (because people are not a monoculture, and homogeneity is boring).

Variety is the spice of life, after all.

-

[1] Florschutz, Max. “Being a Better Writer: Traditions and Worldbuilding.” Online article. Unusual Things. December 14, 2020. [https://maxonwriting.com/2020/12/14/being-a-better-writer-traditions-and-worldbuilding/]

[2] Volume 2, Episode 8: “Field Trip.”

[do-a-reference-properly]

AO3′s users alert! Unauthorised fanworks copying

26/09/2019. Important update on this mess: we found a way to delete fanworks via take down request to the hosting provider. Please check it here https://do-a-reference-properly.tumblr.com/post/187926459079/finally-some-good-news

Dear AO3 users,

We would like to bring your attention to an ugly situation with unauthorized copying of works posted on AO3.

A lot of works from AO3 have been copied to fanfics.me (we’ll call this site FFM for brevity’s sake) and are still being copied right now, either:

— automatically by a code specifically created by FFM’s owner for this purpose, or

— by unaware or unscrupulous FFM’s users via semi-automatic method (by inserting a link to a work from AO3 into a web-worm on FFM).

All works from AO3 — with a few exceptions (I’ll elaborate on this below) — can end up on FFM without authors even noticing. Even fanarts or podfics.

FFM doesn't comply with DMCA which means that such reposts endanger fanworks' creators in case the copyright holder demands to delete the fanwork.

Authors of the copied works do not have any control over them; if the work is edited it won’t be updated on FFM until someone manually updates it.

Additionally FFM’s owner makes money out of reposted free fanworks from numerous Google and Yandex ads on each and every FFM’s page by having people go to this site when searching for fics on Google etc. So we recommend using an Ads Blocker when visiting this site in order to prevent the owner from earning more. Ghostery or Adblock Plus work just fine, but you can use any other Ads Blocker that is convenient to you.

Oftentimes FFM even shows up before the original post with the work on Google search results.

The owner’s e-mail: refery@fanfics.ru.

The owner at AO3.

We are trying to bring AO3’s users attention to this situation and help authors with taking their works down from FFM.

 Briefly about the website and its owner

Let me start from the very beginning as it will bring into the light the nature of FFM and give a good example of its owner characteristic behavior.

At first, some person with nickname Refery created FFM as a web archive where authors — mostly from Harry Potter fandom — could publish their fanworks.

Time passed, the site grew and added some features (blogs, pre-moderation and etc.), and all was good and well up till the moment when Refery decided that it would be a great idea to copy to FFM fanworks published on other Russian fanfiction archives — among them from the biggest and most known site ficbook — without asking authors for permission. Even those works that had “Ask me before posting the story somewhere else” mentioned in its text or summary were copied.

For some time nobody noticed, but when finally and inevitably this came out the authors were outraged. It took a lot of time to finally persuade Refery to at least not to copy fanworks bearing a special tag “Уточнять у автора” (Ask the author first).

But after some time Refery — without giving any notice — violated his own promise and resumed copying to FFM fanworks that had the agreed upon tag. The authors complained again, so very reluctantly and after many painful discussions this feature was reinstalled.

So FFM has been notoriously known, mostly amongst Russian fandom, for claims on re-posting fanworks without the consent of the authors.

We're mentioning this situation just to give you a detailed portrait of a person we are dealing with here.

Not only fanworks are copied to this website, but original works, too. Even those which were already published. There were all 7 of Harry Potter novels (both original text and translation), The Hobbit: There and Back Again (translation) and Vorkosigan Saga (translation) available for everybody to read and download. They were taken down only recently due to the attention this whole situation had drawn, but nothing ever goes away once it’s posted online and you can access the proof via Internet Wayback machine. We know for a fact there are other books on FFM and some actions have been taken in this regard, but still it takes time to find published books on this site.

Recently Refery decided that Russian archives are not enough for him and started copying all fanworks into FFM without any permission from the authors from numerous sites, like AO3, fanfiction.net, fictionpress.com, fanfiktion.de and likely other web-archives.

Moreover, the authors of these works can not delete their works from FFM and/or manage them. The site is in Russian only and, hence, we strongly believe that non-Russian speaking authors even do not know that their works are reposted somewhere else.

As a Russian fan-community, we have tried to stop such activity of FFM many times; however, we have not been successful in achieving our goal completely. Our most recent achievement is that the FFM’s owner implemented the "Don't copy to another site" tag created specifically for AO3 (here is the link to FFM’s owner post on his personal blog regarding this tag. Please use Ads Blocker!). This tag should be added to each work presented on AO3 in case the author does not want their works to be copied to FFM.

We are of the opinion that no work should be taken without permission in the first place, but this tag is all we’ve got.

Please note that it seems that some time ago there was similar case of unauthorized copying with other site. Please check this link, they give useful advice.

How to prevent copying from AO3

If you check AO3 you may notice that "Don't copy to another site" tag has hugely emerged in the recent weeks, but mostly amongst Russian users and there is a good reason for this: the owner of FFM announced this tag only in Russian and only on his private blog, so naturally there is no way for non-Russian speaking AO3 users to know about this — albeit non-satisfactory — solution.

There are no guaranties that the FFM’s owner won’t change the rules again as has already happened numerous times before (few examples we described above) and that works with this tag won’t be reposted in the future, but for now it’s the only quick and working solution besides making your works visible only to registered users, which is not ideal. 

This situation is highly unpleasant, but we ask you not to delete your works from AO3, because if the work is deleted from AO3 it will be nearly impossible to delete it from FFM: we won't be able to refresh it manually and remove the text.

Please note that adding this tag won’t work for texts that have already been copied. Only users who have accounts at FFM will be able to delete them. Each work needs to be deleted manually.

However, the Russian fandom — except for the owner of FFM — strongly condemns reposts without the consent of the author, so feel free to contact our volunteers (through DM or Ask on our tumblr page) providing the links to the works stolen from AO3, so we could delete them for you.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to cover all authors and works manually. So, we contacted AO3’ Technical Team with the aim to bring their attention to this situation and inform about it all AO3 users, and hope that AO3 team will find a general solution to resolve this problem, possibly, in collaboration with the AO3 lawyers.

We are trying to warn as many authors as possible and recently started spreading this information via comments on AO3; but considering the number of works copied to FFM informing all authors will take considerable time, and we can easily miss someone, especially since the copying is still in progress and new works from AO3 are appearing on FFM every day.

Please help us spread the word!

 We tried to make a comprehensive FAQ about this. Feel free to ask if anything is unclear!

FAQ

Q: Can I check if my work was copied to FFM?

A: Yes, you can.

FFM makes money on Google and Yandex ads, so we recommend turning on the Ads Blocker of your choice before visiting this site.

Please follow this link, insert the title of your work or your AO3/other web-archive nickname into the field containing the words "insert-title-nickname" and hit "Искать" (Search).

For works rated Mature or Explicit you will be able to see only the caption "Текст произведения доступен только зарегистрированным пользователям старше 18 лет" ("The text of the work is available only to registered users over 18 years old"), but FFM users are able to read and download the story.

Q: My work from AO3 was copied. How can I take it down?

A: First of all add the tag "Don't copy to another site" (without “ “) to the stories you want to be taken down.

Actually we would recommend adding this tag to all the works you don't want to be copied.

Contact one of our volunteers (through DM or Ask on our tumblr page) providing links to your works or send an e-mail with your deletion request directly to the FFM owner at refery@fanfics.ru or at AO3. 

There is a third option: to register on FFM and delete the work yourself by hitting the refresh button, but considering that the site is in Russian we do not think it will be very convenient to those who do not speak Russian language.

Q: I got the message that my work has been deleted. How can I check if it is true?

A: You can go to FFM, search for you work, click on its title and scroll down.

After the summary there is a field that should look like this for those fics that have been deleted.

Basically it says that the author of this particular work has forbidden its copying and that only the information on its title, author’s nickname, rating, pairings, summary and the link to original post on AO3 are available. 

For works that are still available on FFM this field looks like this (if the work is open for non-registered users).

Q: My work copied from AO3 was deleted, but FFM still shows some information on it. Can it be deleted?

A: Even though the text of the fic is not going to be on FFM anymore after it has been deleted, the fic's title, author's name, rating, pairings, summary and link to original post on AO3 will remain there.

The deletion of this leftover information can be done only by the site owner himself.

Some Russian authors tried to make him to delete it, but in most cases the FFM’s owner refused them mentioning that publication of such information is in line with fair use concept and doesn’t violate authors’ rights.

We are yet unsure how to delete this leftover information. In case you need it as well, try contacting the FFM owner at refery@fanfics.ru or at AO3. Maybe e-mails of a large number of authors will work, but unfortunately we can’t guarantee anything. In case you need it, we can provide Russian text for you to send by e-mail (please contact our volunteers through DM or Ask on our tumblr page).

Q: My work from fanfiction.net/fictionpress.com/fanfiktion.de/other web-archives was copied to FFM. How can I take it down?

A: Unfortunately, there is no possible way for us to delete from FFM the fanworks that are copied from web-archives other then AO3. Only FFM’s owner can delete these works, please try contacting him at refery@fanfics.ru or at AO3. In case you need it, we can provide Russian text for you to send by e-mail (please contact our volunteers through DM or Ask on our tumblr page).

Please do not delete your works from the web-archive it was stolen from, because if the work is deleted it will be nearly impossible to delete it from FFM.

Also it seems that some time ago there was similar case of unauthorized copying with other site. Please check this link, they give useful advice.

[hostingcareer]

WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT BLUEHOST COMPANY!!!.

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WordPress is the most widely used website platform on the market.Of course, you can use almost any web hosting provider to create a WordPress site. But the fact that Bluehost is one of the few officially recognized partners is encouraging.

7. Easy to Use for Beginners

Some of the web hosts we’ve seen are best only for advanced users.LiquidWeb, for example, is great if you know what you’re doing. But they lack a user-friendly interface for non-technical people. So if you’re a beginner, you’d have a tough time getting a site live.The layout of Bluehost’s control panel (cPanel) makes it easy to use. You just need to point and click in most cases.It also has features for advanced users, but beginners too can easily install and start-up WordPress.Or, they can use the Bluehost website builder tools(such as Weebly or Drupal) to start with a template that you can customize by just dragging-and-dropping features.

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Getting the best deal on web hosting usually means prepaying for a few months, a year or several years at a time.Bluehost is no different — more on that below. But they do offer a 30-day money-back guarantee on their plans.You can try out the service to gauge their performance for yourself, and then still ask for a refund if you’re not completely satisfied. We have a few words of caution, though.According to their terms, here’s what does and doesn’t fall under that guarantee:You can only get refunds on the web hosting cost, not any other products like domains or other add-ons.A $15.99 fee will be deducted if you received a free domain name in your plan.Any requests after 30 days will not be refunded.It’s not exactly a no-questions-asked policy like we’ve seen from some hosts. So make sure you’re OK with those points before signing up.

9. Customer Support

Bluehost offers everything from a knowledge base, to live chat, email ticket support, and even phone support. We tried out the live chat and Vinutha from Bluehost connected within two minutes.

Cons of Using Bluehost Hosting

Site Migrations Are Not FreeBluehost Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick FactsBluehost’s Basic plan will cost you $3.95/mo (or $2.75 with our discount).Free domain? Yes for 1st year, then renews at $15.99.Ease of Sign-up: Easy two-page sign-up process.Payment Methods: Major credit cards and PayPal.Hidden Fees and Clauses: No refund on any domain names. Renewal rates for both domains and hosting increase.

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[love-it-or-its-free]

@dyke-diva

[edited to update pastebin and make links clickable.]

First, just some more context about me: I am a 33 yr old lesbian, butch (in a nerd way) and quite androgynous/GNC.

Until a year or two ago, I was an ardent supporter of trans activism, as it went part and parcel with being a member of the LGBT "Community".

Literally, asking this same question to myself was a turning point for me. I knew I was supposed to hate and denounce anything TERF-related.... but one day I realized, I didn't know exactly what TERFs had supposedly done, that would warrant such seething hatred against them.

Like I said, I comprehend hating Nazis, because I have seen evidence of the unforgivable brutality of the Nazi regime and its supporters. I've taken history classes, read books and original sources, and watched documentaries about it.

Basically, I have seen enough evidence to understand the scope of Nazi evil, so it makes sense to me why some people go around saying "punch nazis." Personally, I'm not the type to punch anybody... and I question whether punching actually fixes the underlying evil... but based on what I know, I totally understand why nazis are so hated.

But why are terfs so viscerally hated that they are directly compared with a mass-genocidal regime? I want to know the truth. If the evidence is out there, I want to see it, to keep my views updated and accurate.

Now on to your response.

I do not believe that you should debate hate groups. I think that doing so will only help spread their hate and

I don't really believe in debating hate groups, either. But I also believe that having a closed mind is a victory for authoritarians of all stripes. I have no problem engaging with people who disagree with me, because I generally believe in having "strong opinions, weakly held" -- I am firm in my beliefs, but my mind is open to evaluating new evidence. If I deem the new evidence convincing enough, I may change my mind or update my views. I value intellectual rigor, so I want to keep my views accurate and up-to-date.

I am severely distressed about the number of terfs in wlw spaces and think that something should be done about it, it has gotten to the point where if it is not stated directly that they do not support transmisogyny that I will often feel paranoid about being in the space.

Honestly, I would love if you could PM me about these "wlw spaces" that are supposedly crawling with terfs. I feel like I'm reading this from a bizarro mirror dimension, thinking... WHAT wlw spaces? Is there really anything like this, outside of a handful of unpopular tumblr tags and a couple of small subreddits?

The only spaces I know of, especially IRL, are bending over backwards to be so "q***r friendly" that actual lesbians are being pushed out. One local activist in my city, started a public speech by claiming, "terfs are lesbians who..." and went on to drag lesbians for not being inclusive enough. Why only lesbians, I wondered??

Singling out and pressuring lesbians that way is not okay, in my opinion. Lesbians deserve to have spaces for lesbian (natal) women only. Lesbians are allowed to be repulsed by penises. None of that is hateful! Lesbians should not be pressured to sleep with anyone they aren't interested in. Unfortunately, I see that happening a lot these days. The "wlw spaces" I know of, offline and online, increasingly pressure lesbians in this way. Not cool.

Now, I can handle those pressures... but I'm really worried about younger lesbians. Being a lesbian is hard enough as it is! We have a right to exist, and to express our sexuality without added pressures.

and finally reason three, trans people who are afab have been seen to dismiss terfs actions and beliefs purely because terfs do not actively threaten their existence like they do amab trans people.

I'm not sure if I follow this part... it seems like you're saying that some FTMs ("trans people who are afab") do not feel threatened by so-called terfs, because the perception is that terfs are more threatening to "amab trans people"? Sorry if I misunderstood, but I would be interested to learn more about this phenomenon either way.

The person who sent this ask had lots of “Terf Safe” tagged posts on their blog and in their likes (though it seems their likes are now private), so I had blocked them, on the post that I made on my @la-joueuse-ultime blog that I quoted above they had asked why Terfs and Nazi’s are being compared, saying “I know about the reasons Nazis are bad, we can study history to see that evidence. But where is the evidence that terfs are comparably bad?” I had responded “@love-it-or-its-free it’s not that their comparably as bad, it’s that they’re bad. They are a hate group that has killed trans people and because of that they shouldn’t get a voice to spread their hate.” I then told them I planned to block them, I had done so and then they sent this ask.

Well, just to be clear, you were the first to interact with my post. It appears that you went looking in terf-friendly tags, found my post, and decided to interact with it. I'm happy to clarify the details of this, but I think your wording makes it sound like I sought you out, when it was actually the other way around. I posted mild terf-friendly content, you directly compared terfs to nazis. I think that's extreme.

I guess it's a good thing I hid my likes, too, because it sounds like you were ready to trawl for "punishable" content. I mean... who among us has not accidentally tapped the heart while on mobile or something? I hope you aren't really intending to police liked content like that.

Now to the actual ask, I believe the reason you can’t find Terfs that have killed trans people is that, well, you’re literally not looking,

I am quick to google anything that pops into my head, so rest assured, I would not pose this question to a tumblr rando unless I had actually attempted to answer it for myself. I'm asking to try and gather more info/evidence on top of what I have seen already.

or you think that they needed to have direct (by direct I mean they physically took part in) killing the trans person. You don’t need to be holding a knife to take part in someone’s death, you can encourage violence against the minority, you can bully and harass them until they take their own life, or you can fight against medical procedures that some of these people need to live. Terfs have done all of these.

Right... but I specifically asked how you can directly compare terfs to nazis. I agree that bullying, etc. is wrong. But I am asking for the evidence you used to make the direct comparison. You are shifting the goal posts here. I'm okay with that shift if you are... because I'm happy to provide evidence of trans activists doing things like sending death threats to terfs (or any woman who is deemed to have "terfy" views) which seems directly comparable to what you are claiming here.

It took a second search to find Terfs encouraging violence against trans women.

I found similarly scant search results... but like I said, I'm willing to evaluate new evidence when I see it.

This post on Reddit (I recommend being careful, tw for violence) is of a screenshot of a Terf stating that “It is a shame that people cannot do this in America” the post contained a picture of a man seemingly attacking a trans-woman for using the bathroom where she was most comfortable to do so. The posts were made on Spinster, a “woman-centric” social media platform that was made by M.K. Fain, a known terf.

So... I'm honestly surprised you would link to that particular subreddit as evidence of anything. But I'll charitably ignore the source for now. What I see, as far as content, is a screenshot of an anon comment on a website. You claim that the comment must be from a terf. Why? 1) screenshots can be photoshopped. 2) Anyone can sign up for an account on sites like that.

Sorry, but this isn't convincing evidence to me. Even if it's real, it's not a death threat, it's not an incitement to violence. It could be "real" in the sense that some troll signed up to the Spinster site just to troll "as a terf". It's just a shitty anon comment. Of course I object to the sentiment behind it (see anti-violence disclaimer to follow)... but I don't believe it stands up as evidence to support your claims.

(aside: I don't want to make this post any longer than it is, but I noticed some not-very-nice comments from that link and collected them in a pastebin here )

Finally, I researched the actual murder case in question. All eight people arrested in connection with the homicide are men... not terfs.

(I'll include this disclaimer here, though I'm bummed out that I feel the need to be pre-emptive/defensive about it:

I am anti-violence. I condemn violence of all kinds. (See above: I'm a softy, not the punching type) I especially condemn murder and homicide, and I do not endorse eye-for-an-eye justice. I want less pain and hatred in the world, for everybody, even folks who disagree with me.

I believe "the Golden Rule" is called Golden for a reason... it's Key! end disclaimer.)

Not only that but I found many articles directly denying violence against trans people, that I won’t link because they were made by terfs for terfs and I do not want to give them a platform. By denying the violence trans people face you are encouraging it, telling the people who enact the violence that they won’t be punished for it.

Yes, "denying violence" sounds like a bad or at least ignorant thing to do. But how is it remotely equivalent to committing violent acts? Unfortunately, if I can't see the evidence, I can neither refute nor accept it.

Trans people have a shockingly high suicide rate, there is no denying it. This article talks about a Terf that targeted a suicidal trans woman to harass, as well as provides a link to an article about Cathy Brennan, one of many who try to directly prevent trans people from seeking medical help.

I read this, but I couldn't figure out the series of events it's describing. I looked around on my own, and found that it seems to be a response to an ongoing feud between Dana Taylor (author of the piece) and at least one other person. For instance, I found multiple blog posts from the "other side" which described Dana Taylor's participation in harrassment and doxxing campagins. Here's one person on twitter, describing their experience with being targeted:

I just googled myself and found this from 5 years ago which said I was going to be watched. I don't think they watched me.

source thread

That's just one example I found. There were many similar tweets and comments about doxxing involving the author of the link you gave. So I'm open to reading more about these incidents, if you have more links. If something bad happened, I would like to understand better. But right now, this at best looks like just one side of a multi-sided internet slapfight.

If you just listened to trans people you would hear story after story of them being attacked by terfs if you just paid more attention you would see them encouraging violence against trans people, and if you just cared a tiny bit more, you’d realize that trans people are human too.

I am listening, or at least I'm trying to listen by asking good-faith questions while trying not to be attacked for it. Are you doing the same, keeping an ear out for stories of terfs being attacked, and listening to their stories?

How would it make you feel if I said, "if you just cared a tiny bit more, you'd realize that terfs are human too." ?

Anyway, that’s the post thank you for being patient.

Same here. I want you to know that I truly appreciate your thorough reply and the time you spent on it.

[roswellroamer]

Day 1 (&1/2) January 28-30, 2020. Atlanta to Christchurch, NZ. 10,646 miles.

This new year (and the new decade) starts a motorcycle journey for me which involved planning a trip to circumnavigate the entirety of New Zealand's South Island. Made more popular with tourists over the last decades through the spectacular cinematography brought to us by native Kiwi Peter Jackson and his Lord of the Rings and also the Hobbit trilogies which were largely filmed on location here. The majestic scenery I witnessed through these films certainly helped plant a seed that this land was one I would try to explore if possible and so a year ago, around the time of my South African adventure 👇👇👇, I began planning a ride focusing on the lesser populated and visually stunning South Island.

https://www.google.com/search?q=south%20island%20new%20zealand

One interesting fact that stuck in my head since I was a youth was that New Zealand has more sheep than people. Back then it turns out the ratio was something like 20:1. In the decades since the ratio has decreased but still remains an impressive seven sheep for every person in New Zealand! 🐑 🐑 One of my Aussie mates indicated that they were interested to do a similar ride around the Island and earlier in 2019 I was planning on joining their crew. However it turned out that they were planning a shorter journey for less than two weeks so I proceeded to contact a rental agency regarding a bike and to chart a route. The bike rental agency was very helpful in making suggestions regarding a route and even some lodging. Around August of last year I had gained the interest of a fellow Ducatisti and recently retired pilot Ted and by September we were actively booking lodging and securing flight reservation for a the two of us to make our way to the other side of the world and explore for ourselves on two wheels.

My Aussie buds also made me aware of the Southern Hemisphere's largest bike rally, the Burt Monro Challenge Rally. Yes, he's the guy portrayed by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the 2005 film "The World's Fastest Indian". It is slated to occur in Invercargill next week 2/6-2/10. I will plan on meeting my friend Andy there with his crew and enjoy the events which will serve as a few days interlude amidst our ride. This journey began with a Marta (transit train) ride to ATL then three flights totaling about 30 hours through LAX and then BNE (Brisbane, AUS) before jumping back over to Christchurch, the only city to speak of on the South Island. The flights were all at least :30 early to their destination which erased any slight concern with regards to making connections for us and/or checked luggage. There was one surprise that was significant and nearly derailed me en route. Upon check-in in ATL at the international desk I presented my bag and ID and let it be known I was checking in to the first leg of the journey to Christchurch. I was then asked where is Christchurch? She then checked my bags through to CHC but only gave me the first of theee boarding passes. I figured that was due to the latter legs being on Virgin Australia, no problem. After landing in LA and wandering around the very nicely appointed international terminal B for a while I moseyed over to the gate to get my boarding passes about a half hour before boarding. The gate agent said, I was calling your name over the PA system, however I was further down the terminal and hadn't heard any of that. So, it turns out that I booked the flight by early September and I had checked to see if a visa was required to visit NZ. At that time it was not needed. Well, as of October 1, 2019 they instituted a visa requirement and I was unaware. Now I had about twenty minutes to board the flight to BNE and the agent said they were not able to issue a boarding pass if I didn't have a NZ visa. Ugh! She said a website was available to secure a visa online but that it could take ten minutes, or up to theee days to receive it... I was sweating at this point and I head to the chairs to get busy. They have an app, which she recommended I use. I failed in successive attempts to scan the passport info as it kept saying "try to avoid reflection" and I was unable to proceed despite relocating to various lighting options in the terminal area. Tick tock... I then just went to their website directly and manually entered in the passport data. Paid my $47 fee and prayed a bit. Within three minutes I had received confirmation emails of receipt and then thankfully the email with my visa number and confirmation! Luckily, just in time to board and the rest of the trip went without a hitch. With the recent spate of coronavirus, lots of airport workers and many Asian travelers were wearing masks. It seems this newly discovered virus is spreading rapidly and was making its impact felt on concerned travelers.

On the route into CHC, we came over the NW coast of the South Island, then cruises while descending over the central mountains which largely run the length of the spine of the island which displayed glaciers, good looking peaks and rivers visible between the puffy whites. On the east side of the mountains the green we saw were irrigation circles as the mountains wring our most of the moisture blowing eastward. A lot of private horse racing tracks we well and then just before the airport a good sized racing facility off to our left which via Google map's reckoning looks to be Mike Pero Motorsport Park Ruapuna. Passport control was all automated (we could learn a thing or two here) and then a quick scan of the bags to make sure no food or other contraband was within. NZ is appropriately protective of their island from invasive species and are very thorough to ensure these don't make it through customs. I then got some NZ dollars (currently worth about $0.66 each) and hopped a cab for Merivale, where I had reserved a three bedroom apartment for the next couple nights. Three floors, our own laundry (already used!) and a nice set up for a protracted stay in this city. Having had a row or three seats to myself from LA to Brisbane I actually got some sleep and after checking in we headed off to explore the city. We had celebratory arrival beer at the Carlton, just down the road and then walked about four miles through a picture perfect afternoon and evening. Taking in the scope of the botanical gardens with various flower gardens (rose, hydrangea, bulbs/flowers) a impressive array of monstrous and varied trees, all surrounded by the idyllic crystal clear Avon river (more like a large stream), massive fields where I got a few tosses of the frisbee in with an ultimate team warming up for a match, tennis courts, swimming pool, and lots of folks running on a perfect 72° summer day. The botanical gardens sit amidst this very large Hagley Park sort of like a Central Park for CHC. 9 years ago 185 people were killed here in an earthquake that caused widespread damage to many of the historic building in the central business district. Some are still held up by trusses awaiting reconstruction. Some are still sitting condemned. But they have poured a lot of money into restoring this area and it seems vital and there were lots of events and people on a Thursday night. There was a busking festival, various art shows, we also passed a production of Treasure Island just beginning on a Hagley Park stage. This is peak season down here due to the summer temps and drier weather. Now we explore a bit more and get our bikes following a sound sleep. Off we go! 🏍

[recentanimenews]

The Most Popular Anime in 2020…According to Wikipedia

  How can you tell what anime is actually popular? Your Twitter feed is a bubble, curated by people you’ve chosen to show up. Most anime fans don’t use a service like MyAnimeList or AniChart to broadcast what they’re watching, nor are those who do necessarily representative of the broader community. Crunchyroll may be the largest anime service for most of the world, but its own “Popular” ranking doesn’t capture any viewership from anime licensed or watched elsewhere. 

  However, our curiosity is more honest — and, potentially, more representative. You can fake interest on a survey or a Discord channel, but if you’ve landed on a Wikipedia page, there must be a certain sincerity to your action. Like a Google search for symptoms or snooping on an ex’s Facebook, when people query Wikipedia, they’re doing it in a semi-private sphere. Today, we’ll be using that candor to count down the most popular anime of 2020 so far…based on page views on the English version of Wikipedia, the web’s 11th most popular website.

  Using Wikipedia’s internal tools, your reliable author examined and compared viewership between all 9,848 pages within the website’s “Anime” category, year-to-date as of February 19th. Below, you’ll find the top 10 most-read pages related to anime on Wikipedia by this standard, regardless of how sensical the results may have been. Let’s jump in!

  Yusuke Murata (One-Punch Man, Eyeshield 21) Illustrated the cover for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse's Japanese Home Video Release

  10. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

  The 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a sensation, and was inspired by anime as well as coming full-circle to serve as an inspiration to creators in the medium as well. Yoshiyuki Tomino called Spider-Verse “a really weird anime” during a 2019 lecture, but just because the creator of Gundam says so, is this really an anime? A quick “CTRL + F” of the Spider-Verse page indicates that the film was grouped within the category on Wikipedia due to it being included as one of 199 entries listed as an "Anime-influenced Western animation”. So Spider-Verse isn’t really an anime, but since Wikipedia classifies it as such (and so would many of your favorite creators), we're not going to editorialize this list. Its inclusion speaks to the growing bridge between animators in Japan and overseas, as well as the high level of excitement for the film and anticipation of its sequel planned for 2022, and I for one am thankful this is the one true non-anime page that made the top 10, particularly compared to other contenders like 4chan (Rank 18).

    Promotional art for Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot

  9. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot

Our next entry is much more closely aligned with anime, but rather than being an anime series or film itself, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is a new video game based on the Dragon Ball manga franchise for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC released just last month. Of the 262 pages directly associated with Dragon Ball on Wikipedia, it makes sense that fans in 2020 would flock to this more than the rest, since Kakarot is the only new adventure of Goku and friends released this year. The parent page of the franchise “Dragon Ball”  is the next most-read page on the list at rank 22, with approximately 4,150 readers every day. Dragon Ball Z and the most recent TV anime, Dragon Ball Super, follow shortly behind.

  What’s most impressive to me about Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot’s spot on this list of Wikipedia’s most popular anime-related pages is not how high it is, but rather, how low in the ranking it’s found. Kakarot was the best-selling video game in the United States for the month of January, and the US makes up more of the English-language traffic for Wikipedia than any other country. Yet, the Kakarot game only gets half the traffic on the platform as the most recent Call of Duty game, which is several months past its peak Wikipedia interest and isn’t moving as many copies in stores. This disparity speaks to the varied reasons one would go to Wikipedia to learn more about a game, but it also may represent the relative staying power of Goku’s latest console outing. 

  Momoka, the mascot of FAKKU (NSFW), the largest English-language platform for hentai 

  8. Hentai (Warning: This link includes NSFW content)

  Hentai, which Wikipedia encourages us not to be confuse with Hentaigana, is defined by the platform as “anime and manga pornography” - at least when the term is used outside of Japan. While not all fans of anime are also compelled by anime pornography, certainly, judging by Wikipedia traffic and Google search data, many are. That said, with a Google search, one would expect most of the queries would be made with the intent to consume hentai content. On the Wikipedia platform, that may not be the case - whether it’s a confused parent or friend, investigating an encyclopedic page for hentai may feel like the safer way to understand the topic. 

  Hentai Page Monthly Traffic on Wikipedia

  Interestingly, 2019 was the weakest year on record for the Hentai page of Wikipedia - had it continued at its rate from last year, the topic would barely miss a top 15 list of anime pages. But in 2020, there seems to be a resurgence, though with no particular inflection point your author could discover, no major article about the topic that would inspire further curiosity from those not “in the know”. It’s worth noting that popular hentai related terms did not show similar dips in 2019 on Wikipedia, and the largest English-language hentai distributor, Fakku, saw its best year on the platform to date. 

  A comparison of international search traffic for the topics “Anime” and “Hentai” via Google Trends 

  However, in investigating this strange downturn, I re-discovered something else that I’ve always considered a novelty of data. “Anime” and “Hentai”, as topics, are incredibly strongly correlated on Google search. When one goes up on search, the other follows - and likewise for downturns in traffic. There’s a meaningful exception at the end of 2015, when hentai and its related terms saw a huge drop-off, but that may be more related to Google’s update to the Trends data collection method. That said, it’s hard to argue that anime has outpaced hentai these last five years, and that hentai’s downturn can be found both on Wikipedia and Google. While I don’t believe there’s any less interest in the subject than before, as anime becomes more accessible to broader audiences, and more people are on the internet in general, I would imagine a slightly smaller proportion of those who love anime are also interested in the style applied to pornography now as compared to 10 years ago…but that’s a topic for another day. 

  Giorno Giovanna and his stand, Golden Wind from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

  7. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure

  Finally, taking the number seven slot on our list is the first actual anime series, and it’s a good one: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. My instinct would be to assume that the meme of “watch jojos” has led many a curious Wikipedia users to this page. While technically this page is the parent page for the manga (and the franchise at large) and not any particular part, the growth in the franchise over the last few years has exploded overseas. 

  Starting with the anime adaptation of Part 4, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has transcended from one of the most meme’d anime to one of the most watched. From this author’s perspective, Part 4 represented a critical mass in the English-speaking JoJo’s fandom, where it became just the right size that the unengaged finally relented to watch this crazy anime that had been recommended to them with the intensity of a road roller for years before. Part 5 only ramped up this effect, a much more accessible story for those unfamiliar with the years of mythos that led up to Giorno Giovanna’s adventure in Italy.

  There’s no particular cause for JoJo’s high readership on Wikipedia so far this year — no announcement of a Part 6 (sadly), no major shakeups in the manga, no more memes than usual — JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has simply become an unstoppable force in the world of anime, and that’s a good thing by my judgement. The best thing I could ask for, even. Please, watch JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure on Crunchyroll.

      Studio Ghibli's My Neighbor Totoro

  6. Studio Ghibli

  After our first actual anime series of the list, we return to another more meta-relevant anime page with Studio Ghibli, undoubtedly the most famous production house in the industry. Started by Hayao Miyazaki and the late Isao Takahata and famous for films like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, Ghibli has won at the Oscars, won our hearts, and given Miyazaki endless excuses to never actually retire. 

  In January, the Studio Ghibli page reached a 4-year high for monthly Wikipedia pageviews due to the announcement that the 21 films previously announced as part of HBO Max’s service at launch in May would also be included on Netflix outside of the United States, Canada, and Japan. According to Comparitech data on subscribers from December 2019, that would mean that even with their top country out of the running, approximately 55% of the service’s subscribers would have access to these beloved films.

  The top-performing Ghibli works when it comes to Wikipedia traffic are Spirited Away (rank #18), My Neighbor Totoro (#29), Grave of the Fireflies (#67). Not surprisingly, these are also 3 of the top 5 most-watched films from the studio according to imDB, with Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Moving Castle ahead of Grave of the Fireflies in the list. 

    Various Characters from Interspecies Reviewers 

  5. Interspecies Reviewers

  Interspecies Reviewers is an anime about a human named Stunk and his friends as they explore the world of prostitution via a series of brothels run by succubi of various fantasy races and species. The series, from its premise, sounds like it has more than enough potential to cross some lines in regards to what is allowed on television…and according to multiple Japanese TV stations and streaming services, that’s exactly what happened. 

  On January 31st, Funimation was the first licensee to stop broadcasting Reviewers, stating, “After careful consideration, we determined that this series falls outside of our standards.” Amazon, Wakanim, Tokyo MX, and SUN soon followed suite.

  The reaction within the anime community was…vibrant. The news spread quickly— there’s not much better way to draw awarenesses to something than to tell people that they can’t have it. While some fans made the anime a rallying cry for various causes, the interest faded quickly after the engagement on various YouTube videos started to flag. In fact, it’s worth noting that Interspecies Reviewers is not particularly popular on any major pirate site that lists viewership, falling far outside the season’s top 10 on each of the sites sampled by this author. Had this article been written about January traffic alone, Interspecies Reviewers would’ve topped the list, but at the rate Wikipedians are trafficking the page now, it won’t stay in the top 10 for much longer.

  Makoto Shinkai's Weathering with You 

  4. Weathering with You

  Next on our list is the film Weathering with You. Makoto Shinkai’s visually stunning follow-up to your name. came in #2 last year at the Japanese box office and has since surpassed Aladdin to become the country’s top earner of a film released in 2019. Being able to wrestle anime theatrical dominance from Detective Conan in its native country isn’t enough to get this film onto the top 5 of an English-language Wikipedia-based anime list, though: Weathering with You has been opening in theaters around the world, with its impressive US release on January 15th. 

  With $7,710,749 in US box office as of writing, Weathering with You is one of the top-earning anime films in the country in history at #11 not adjusting for inflation, just behind Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’ and Digimon: The Movie. Going by the average movie ticket price in North America as reported by The Hollywood Reporter, that means about 846,000 people have gone to see the film in the United States - nearly twice the amount of people who looked it up on Wikipedia.

  Thanks to an excellent marketing campaign from the people at G-KIDS and a 90% “Certified Fresh” rating from Rotten Tomatoes, the hype for Weathering with You was real enough for its Wikipedia page to interest more folks browsing Wikipedia than even a controversy surrounding a fantasy race prostitution rating anime.

    Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Wins the Crunchyroll Anime Awards (via Crunchyroll Germany)

  3. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

  Say “Hello!” to the 2020 Anime Awards winner for Anime of the Year, Best Boy, Best Fight Scene, it’s Demon Slayer! Demon Slayer became one of the most popular franchises in the world of anime and manga in the last year, with its manga breaking sales records, its opening song still topping Billboard Japan, and its unbelievable fan power around the world. 

  It’s been nearly five months since the TV series for Demon Slayer ended, but the excitement around the exploits of Tanjiro, Nezuko, and their friends has not slowed down. With an upcoming movie coming soon, it would be surprising to see this franchise lose steam any time soon.

    My Hero Academia

  2. My Hero Academia

  There’s not much to be said about My Hero Academia here; since its second season, the show’s popularity has skyrocketed all around the world, and has only started to slow down recently now that nearly every anime fan out there has given the Weekly Shonen Jump standout a chance. Whether it’s topping Toonami’s viewership numbers or ramping up for its next international theatrical release, it’s hard to imagine My Hero Academia any lower on this list while new episodes are coming out every week!

  Alita: Battle Angel Promotional Image

  1. Alita: Battle Angel

  Last year, audiences around the world were treated to the biggest Hollywood adaptation of a manga to date - Yukito Kishiro’s Gunnm was released as Alita: Battle Angel, a passion project of James Cameron’s that came to life under the leadership of director and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure fan Robert Rodriguez. Now, in 2020, the film’s Wikipedia page tops the list of anime-related pages for a second year in a row — thanks to diehard fans.

  If you looked at the rankings in January, Alita would still make the top 10, but just barely. However, an online group known as the #AlitaArmy started a kickstarter late last year to get enough funds to fly a plane over the Oscars requesting a sequel to the 2019 film. The quote for the banner was originally $1,810 USD, and all further funds raised were set to go to Open Bionics, a prosthetics company that worked with Fox to help create the look and feel of those featured in the Alita movie with a mission to “make beautiful bionic limbs more accessible.” The #AlitaArmy ended up raising $15,599 as of February 20th, and is in the process of passing along the excess funds to Open Bionics. 

  The #AlitaArmy Plane Petitioning for an #AlitaSequel at the 2020 Academy Awards

  The airplane’s message was heard loud and clear: outlets from Indiewire to IGN covered the story, and staff and cast alike shared their excitement about the stunt with fans on social media.

    John Landau, Producer of Alita: Battle Angel, sharing his support of the fan campaign on Facebook

          View this post on Instagram

The Oscar for outstanding performance by a fan base goes to #alitaarmy

A post shared by Rosa Salazar (@rosasalazar) onFeb 13, 2020 at 9:17am PST 

Rosa Salazar, who plays the titular Alita in the film, celebrates the fandom on her Instagram.

    It’s incredible to see that a fan campaign was able to both bring such attention to this franchise with a single stunt that Wikipedia traffic for the page even exceeds that of the top airing simulcasts, but if that doesn’t speak to the power of fandom, I’m not sure what does! Alita: Battle Angel was recently added to HBO, HBO Now, and HBO Go, so if you haven’t had a chance yet to see the biggest thing in anime (at least according to Wikipedia), give it a shot! Your author was enthralled by the movie as well, and here’s hoping to an #AlitaSequel!

   And that’s our list! I hope you all enjoyed diving into Wikipedia’s analytics to help better understand part of the larger interest around anime. While including all pages, regardless of whether they’re actually a show, studio, genre, or not really anime at all may not have told the specific story you were looking for, I’ve also gone through the effort to collect the top 10 currently-airing anime by Wikipedia pageviews. Enjoy!

   1. My Hero Academia (466,536)

 2. Interspecies Reviewers (428,338)

 3. Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun (213,930)

 4. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (201,656)

 5. BOFURI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense (199,691)

 6. One Piece (196,166)

 7. Black Clover (171,645)

 8. Haikyu!! (156,525)

 9. Darwin's Game (154,975)

 10. Plunderer (123,129)

   Thanks for reading - let me know what you think of the results in the comments below!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[comp6841]

Lectures - Week 8

Exam Movie & Accident

The movie ‘The China Syndrome’ is going to be needed for one of the questions in the final exam. It’s going to be shown in the security theatre in week 9, but my memory isn’t that great so I might have to get it from elsewhere closer to the actual exam date. Without going into spoilers, it basically involves a cameraman and a reporter who witness a SCRAM event in a nuclear power plant in California. They manage to initiate the emergency shutdown procedure to prevent a catastrophe, but the plant manager still suspects it isn’t safe and wants to bring it to the attention of the public.

There also is going to be a generic question on either: Chernobyl, Bhopal or Challenger. I know Chernobyl pretty well as I’ve watched a heap of documentaries on it and similarly with Challenger, except with a more detailed writeup on my blog. Maybe I’ll do some more research on the Bhopal disaster in the next couple weeks, as I don’t know too much about that.

Root Cause Analysis

Often when something goes wrong with a system we resort to a process known as root cause analysis; this means tracing back the flow of events to try and discover the factors which contributed to an accident. The problem is that in a lot of circumstances when it is applied, we like to assign blame to one individual in particular; we like things to be simple, but this is unrealistic. The one thing that is common to every single cause is that it involved human error to some extent - whether it be an inspector, someone who manufactured the part 5 years, someone who designed the computing systems or a person who installed the component.

In aviation for example, “last touch” is almost a running joke in the sense (not that people may have died obviously) that the last person to touch a part in a plane responsible for an accident almost always gets the boot. When the issue that led to an incident resides throughout an organisation, this typically requires a larger overhaul - a complete chance of organisational culture. They need to try and re-education everyone and being able to do this successfully is hard.

Human Weaknesses

I think by now everyone knows that humans are bad at telling the truth; when they do this depends on social judgement. For example, if they know they can gain an advantage without getting caught and face no social judgement, they are usually okay with doing it. However, if there are potential repercussions then they usually carefully weigh up the consequences for dishonesty with the possible reward and make a judgement.

When we looked at magic tricks earlier in the term, I think they clearly demonstrated how easy for us to get distracted or misdirected. It’s essentially a form of social engineering - we just love to focus on what is psychologically salient as opposed to what is logically important.

Another idea of satisficing links fairly nicely with truthfulness in humans; basically we’re only willing to lie to the extent that we know we can get away with. Or more appropriately, in a uni course you might decide to do the bare minimum just to get a credit - you might value other aspects of your life more and decide to do the bare minimum in certain areas. Some other inherent humans flaws are:

Bounded irrationality - decision making is limited by the information you have, the limits of your mind and the time you have to make a choice

Preferences for positivity - we want to accept the most positive outcome

Group-think syndrome - often have a preference to ‘keep the peace’ within groups for fear of social exclusion; can result in bad decision-making processes

Confirmation bias - only caring about the evidence that supports what you believe

Heuristics

Humans often rely on heuristics when determining the outcomes of situations and the associated risks. A number of types were mentioned:

Similarity matching - thinking of a similar situation that occurred in the past and applying it to the current circumstances

Frequency gambling - if many patterns match, you pick the one you are a most familiar with (a ‘natural reaction’); relies on the logic that what ‘worked in the past’ must ‘work in the future’

Availability heuristic - relies on how easily something can be brought to a person’s mind; people estimate the how frequent an event is based on how easily it can be brought to mind

Designing Code

Just some general ideas to think about when designing code:

Minimise complexity - no one component should be too complex; higher risk of errors

Coupling of components - try to avoid this because if one component is broken then the other will probably break

Cohesion - this is a good idea and involves nearby components making use of each other, while more distant ones don’t tend to

Following these rules makes it easy to build and maintain a system which is resilient to attack; if everything is tightly coupled it is hard to provide defense in depth.

3 Mile Island

We were told to watch ‘Chernobyl’ for homework again; yay I’ve already done that - love it when you’ve already inherently done the homework! I don’t think its really necessary to know the details of 3-mile island except for the fact that a cooling malfunction meant that part of the core in reactor 2 melted. This resulted in them having to release some radioactive gas a couple days after the accident.

I think the whole point of this discussion was to highlight the issues associated with highly complex systems. In the case of nuclear reactors, this makes them highly coupled such that small changes in one area of a system can lead to massive changes in other areas.

Extended Seminar: Privacy

I totally agreed with the first point of this presentation - it’s definitely all about a sacrifice of privacy for convenience. I’m pretty sure I would have great privacy if I wasn’t connected to the internet and lived on a remote deserted island, but it wouldn’t exactly be the most interesting or exciting existence. The main concern an individual might have with regards to information being online is it being used as blackmail against them; anything for a ‘quick buck’ these days it seems right? They went over some techniques you can use to protect your privacy online including:

Incognito mode - doesn’t store browsing history or cookies but not very effective against other forms of tracking

Privacy-oriented browsers - you could use search engines like ‘Duck Duck Go’ which don’t track you like Google, however if anyone in your household isn’t as concerned about their privacy as you, Google could probably still link you back up

Protecting your accounts - logout when you can, don’t like your accounts and lie about personal details

VPN (Virtual Private Network) - intermediate body between you and the internet server, so the external entity sees them (not you); traffic is encrypted

Onion routing (i.e. ) - encrypt data N times and obfuscate the origin through forwarding through a series of nodes; each of the N nodes peels back a layer of the decryption on the way to the destination

Can make yourself vulnerable by logging into accounts or through timing attacks

There was an interesting discussion regarding the “nothing to hide” argument presented by people who don’t care about widespread surveillance. Now the first counter-argument against this is the fact that you “haven’t thought of anything yet”. Also a single piece of data may not seem important but once you combine them all together you can learn extraordinary amounts about an individual - and who knows how this information could be used!

Extended Seminar: Digital Forensics

This branch of forensics is basically concerned with recovery of material on digital devices. There are 3 main stages in a digital forensics investigation usually:

(1) Acquisition / imaging

Capturing an image of a drive

Following the ‘paper trail’

Hashing

(2) Analysis

Keyword searches

Recover deleted files

Special tools used

(3) Reporting

Evidence used to construct events / actions

Layman report written

Some of the different types of forensics:

Computer forensics

Memory

Data

Mobile device

Phone

Network forensics

Router

Switches

Packet captures

Database forensics

Video / audio forensics

Movie files

Audio recorded

Steganography

The basic idea behind data forensics involves trying to re-establish the headers for files - when a file is deleted, the OS simply deletes the point to the file and marks the space under the FAT or FMT as available. Even if you overwrite the data, the overwrite is not perfect and still leaves traces of the original data. You usually need to overwrite tens of times at a minimum and test it to have any degree of certainty. I’m guessing the activity is probably going to have the flag steganographically written into the least significant bits or something...

[arsenault16lawrence-blog]

Siacoin Wallet (SIA-UI)

Sia is a decentralized podium of storage, secured by the blockchain technologies. The particular Tanto Storage Platform (SSP) harnesses underutilized total capacity all around the world to create a files storage space place that is definitely more reliable and lower price compared to traditional cloud safe-keeping providers. Sia distributes plus scrambles your files around the decentralized network wherever you regulate your non-public encryption take some time and may own your data. Simply Wallet Siacoin v1.3.7 can get or perhaps control your data files, not like traditional cloud storage space suppliers. On average, Sia's decentralized fog up storage fees 90% a lot less than incumbent fog up storage vendors. Sia shops and directs redundant report segments about nodes throughout the globe, getting rid of any kind of single point of malfunction and ensuring uptime that will rivals traditional cloud storage space providers. Sia is one particular of the major forty five cryptocurrencies by market increased. Sia is some sort of assignment which offers a private, decentralized and secure cloud-based storage platform organised around the blockchain for a portion of the associated with various other well-known storage platforms such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, and Google Drive Sia, as a concept, was initially first dreamed up at HackMIT, a student-run hackathon, back in 2013 and even was officially unveiled in June of 2015; it is now backed by means of Boston-based firm Nebulous Inc., whose self-proclaimed mantra can be: �Re-decentralizing the Internet�. The standard idea is that as a substitute of hiring storage area through a central loan company of servers, as is the norm with traditional cloud-based platforms, peers on the Sia program rent space via each one various other via their �distributed cloud storage platform�. Sia employs erasure coding (distributing encrypted fragments associated with data redundantly across often the network) and an independent blockchain with tokens referred to as �Siacoins� to support the network. Not like most new coins, Sia�s launch wasn�t forwent by way of an ICO or pre-mining; instead, Sia begun existence when its genesis block was mined. Because of prominent investors such like Procyon Ventures, Raptor Class, Fenbushi Capital, along along with angel traders like Xiaolai Li, the Sia workforce managed to raise above $1. 25 mil around funding without an ICO. Who�s Behind It? Items [Show] Sia is usually backed with the Nebulous advancement team which is made up of some sort of central team of 5 industry persons all decided to see Sia have great results. Nebulous� focus will be trusted, decentralized infrastructure to help carry forward the future and even Sia is the primary project of the Nebulous team. TwitterFacebookGoogle+BufferLinkedIn Sia can be a project which offers the private, decentralized and safe cloud-based storage platform published on the blockchain to get some sort of fraction of this price of other well-liked hard drive platforms such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, in addition to Yahoo Drive. Sia, because a new concept, was first of all dreamt up at HackMIT, a gross annual student-run hackathon, back in 2013 and was officially launched inside 06 of 2015; the idea is now backed simply by Boston-based business Nebulous Incorporation., whose self-proclaimed mantra is usually: �Re-decentralizing the Internet�. The basic idea is the fact that alternatively of renting storage area from a central bank involving servers, as is typically the norm using traditional cloud-based platforms, colleagues on the Sia platform rent place from each other by using its �distributed cloud safe-keeping platform�. Sia employs chafing coding (distributing encrypted pieces of data redundantly across often the network) and a good indie blockchain with tokens identified as �Siacoins� to support the system. Unlike Siacoin Wallet v1.3.7 , Sia�s kick off wasn�t forwent by a good ICO or pre-mining; alternatively, Sia commenced life whenever its genesis block has been mined. As a result of prominent shareholders such as Procyon Efforts, Raptor Group, Fenbushi Cash, along with angel shareholders like Xiaolai Li, often the Sia team maintained to improve over $1. 25 thousand in funding without an ICO. Who�s Behind It? Contents [Show] Tanto is backed with the Nebulous progress workforce which includes a central team connected with five industry folks most determined to see Sia be successful. Nebulous� focus is definitely trusted, decentralized infrastructure to help bring forward the potential future together with Sia is the primary job of the Nebulous team. 3Commas Jesse Vorick is cofounder and even CEO at Nebulous. He�s a talented developer using a degree in pc science who spent a while as a software creator before taking the reins at Nebulous where he or she is an critical element in the managing of the Tanto project. Jake Miltenberger, originator of Nebulous, is an Us opportunity capitalist, entrepreneur and even investment decision banker for rising advancement companies. Todd presently serves as Associate for the Private Markets Group on Stifel Nicolaus, devoting the time for you to the group�s investment decision consumer banking and Vectis II deposit administration activities. Todd established Nebulous in last year as the niche consulting business. Lomaz Champine is definitely co-founder at Nebulous exactly where he is a specialist in writing software to re-decentralize the world wide web. He studied Computer as well as Techniques Engineering for a few several years, before him in addition to a good friend were, in his words �bitten by the new venture bug� and moved to cofound Nebulous. He�s in the past worked in Akamai and even Kronos, respectively. Other affiliates include things like Jae Heller, that takes care of company enhancement, together with Drew Volpe, Nebulous� plank observer. Likas? is a forward-thinking business owner and marketing strategist using an appetite to be able to break up, create and transform products and experiences which enhance industrial sectors, engage consumers, and even make it possible for positive change. Volpe is an investor, businessman, plus technologist with some sort of solid qualifications in seek, machine learning, devices, plus mobile technologies. Why Could very well this be Major? Tanto has the potential to be able to disrupt a multibillion dollars industry, namely the storage on the world�s files in a way that is more private, more secure, plus more price useful when compared to how ever before. With virtually no need intended for a fundamental bank involving severs on which to store data, Sia could totally better the cloud storage space field by utilizing blockchain technology to fit peer-to-peer file storage. The way it works can be hosts in addition to renters participate in file agreements which often is essentially an contract involving the storage service provider as well as the consumer; this requires place ahead of any storage area is given. The customer pays the Siacoins beforehand to the blockchain, which will acts as an escrow service, with the earlier contract serving as this rules for arbitration. In case the contract can be found and the storage service provider submits a proof involving storage area, the storage provider is definitely compensated and, in the event that not, the coins will be returned for the renter. Siacoin Wallet v1.3.6 expresses: �as involving January 2016, hard drive will be about $2. 25/TB/month having 6x redundancy�, although genuine prices differ slightly. Siapulse. com claims to observe market rates and selling price conversions. The SiaExplorer from official Sia domain as well caters for blockchain query, where some basic metadata regarding agreements and orders can be viewed. In case, in practice, Sia is able to to get even close in order to $2. 25/TB and typically the Nebulous team are able to successfully market their alternative, that could spell big trouble for the likes connected with Search engines, Amazon and Dropbox. Siacoin Funds Although Tanto did not hold an ICO, these people did crowd account together with the sale of �Siafunds� which are the second cryptocurrency and pay out several. 9% of all profitable storage space contract payouts in order to the holders of the Siafunds. 10, 000 Siafunds were issued in total, and even about 1, 000 have been sold in the crowd-sale along with the rest held by means of the advancement team. The idea is no longer possible to purchase Siafunds except if you attain one straight from a new case, many people are once in a while offered available for sale on their subreddit as well as Slack trading channel. Right now there is presently no lite finances readily available for storing your Sia Gold coins so a person have to download this Sia UI client which will synchronize the blockchain in your local machine. This required a lot of hours to get when I first placed that way up so get given notice, maybe you have to get away from your computer about all of day to get the full blockchain. You could create your wallet within the app, you will become given a seed which in turn is a good list of words � store this someplace safe as this will be precisely how your wallet will be backed up, you will will need it if you need to reconstruct your pocket. Once you have your wallet synced, you could begin mailing and getting Siacoins and in addition come to be some sort of host or number your own own files on this community. Conclusion Siacoin seems like it would be an useful project. Peer-to-peer safe-keeping may very well be this future of file storage as our respective internet foot prints grow larger having each passing year, gradually filling up the machines on Amazon, Google plus the like. From an investing point of view, Tanto did very well above the last six several weeks and it has proven itself to help be a good resilient and often high resource. A new quick glance at the relevant graphs regarding typically the coin�s flight, and even you are getting to get a good perception of the particular outstanding journey Tanto possesses been on during the last two years or so given that its launch. Possessing explained that, one issue which in turn is causing the Nebulous advancement team concern can be, whenever you can believe it, this speed where the respectful Siacoin has surged in value. The reason with regard to it is that the some what concept of Tanto depends on Siacoins being utilized to be a repayment for expert services presented, certainly not, as several seem to believe, like some sort of investment auto. Only time can notify whether the staff are able to efficiently stabilize often the currency, as a result rendering this fit regarding purpose which in turn could stop potential traders in often the coin. Another region intended for concern is the challengers which are now coming into the foreign exchange market, for example Storj which in turn just held a good successful ICO where that they raised $30mm in tokens and have combined together with the extremely popular FTP program Filezilla to combine his or her product straight in it is interface. That is usually projected that the cloud storage market place could get worth $74billion by way of 2021, if Sia may possibly get some way to recording a part of this market from the proven companies such as Dropbox, Microsoft and Google in that case it can prove in order to be a very lucrative investment. Sia-UI is a person of the very best Siacoin wallets online to maintain your own personal Siacoin. It's also the sole official app made by simply Nebulous, the developers involving the Tanto Storage Software. This can be obtained for Mac Linux and Windows OS IN THIS HANDSET and is one of the safe and sound Siacoin wallets, traders may use. It is suitable with iOS equipment and even is considered the most effective Siacoin wallet IOS. Anyone must check the Siacoin wallet deal with thoroughly prior to sending. As of this moment, no whole lot more wallets are supporting Siacoin, but as its becoming famous, more wallets is going to also begin supporting that.

[blackgoddessofsassiness]

Affiliate marketing training course

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[gamebazu]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

https://ift.tt/3AOetEY

[noithatotoaz]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[kjt-lawyers]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[xaydungtruonggia]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[epackingvietnam]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

[bfxenon]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.