Since We've Been Gone...

November 19, 2000

As many visitors to the site over the past year have noticed, we've been out of the loop. We were on a roll, updating weekly, getting lots of publicity and even were featured on the Anime Web Turnpike at the start of the new year, but then, we came home from Christmas vacation and found ourselves in quite a predicament.

Our ftp access was denied by the university. We were locked out.

We tried to get new passwords, but they were slow in coming. We were hurting without direct access. Our club's web chairperson offered to upload the pages for us, but this presented some problems. If there was bad coding or a link wasn't working, we could not fix it immediately. Also, we were being approached by companies looking to sponsor us. Since we're hosted by ASU, this was a major problem. We wanted to accept the sponsorship, but in order to do so, we would have to move the site to a non-educational server. site.

So the hunt for our own domain began. First we worked at setting up our own server, but money problems prevented that from coming around, although we did register a domain name (www.themanime.org) even though it doesn't work right now. By this point, classes had started again and we (Christi and Carlos) were also between jobs. We decided since there was nothing we could immediately do, we would put the site on a temporary hiatus until we could get back on our feet and get themanime.org up and running.

We had no idea that it would take so long, or that so many things would go wrong. -_-

People offered us webspace, but ftp access was still a problem. Files were lost. We moved and the main computer that housed all of the site info was in pieces for three months. Some contributors left. Family members and close friends died, and we went through some very tough financial problems that almost left us homeless. The hiatus became total abandonment. THEM Anime was simply no longer a priority, and we couldn't find anyone else to take over in the interim. We even lost our e-mail access for quite a while, which was not exactly convenient.

It also didn't help that the Chief Reviewing Editor got really burned out on anime fandom in general, which we'll discuss in a further editorial.

But then the new school year started, and we got a happy surprise. We moved in with a fellow THEM member who offered to let us use her university access to continue running the site. We also have new, stable jobs that let us concentrate on working on the website more than paying the bills. (Fingers crossed.) The first of hopefully many new contributors sent in his first review, as well.

We're back, better than ever. With greater club involvement and more anime being distributed now in North America than ever, we can really have a lot of fun with this site. And that's something we've missed in the last few months.

Thank you again for your patience, as we're going to make sure that this doesn't happen again. So sit back, relax, and enjoy our website. It isn't leaving any time soon, and neither are we, if we can do anything about it.

- Carlos/Giancarla Ross

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