I hope it's change you guys can believe in. We are currently overhauling how we do things at AKF to make it a better experience overall for the readers and commenters.
The biggest change we are undergoing is the posting. We are no longer going to try to cover the daily news and put our spin on it. After reviewing what are our best and worst articles are, I found a trend that our worst articles are the ones in which we tried covering the news and the best ones were the articles that made people come to AKF in the first place. Therefore, we will focus on what we are best at: commentary. That means we will continue MV reviews and editorials. If we do cover news, we'll try to do it in an amusing manner.
So how do we offset the decrease in posts for AKF? First of all, I think this will be a benefit to AKF, as we will remove the clutter of CF and picture articles that are posted just to have something posted that day. When we do CF and picture articles, they will appear in compilation posts. We want to give you better articles on a consistent basis instead of more articles.
As a lot of people rely on AKF to get news updates, we have found a solution that many people should like.
At the top, you should notice "Kpop Recap," which I have circled in red for you guys. This is a collaborative project between what used to be known as allkcrap, AKF and other contributors. The project is still in its beta stage, but we aim to deliver the most important news of the day in one convenient place and in one convenient post. As it is getting harder to keep up with the daily onslaught of articles from Allkpop, Koreaboo, Soompi and other sites, our job is to cut the bullcrap out. Instead of waiting for us to post about an article, you can view that and the most important news of the day at Kpop Recap.
We believe this move will be beneficial for everyone. There are other sites to get editorials and analysis of news, but a lot of people on AKF prefer this site to read and this community to talk with. You will be able to get your news faster with Kpop Recap while we can focus on which happenings in Kpop to write about.
To counter the decline of opportunities for the commenters to put their word in, we have reinstated Chatango, the chat client we used in 2011-2012.
Click the "AKF Chatroom" page to take you to a separate page where the new Chatango is located. Chatango now runs on HTML5, which eliminates many of the problems we had before with Flash crashing the site. However, to participate, you must have a Chatango account, which takes a whole minute to create. This is to reduce the chance of random fangirls coming into the chat as anons and complaining about how we're "anti-kpop" and us having to tell them we're "anti fangirls like yourself." Most of the staff will be there when possible and I'll be there when I'm taking a break from studying. We reinstated Chatango because we felt our Skype chat was too exclusive and no one was using the mibbit chat any longer.
Lastly, we have some changes in authors, but everyone here is remaining on board in some capacity. You will see that certain authors will not write any longer. We will be hiring soon, but we're putting that off for a couple of months for the current staff to get acclimated to the new system and for me to have more time to help with author selection. We may change the process of how we hire authors, but we'll work on that in the meantime.
If you guys have any suggestions, post them below. In advance, I will still say "no" to installing Disqus to AKF. Most of us on the staff hate Disqus for a myriad of reasons. We don't want to see shit such as:
in lieu of actual commenting. We have a chat for people who want to chat, so that removes another argument for installing Dicksucks.