Evolution Ball!

By: CereCere

Well, it's been 5 years.

Now I have to level with all of you: there was a while there where this site almost didn't make it to this point. Last spring, we were talking about shutting down- maybe we would try to hang on for our fifth anniversary, do one more SMPCA and go out with a bang. In May, we began to talk about the site's future. We began to wonder what should be done with the site once we decided to leave it. We decided the site would not just go away altogether. There's way too much stuff here just to take it down. So we started putting together ideas on how to re-develop the site into a static version.

That's when something funny happened.

[start humming your favorite dramatic sounding music here]
Something sparked inside the four of us, something that had been missing, but like an old friend, we were happy to see it. The ideas for shutting down became ideas on how to freshen up the place, ideas to change the site and bring new life to it. The AQ was alive again! Mwwwha ha ha haaahahaahahahaha!

(By the way, you can stop humming now. It didn't go with the evil laugh anyway.)

So all summer, we have been cooking up new ideas for the site and developing them bit by bit. In the end, we have come up with a new look for the site, a re-vamped review and archival system, and a few other bells and whistles.

You should have already noticed the redesigned layouts for the site. We hope it will offer improved navigation with the help of XSSI and that it will also make the site easier to read by using CSS to control text spacing throughout the site. Our front page currently features great fanart by Brian Bork, and we want to thank him for it together for us. There's also updates to most of the sections, The Lemures Files, each Special Feature (including a 5th Anniversary Special), Page Tips, and more. It also wouldn't be our anniversary without the SMPCAs. The results of the fifth SMPCAs are now up in the vote section.

Now to the reviews. We realized after five years, it was time for a bit of a change. The old system was too slow and took too much time to process through. Therefore, we came up with a revamped system that will improve things, but without sacrificing what worked in the old system of reviews. After all, the old system worked, and it worked well for five years, but with this new system we think we can do even better. First big change: gone are the "_ of the Month" titles, simply because it has become to difficult to follow a monthly schedule. That doesn't mean there will be long gaps between reviews. Yes, sometimes there will be, but there will also be times when a new review will pop up right after another one. It will make things more flexible, and it will allow us to break down the nominations into smaller groups, which will give each nomination greater "weight." Right now we have to go through over a hundred nominations each time we prepare to do a set of reviews. Therefore, it takes a lot of time, and a lot of good nominations get tossed out in favour of slightly better ones. With this new system, we should be able to break the nominations down into small groups for each time we prepare to write reviews, saving us a lot of time and giving a better chance for more nominations to be reviewed.

Next, the "Best" title has been replaced with "Recommended." Doesn't have exactly the same punch to it, but we did this for several reasons. The main one was because we are now expanding our list of sites to include ones from other anime. For a long time, many people requested we give this a try, but we avoided it. The four of us felt we didn't know a lot of other anime, and out of the ones we did know, there were only one or two each that we felt qualified enough to review sites for. However, to solve this problem, we have asked a few experienced web site reviewers to join us as "Guest Reviewers" to increase the number of series we can cover. We only have two Guest Reviewers right now, but we more will be added in time. Sailormoon sites will still be the central part of this site, but the other anime will just help expand our horizons a bit and provide a new service to our visitors. Finally, the new recommended reviews will not have all of us reviewing a site. Whenever possible, we will have more than one person reviewing each site. However, each site will still be approved by all of us before reviewing. We felt this would allow for longer, more in depth, and more frequent reviews for good sites, and would also allow for more frequent re-reviews (Second Looks) of the older sites in our lists.

Then there are the "Worsts." Well, this site wouldn't be the same site without them, would it? We couldn't even keep our name if we didn't have those! Well, the "Worst" and "Runners-up" are staying and will be almost exactly as they were before. Like the Recommended Sites, they will no longer be confined to a monthly schedule. We will require at least two of us to write each review for these categories, and all four of us will write the reviews whenever possible. Even if all four of us do not write a "Worst" or "Runner-up" review, all four of us must accept that a site is bad enough to go through with reviewing it. Oh, one more thing: for now, we will only be reviewing Sailormoon sites for those two sections.

So that's it, we hope you enjoy. As usual, we appreciate hearing any comments you may have about the changes to the site. This is our biggest change in five years, so there's bound to be a few tweaks and fixes to me made. If you can think of any, please don't hesitate to let us know.

October 27th, 2001

As usual any comment made on this page is that of "The Amazoness Quartet" or one of its members. Tripod has nothing to do with our opinions, etc, lalala...