My personal thoughts: How it all started

Hello, let me introduce myself, I am Yun. Some refer to me as Owner, Director, but I like to call myself more one of the main admins of mikudb. If you ask why im blogging now on MikuDB huh? I simply felt that we should share with our fans how the road to rebuild MikuDB was crooked.  Also, it will be soon a year that MikuDB.moe exist and take this as my own small anniversary talk. I know this gonna be a long long talk and I dont really force any one to read it till the end, if you are interested how MikuDB was revived through my eyes, here you go, I personally believe it is worth to read it. Feel free to comment and ask anything, okay?

About me

That time,I was still working at anime-mp3.com website as manager of project(s) and was seeking for fields where the website could expand. That time, because I wasn’t the owner, my hands were often tied and I had to mostly report everything to the owner. I couldn’t do things the way I liked, every change on page I made mostly brought heavy discussion and fights between me and the owner (How I hated ad.fly and other ads on page etc.). After some time, I really had no motivation to carry on, because simply combating 2 things at once was for me impossible: directing the page and same time explaining it to the owner 3-4x was really tiring (In addition, he wasn’t good in english so you can somehow imagine our conversation).

The very first deal with MikuDB or Doujin.us

While working there, I was once contacted by one guy, stating he is the owner of doujin.us and he would like to be an affiliate with us ( I already knew about mikudb as I was a fan of vocaloids and Zaku dono). Because anime-mp3(AM3) was really lacking behind their rivals in Vocaloid and doujin field, I instantly had some ideas in my mind, which I told him. Sadly, he turned me down saying he is no more interested in doujin.us (or you could say mikudb) and he doesn’t have time for it and is maybe even willing to selling it to me. But I really wasn’t interested in acquiring Doujin as I wanted only to co-operate. Some of doujin.us members were already working with AM3 or at least did a bit outsourcing so buying it would really be an overkill. I’m not gonna judge him or how the project was basically innactive as he never implemented the new features or never listened to the other staff members, everyone should make their own point of view.

Doujin.us down, let’s do it!

Later I saw doujin.us suddenly down and the new owner leaving the project alone. The doujin.us members, who were working alredy with me told me that there are already some people, who are willing to revive MikuDB and he told me if I wanna join and help. That is how I met YukiDoke, the admin you all know inside group/website.

The start was really rough, we had no money, people who would help and the most important thing- domain. We really loved the mikudb and wished to get one mikudb domain. MikuDB.net was taken, MikuDB.com already too and the owner of doujin.us refused to  transfer it to us, only sell. But seriously, who would buy one domain for 600$+? There was one solution, mikudb.moe, but it would take 2 more months until it is available. That is how I used my connetions in AM3 and got us the infamous mikudb.anime-mp3.com while pre-registering .moe and waiting it to be online. I had to convince the owner that MikuDB will be part of AM3.

At the very start, we were like 5 people, with Hexor22 and KuroxRepaer our main driving force for album indexing. They were really the main driving force working like maniacs publishing everyday 20+ albums and Neonat as some one responsible for MikuDB album record keeping. But because of the domain, the website was gaining no public attention and people were basically ignoring us, thinking we are fake and just another AM3 website, wannabe mikudb. Just 80 visitors per day was really a sad amount. Later a lot of more members were joining with Petrichor and Khouw as one of the most important members I ever met.

Me and the new mikudb

Because I had a little time, there were two options that time. Create our own web content system (CMS) or just use one open source and load it with stuff I need. It would save me a lot of time, but I knew I would need to work on it for a long time until it would be complete. I choosed the latter option and if you wanna know how long it took mikudb to look like this? It took me 4 months of working on mikudb (I could only work on it in my free time) and I was doing it while MikuDB was running already. The very first of mikudb was really plain without even registration. I managed to cover the hosting for a whole year alone, with other admins (Yukidoke and Hayden) splitting the domain cost (I couldn’t shoulder alone the domain costs).

I tried to implement everything I felt was lacking before. A homepage that is showing new releases and additions separately, something I missed on the very first MikuDB and doujin so the visitors can instantly distinguish the albums. Faster new releases and not only old albums. Albums, where people could browse through artists, albums, circles, not only via tags like before, direct contact with our fans and listening to ideas from visitors, MikuDB events and campaign. Hopefully you guys are cherishing the changes the same like I do.

mikudatabase.com …

The page barely had 800 albums and during same time, alot of another MikuDB projects were launching eventhough we were the official one. That is how a project called mikudatabase.com exist and will never go down, because it is backed up by the doujin.us owner who abandoned the page… We tried to contact them and negotiate, but nothing worked and just kept turning off topic whenever we talked. There were really interesting proposals and even agreeing for a merge, but nothing helped, they kept using the mikudb domain, eventhough the admins were never affiliated with MikuDB in any way, nor working for it. We were basically the only ones with the  blessing of zaku-dono allowing us to use the name mikudb. We even told them to use the doujin name but they turned us off with some funny answers. We were especially angry as Yukidoke even wrote a document for them to read, which basically told the whole old MikuDB->doujin.us story just for them to understand our situation. Because I still have a little human feelings for them, I will rather not go into details and make their idendity hidden. Oh my, reminding me of their arguments and reasonings made me laugh… By that, we learned our lesson: Contact the other mikudb projects once, then if it is not working, give up, because mostly it is not worth the time and effort…

mikudb.moe

We were still combating the low public attention and how people were not visting our page. But as we started mikudb.moe everything turned 180 degrees and we started to gain more visiors with people cheering for us! Even the very first father of mikudb came back and joining the team! Zaku-dono enlisted as one of our main admins and the site was alive! Oh my, finally! We made it! Because how I saw how mikudb team hold so much potential and the members workin so hard, I decided to pull off from AM3 totally and enlist as one of the main Admins. Before, I worked more behind the shadows. As more and more staff members were flowing in. Big thanks to Goth and all others who later joined, without you, MikuDB would never exist. We managed to index more then 2.500 albums within 3 months!

Current mikudb.moe and future onwards

If you managed to reach the end Let me just tell you one thing. Right now, mikudb.moe has more albums then before ever were on Doujin.us or mikudb.com. A team that is rock solid and constantly growing. With donators that are caring and helping us to survive. This year is really vital for us as we are changing to our own CMS (our tech admin is working on it for a whole year). We got really big plans, let’s see how it will end! Thank you for your time and hopefully you enjoyed the reading.  Feel free to ask me everything you want, I will answer all your questions as possible.