I hope you all had a good year this year and excited for the next one! Round numbers are always nice and it makes those cheesy New Year's glasses easier to wear.

I had all but disappeared for a few months for work reasons so I've only been able to do a few bug fixes here and there for AFF and left the site to the very capable hands of the community moderators and a few volunteer site maintainers. Fortunately, I've also managed to learn new tools, programming languages, and other development paradigms in that time to carry all of that knowledge over to Asianfanfics so I've been beefing up the infrastructure over the past month to be able to handle what I want to release for AFF in the next year or two.

As for what I want to do with Asianfanfics in the coming years, I just have one guiding principle in memory of my co-founder: to help support authors and other content creators like her. She always enjoyed writing and making posters for her stories but it was always tough for her to make time for this hobby when she had to worry about things like student loans and other expenses couple with her grueling work schedule. I've already started with our no-fee crowdfunding program last year which has been going pretty well with thousands of dollars already having gone directly to the authors, many of whom are students. The program is technically still in beta but I've slowly expanded the program every few months to allow for applications from more authors and I hope to open it fully next year.

I have a few other ideas I want to work on to help more writers other than the crowdfunding program but they still need to be fleshed out so I'd rather announce them when they're ready than talk about them right now. Eventually, I'd like to expand these programs outside of Asianfanfics because I think every author and content creator can benefit from a bit more help and we're a bit pigeonholed into our niche mainly because we're called Asianfanfics!

I also haven't forgotten about Roleplay Republic. The one thing I want to do for RPR is release an app for it since they deserve one and I actually started the year making it though I had to drop it to finish other things. It will eventually get done though and I hope to make it work even better than the current site.

Anyway, that's what's going on behind the scenes for AFF. This whole year was all prep work for next year. We'll see some cool stuff for 2020.

Hope you all enjoy yourselves this week!