Welcome back, everyone!

Hey there, everyone!

Welcome to the new RandoWis site, now fully equipped with a new Support feature!

Apologies for disappearing these past 10-11 weeks though!

What happened? Why the change?

TL;DR – Felt that my site needed a visual upgrade, and also wanted to change the fact that Fans were forced into using pixivFANBOX if they wanted to support me financially. Solution = A universal ‘RandoWis.com’ site with a support function. 2 testicles, 1 kick.

Long version;
– On the 27th July 2020, I left Patreon as I disagreed with their policies and (what I strongly believed to be) their hypocritical and violative treatment of artists on the platform.

– On 19th October 2020, I joined Pixiv and used their creator support service “pixivFANBOX“, that was similair to Patreon (although somewhat primitive) .

While I understood that by moving to a new platform meant losing a good amount of financial support (and I did), I also believed that, with time, I could recover to a similair level of support eventually. Hoping to expand my work to the Japanese audience on Pixiv as well, I started learning Japanese. These were the 2 risks I took when I embarked on this new journey last year. However, the realisation of ‘Fans being forced out of their way to use this one site if they wanted to support me’ didn’t really cross my mind til middle of this year (2021).

– 12 months and an irregular amount of uploads have passed since then, and Rando is still yabai (bad) with the Nihongo (“Japanese Language” in Japanese). Support there has stagnated for a while, I’ve still yet to convert my works into Japanese properly, and recovery is not at the level I had hoped for; all of which are faults of my own.

While there are other means of supporting myself financially, I wanted to at least try one last idea; which was to have a platform of support available for fans who don’t use Pixiv. I contemplated the idea of using another site (like Subscribestar, Ko-fi, etc…), but the idea of a “Rando leaves Patreon 2.0” wasn’t so coveting.

– So, at the beginning of October 2021, I decided to fully utilise my site to be an all-in-one place for RandoWis, which included a support feature should you want to support RandoWis financially. The past 10-11 weeks have been me just doing that; rebuilding this goddamn site from scratch.

Why 10-11 weeks?

A rough breakdown of what went on is as follows:

Week 1 – Resetting old site and rebuilding of basic structure for new site. This stage was fairly quick.

Week 2 – Added functions required for site (Membership Function, Email Notifications, Feedback Form Submissions, A goddamn logout button, etc..)

Week 3 – Testing/Troubleshooting

Week 4 – Testing/Troubleshooting

Week 5 – Testing/Troubleshooting + Compromising + Adding custom HTML codes

Week 6 – HTML codes caused issues, so more testing/troubleshooting/fixing

Week 7 – Creating visuals (buttons, banners, logos, signs, gifs, thumbnails etc…) + Amirul offered his professional I.T testing skills

Week 8 – Creating visuals, but Amirul found issues…. so + Testing/Troubleshooting

Week 9 – Creating visuals + Testing/Troubleshooting (I hate you Amirul) + Creating YouTube announcement

Week 10 – Finished visuals + Testing/Troubleshooting (I hate you Amirul) + Creating YouTube announcement

Week 11 (when this post was published) – Final Testing/Troubleshooting + Finished YouTube announcement

*As I had NO prior knowledge of HTML coding or website building, everything was done as I learned how to do it (including how to fix problems), which probably contributed to the long amounts of time I spent testing and fixing stuff.

*inserts semicolon joke*

So what now?

Enjoy the site!
I’ll be able to finally get back to making content again, so I hope you’ll be able to enjoy what I make, now and in the future!

Do note that despite all the testing we’ve done, there’s bound to be some bugs or issues that Amirul and I missed.

Should you bump into these issues/bugs/problems, feel free to report them via the “Submit Feedback” button below, or write them down in the comments. I’ll do my best to resolve them asap, but do remember that the site is essentially run by me alone, so I hope you understand if they aren’t immediately fixed.

That’s it from me for now!
Love you much much, and I’ll see you in the next post! ♥
– RandoWis