News Archive

Database access to Pencilboard.net for contributions is finally finished after several provider changes, site attacks, and other problems. Currently the contribution section is undergoing a closed beta test. If you are selected to be a participant, you will be notified so please do not ask to be a participant in this test. Once the tests pass satisfactorily, final adjustments will be made and contributions will be made available to the general public.

Between an emergency trip to Tokyo due to family illness, work, and the server's upgrade causing many aspects of the site to just break, the revisions to the site are almost finished. The revision is mainly data management and isn't visible, but some of you may have already noticed some of the small tweaks to the interface, primarily the way listings and searches are handled. They should feel quite a bit faster now. Hopefully nothing else threatening to derail my efforts here will come up.

The site has finished the first phase of its maintenance. Please see change log for details. Contributions will be disabled until the second phase of maintenance is complete.

A belated post on the start of the third year of Pencilboard.Net's operation. Two years through the test of time and we are doing better than we ever have. Pencilboard.Net has more pencilboards than you can shake a stick at. With over 6300 individual pencilboards, we are now the largest online pencilboard reference. The site stands tall on the shoulders of contributors who made this possible and databasing technology, without which a site of this size would be a nightmare to maintain.

Many thanks to the supporters who got us this far!

I have made an update to the site to add a feature that has a big potential to greatly assist contributors find series that need contributing. See the changelog for version 2.7.3 for details.

The server was offline for a brief while with an error message. It seems the provider changed a couple of settings for their MySQL server and that broke the website for a bit. Everything should be working as normal now and we apologize for the downtime.

Sorry for the lack of updates throughout the recent months. Things have been busy on the homefront. I am planning on making some updates to the site in two weeks time. Until then, I'd like it for all you users to send in any bugs you find or things you'd like to see improve and I will try to incorporate the changes in the update. A user already mentioned that series with duplicate names only show one of the duplicate entries instead of both, possibly causing confusion. If anyone else spots obscure bugs like the one mentioned, please send them my way since I will likely be busy after the updates as well, and be hard pressed for time to make updates happen.

I just noticed the site got a brief mention on the Lord of the Rings movie news website TheOneRing.net. Hello to all the visitors from Middle Earth. Feel welcome to peruse the archive. As more pencilboards are released for LOTR movies we'll be sure to post them.

I will be taking a week long vacation. As such, any email correspondence won't be replied to until next week. If you spot any errors or problems on the site, feel free to email be, but please note that a response will not be immediate.

Pencilboard.Net has migrated to a new webhost! The new site has been adequately tested, however some bugs may crop up. If you spot any abnormalities, please report them using the comment form which is linked at the bottom of every page.

A new search option has been added to the site. Users will now be able to search for references via board code. For details please view the change log.

Until now, contributors had no way to effectively specify that the reverse side of a board is blank without mentioning this in the comments. I have added an item in the transpareny options that will allow a user to specify whether or not a board has a backside. This allows the calculations for reverse image percentage to remain correct, despite the absence of a reverse image.

Also the weekly update record was broken yet again with a new count of 386! That's 26 pages of updates over 7 days.

The record for how many updates were conducted over 7 consecutive days has been shattered by a new figure: 323! I may be speaking too early as there may be more updates coming, but 22 pages of updates over 7 days is certainly cause to celebrate. Many thank-you's to the contributors!

On a side note, my 4th of July was excellent and I hope everyone else had a blast! God bless the USA!

The highlight of this update is that the "Account Info" link now leads to a functional page. You will now be able to edit various account information. Please keep in mind, any changes to email address will require confirmation of that address, identical to when you signed your account up.

Some changes were made to the administrative access of the site. Admins will now be able to make modifications to the site data much more quickly.

URGENT

In the process of upgrading the server files and splitting the titles of each series for the version 2.6 update, I lost some title data from certain series that I was not able to identify on my own. If any of you can identify the titles for each of these series and send in feedback using the comment form on the bottom of the ones you can identify, I can set the correct titles to them.

The series ids are as follows:

UPDATE: All series have been confirmed! Thanks to those who helped out!

Any help on these series would be much appreciated.

Changes to the title browsing have been made since the last update. I have moved all non-manga/anime promo series (eg. K-books, Ken Mizuki, etc) into the Manga/Anime section.

I also separated each title for all series so that they would appear under the correct letter heading. From now on, series will have each of their respective titles under each respective category to make browsing more flexible. As an example, "Angel Links | Seiho Tenshi" is now listed under Anime/Manga under letter "A" as "Angel Links" and under the letter "S" as "Seiho Tenshi"

While browsing the archive, I had an idea pop into my head. It involved merging the "Promotional" category with the "Miscellaneous" category and making it all under "Miscellaneous". I'd like to hear what you frequent visitors think. Feel free to send in your comments on whether or not you think this is a good idea by using the comment link on the bottom of every page

A couple users wrote in to say that for some reason, some contributions were not being accepted by the server with an error message indicating that the data failed to save. I have fixed a bug that I missed while working on the site test platform server. Things should work now, but if they don't, send me feedback with as much detail as possible (eg, what ref id, board type/code, front/back image, etc).

The code revision is done and the site also sports a new look! Most of you won't see the changes but they are there, working hard to keep the site running smooth and fast, provided bandwidth stays abundant. All aspects of the site should be fully functional so those of you waiting to contribute: start your engines!