We would like to thank everyone that applied to join the staff. This was the first time that we had any sort of open application system and none of us were really sure how it’d turn out. However, we got a nice response from the community and this is very encouraging, especially considering the applications we got from readers of the site without blogs.

We have seven new staff members from the application process. We are hoping that this will expand both the amount and the content of the blogs we cover here.

• ellama
• Midori of Midori’s J-pop Overanalyzations
• Murr of Tsuyoki de Yukoze!
• Senor Gibbles
• Selryam of Vitamin Drop and ロッタラ ロッタラ
• Solo-kun of Solo Space
• SuperHappyGenki” of SUPER HAPPY GENKI HYPERFORCE GO!

For now, we won’t be accepting any new applications.

Also, we have a new theme! We will be adding more features over the next few weeks, so please be patient if the site randomly goes down (but that shouldn’t happen).

For the past two themes, we’ve relied on Wordpress Extend to find a theme that we’d like. But this time, we made our own theme! Yes, that “designed by the IW Staff” in the footer is not a lie. We’ve had contributions from nearly every member of the staff to make this theme, so it was a true team effort.

We also got several header submissions, and we love them a lot! So special thanks to johpan, liam and nefuritamika for these submissions. We are still willing to accept any new header submissions, so follow the directions in this post if you’d like to add any. Hopefully it’ll be easier now that it’s obvious how the headers will be implemented.

One thing we were concerned about was the Blogroll. You may have noticed how gigantic it was and how much of the sidebar it used to take up. We are moving the Blogroll to its own page. Right now, the list is particularly out of date. If your blog/site is listed incorrectly, please email us at admins@intlwota.com and inform us. If you’d like to be removed from this list, let us know. If you have a new blog or a blog that is not on this list, please email us or use this Wotatalk thread. We are considering the idea of expanding this list by adding fan sites, message boards, wikis, etc., so if you feel that your website is relevant, email us with a link.

As you can see under the new Categories Sidebar (which you can use to see the latest posts of these categories), we are linking to Tokyograph. If you’d like to suggest some sort of affiliation or link, we will consider it. Same email as always.

We are changing our comments policy for the interim. Previously, you had to be a registered user to comment. The main reason for this was to prevent the comments from being spammed to hell. We are now pretty confident that A) that won’t happen and B) we have enough active staff members to moderate undesirable comments. So now you don’t have to be registered to comment; and if this works out it’ll become a permanent change.

We would encourage any sort of suggestion or idea for International Wota. In our discussions with the applicants, we realized that we could be doing a better job of communicating with both bloggers and non-bloggers. Either email admins@intlwota.com or use Wotatalk, which we plan on revitalizing in the near future.