On a side note, you may want to disable blocking for internationalsaimoe.com entirely. Our site is funded through donations from the community and staff, so I have no plans at all to place advertisements on the site (especially not the pop-up kind).

So on the main Contestants page, you can view character biographies and career histories (by clicking on their avatars). These are available only for 2010 Contestants. All preliminary Competitors are listed, but they do not have bios. Bios for 2009 and 2008 Contestants are linked in their respective pages in the site archives. Those bios are no longer being maintained, but we may develop a more comprehensive and regulary updated database in the future.

The main Statistics page has the cumulative standings for all Rounds; just use the buttons and drop-down menu to navigate. There are also links to tournament information for Japan Anime Saimoe and Korea Best Moe. (Some pages are undergoing rewriting as I make this post; until now all the charts were images, but we are converting them to be text-and-HTML-based, so they load more quickly and also become searchable.)

The main Community page lists all the different branches of our community, which is primarily the forum at the moment. Our IRC chatroom has somewhat died over the course of the year; maybe it’ll revive again someday with the right people. There is also space for community video submissions as well.

Additionally, I’m updating the URLs to our archive sites. Older ISML websites will live in their own subdomain. So archive.internationalsaimoe.com/2008/ will now become 2008.internationalsaimoe.com. Your DNS may take a day or two to update fully, so some links might not work just yet. And if you have existing bookmarks, they should redirect correctly. If not, please update your bookmarks.

Sorry for the confusion, but I hope ISML can become a little more accessible to visitors with these changes.

Aquamarine information has been archived, and the Tiara posters have moved to the Statistics main page.

Thanks to LYJ who is our most recent donor.

The aquamarine borders were temporarily red, and a man-on-man match was placed at the top of the featured match previews. The colors have been reverted now, and the match moved to the bottom of the listings to avoid confusion in the future. If you saw our forums yesterday, I installed a temporary Naruto-based theme.

The visual elements are back to normal now, and we have still been keeping to our schedule. Aquamarine 6 results will be out later today, and the finale, Round 7, will start on Sunday.

In the meantime, we have new banners to display on the front page today.

Some clarifications were needed on the 2010 Charter to reflect the extra seeding matches that occured during the Preliminaries in addition to describing part of the Regular Season tiebreaker process in more detail. Nothing major was affected in this update.

The Rules FAQ has a few statements regarding the Regular Season statistics and how we define Strength of Schedule (SoS) and other indices.

Character biographies are steadily being updated this week with current statistics and tournament information. A page archiving all the exhibition competitors is in development.

Today we received a new donation. Thank you, Snape!

A special shuffling gallery is on the front page to showcase our Contestants while we await the start of the Regular Season. Clicking on the avatars will link to profile pages, which are a work in progress. Our newest Contestants don’t have pages just yet, but they will be in place before the end of next week. Most pages are still copies of the 2009 profiles, but both biographies and statistical data will be updated for 2010. Images will be updated, too.

Some initial Phase II information is available on the preliminaries homepage. What you can view are the brackets (courtesy of melange) for Phase II’s single-elimination tournament starting Thursday. More tables will be available later in the week.

Despite the tournament being called “elimination,” the Candidates who do not win Phase II still get one last chance in Phase III.

All Phase I results have been moved to this page in the Statistics realm.

Finally we take a moment to recognize and thank our latest donors — Vincent Valentine Chang (a.k.a. Newgunden) from Taiwan, zmjhgvn from Germany (repeat donor), and shinz_zhu from Canada (repeat donor). Your generosity is amazing, and our appreciation shall grow to match it.

The video on the site is the PV from 2009 Double Elimination. More videos to come.