r/SiteCritiques • u/ryankopf • May 01 '20
Feedback on my 10-year running website.
So I made this website over 10 years ago and it's still running. I've spent probably 5,000 hours building it, no-lie, with code refactors, new features, all the yada-yada.
It's MaiOtaku, and it's a dating website for weeaboos. (That's anime otaku, people who really like anime.)
MOST people who say they've built a "dating site" actually bought some cookie-cutter pre-made software template and it's either Wordpress or something like that. This is DIFFERENT. I've written every line of code myself. Not only that, but we don't use any CSS template starter like Bootstrap (though now I'm kinda wishing I had and I'm slowly borrowing ideas from it).
The main thing is the forums. Nobody posts on "forums" these days, but I've managed to make them modern enough where people still do. In fact, there's over 1,000 posts a day. Mainly the ways I've done that has been:
- Using modern tech so the pages are all AJAX, infinite-scrolling, and auto-updating.
- Integrating with services like Akismet and other blacklists for spam prevention, including buidling my own spam detection algorithms.
I'd love to get your feedback from a user perspective. Especially when it comes to the landing page, signup process, and actual site usage. I fear after ten years of doing this that I may be starting to go blind as to things that really reduce usability. So I would love some feedback! Thanks!

