- Joined
- Aug 23, 2009
- Messages
- 21,870
- Reaction score
- 39,622
Hello everyone!
We have now moved into the month of September and it has indeed been a rocky road since March of this year when things began to shut down due to the coronavirus including the halting of visitor access to Japan as a whole.
No doubt everyone is patiently awaiting a vaccine solution so that life can begin to get back to a normal. While this is ongoing, we of course urge everyone to take protective measures such as social distancing, wearing of masks and frequent use of hand sanitizer, etc.
We are beginning to see a rise in P4P activity and reviews are a little slower, but they are coming in. We appreciate your continued support of both TAG as a whole and the providers who advertise here which in turn support the operation of this site. We will once again begin updating our Twitter account which has been mostly silent since the virus took a tight grip. It was a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation. (@Karen has been recently granted access to Twitter, she will also be making tweets for us as well)
It has also become a sore subject regarding TAG improvements. That also came to a halt when focus was needed elsewhere and I basically put TAG into a maintenance only mode instead of sticking to patch, fixes and the larger improvement schedule. It is with great hope that we can get that program back on track and make some progress. We did however implement some tighter restrictions on account security, which mainly came from people who do not pay attention to the warnings when creating an account. Since June, we have switched over to manual account approvals so that we can review each account and reject those who do not appear to be compliant with our requests. (Seriously, please do not use your corporate email address on this site. While we keep things secure, it is still not a good idea to use a corporate email address!) To that end, we also request members to consider using 2FA (two factor authentication) either via email or the more preferred smartphone app method using Authy. It is an amazingly simple and secure setup that adds one extra layer of security in a matter of seconds. We have been requested to enable SMS authentication as well, but that is not something we plan on adding until we finish renewing the site. You can review your 2FA settings here. (password required to view)
Lastly, regarding TAG staffing. I have privately been searching for an extra hand and I have now met with three persons, who I declined to accept. (They did not know which site they were interviewing) It is extremely difficult to find trustworthy staff and I elected to search privately, which was in the interest of avoiding any conflict of interest concerns. @Karen remains my right-hand woman for helping manage membership & account issues. @meiji is still around here somewhere, but that is the entire staff at this current stage. (This is of course a non-paid position and it is meant for people who want to build community management skills and improve some technical skill or even soft skills when it comes to interfacing with members and visitors of TAG.
Thank you for your continued support of TAG, every small gesture is appreciated!
(Sidenote: TAG just turned 11 years old!
)
We have now moved into the month of September and it has indeed been a rocky road since March of this year when things began to shut down due to the coronavirus including the halting of visitor access to Japan as a whole.
No doubt everyone is patiently awaiting a vaccine solution so that life can begin to get back to a normal. While this is ongoing, we of course urge everyone to take protective measures such as social distancing, wearing of masks and frequent use of hand sanitizer, etc.
We are beginning to see a rise in P4P activity and reviews are a little slower, but they are coming in. We appreciate your continued support of both TAG as a whole and the providers who advertise here which in turn support the operation of this site. We will once again begin updating our Twitter account which has been mostly silent since the virus took a tight grip. It was a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation. (@Karen has been recently granted access to Twitter, she will also be making tweets for us as well)
It has also become a sore subject regarding TAG improvements. That also came to a halt when focus was needed elsewhere and I basically put TAG into a maintenance only mode instead of sticking to patch, fixes and the larger improvement schedule. It is with great hope that we can get that program back on track and make some progress. We did however implement some tighter restrictions on account security, which mainly came from people who do not pay attention to the warnings when creating an account. Since June, we have switched over to manual account approvals so that we can review each account and reject those who do not appear to be compliant with our requests. (Seriously, please do not use your corporate email address on this site. While we keep things secure, it is still not a good idea to use a corporate email address!) To that end, we also request members to consider using 2FA (two factor authentication) either via email or the more preferred smartphone app method using Authy. It is an amazingly simple and secure setup that adds one extra layer of security in a matter of seconds. We have been requested to enable SMS authentication as well, but that is not something we plan on adding until we finish renewing the site. You can review your 2FA settings here. (password required to view)
Lastly, regarding TAG staffing. I have privately been searching for an extra hand and I have now met with three persons, who I declined to accept. (They did not know which site they were interviewing) It is extremely difficult to find trustworthy staff and I elected to search privately, which was in the interest of avoiding any conflict of interest concerns. @Karen remains my right-hand woman for helping manage membership & account issues. @meiji is still around here somewhere, but that is the entire staff at this current stage. (This is of course a non-paid position and it is meant for people who want to build community management skills and improve some technical skill or even soft skills when it comes to interfacing with members and visitors of TAG.
Thank you for your continued support of TAG, every small gesture is appreciated!
(Sidenote: TAG just turned 11 years old!
)