Welcome to Wonderland, bunbuns! Thank you for taking the time to read our rules and FAQ; we wrote this for the benefit of the community and to enrich your experience on the forum, not just because we're a bunch of whip-cracking rule-nazi jerks. Well, not entirely, anyway. Ahem. Anyway, this is to help you understand what's expected of you, what you can expect from the staff and fellow forumers, and to help you get started on the forum. We strive to be one of the most open, inviting, and friendly anime culture communities on the internet, and this is intended to reflect that. If you need help with anything or have any questions at all, scroll down to the staff contact info and give one of us a shout.


1.) What is Wonderland?

Wonderland began in May of 2003 as an Azumanga Daioh forum, founded by our wonderful webmistress Anna (Revan) as an extension of her Wonderland Azumanga fan site. Though initially somewhat slow to take off, the forum population exploded in 2004 and 2005 with the American licensing and release of Azumanga by ADV Films. The new members brought with them a wide-ranging plethora of anime, manga, gaming, and Japanese culture interests, and over time as the interest in Azumanga itself waned the focus of the board as a whole shifted from Azumanga specifically to anime in general with an unofficial focus on following new releases and current series. Due to this shift in focus and in an effort to reinvigorate the community, the decision was made in 2010 to officially change the "mission" of the board to general anime discussion. In April of 2011 this was accomapnied by a name change to Wonderland Anime Forums (dropping Azumanga Daioh from the title completely) and a move from Invisionfree to self-hosted phpBB3 forum software, which itself was driven in no small part by a crippling server crash in late 2006 (the full story of that disaster is detailed in the FAQ.) The board celebrated its 8th anniversary in May of 2011, and although we aren't as busy or utterly insane as we once were we continue to strive to expand our ranks, broaden our horizons, and keep a collective finger on the pulse of anime culture and releases in Japan.

No small part of the Wonderland experience is the annual meeting of forum members at the Otakon convention in Baltimore, Maryland in the northeast United States. Members have come from as far away as Washington State, LA, Atlantic Canada, the UK, by car from southeast Texas and Louisiana, and even Slovenia in eastern Europe to take part in what can only be described as a four-day (we get started on Thursday) fungasm of cosplay, group watchings of random anime, kooky TV series, and Mystery Science Theater 3000, radio-coordinated assaults on the dealer's hall, and extra-curricular dance events powered by old-school hip-hop, funk, and anime-themed techno blasted from specially-constructed concealable portable stereos known as "sack stereos." Although the core attendance has remained largely intact since the first such meeting in 2005 we welcome and encourage absolutely everyone on the forum to come and participate if you have the means to do so. Our motto (actually I just made this up right now) is "Post counts are meaningless in person." New member or established Wondertard, there is no better way to experience the Wonderland Effect (tm)(actually I just made that up too) than in person at the second-largest anime convention in North America.


2.) The Council.. er, The Staff

A diverse multinational body with members from Canada, Australia, America, and a super-intelligent colobus monkey the Wonderland Staff are the folks that keep the gears turning, the sprockets sproinging, and the Visigoth hordes at bay.

Okay, in reality we're all fans like you who volunteer our time and talents to keep the forum clean, current, and peaceful. We're a (mostly) normal group of people and completely approachable, so don't hesitate to get in touch with us with any problem you might have. You can click on each member's name to be taken directly to their private message (PM) contact page. Online times shown are approximate, so contact whoever you see online if something needs to be brought to out attention immediately.

Revan (Anna, board founder and lead admin)
Online during early and mid-evening hours, Atlantic Canadian time.

tom (Tom, superadmin)
Online during early to late evening hours, Atlantic Canadian time.

Hishy-kyun (Josh, admin)
Online during daytime and late evening hours, US Central time.

osakaki (Barry, admin)
Online during morning, daytime, and evening hours, US Pacific time.

Thane (Benny, moderator)
Online during evening and night hours, US Eastern time.

Keel (Camille, moderator)
Online during TACO TIME, US/Canadian Pacific time.


3.) Forum Rules & Regulations

The part you were all waiting for, right? Right? Okay, in all seriousness what follows is simple common courtesy and basic forum stuff which you will find in some form on any well-run internet message board. We don't enjoy suspending or banning people for breaking these rules, but we also don't put up with people bringing down our good time and we will be ruthless to trolls and creeps when called for. So please, do all of us a favor and please abide by the following.

• a.) No spamming, flaming or trolling.

The #1 rule of any civilized internet forum. To put it in plain English, play nice and respect your neighbors. If you don’t like someone, don’t bring it up in the open forum. If you disagree with someone, take it off the forum. Don’t be a jerk and post crap or pick fights in threads started by or populated by people you don’t like. You get the idea. We will be ruthless in handing out suspensions and bans if this rule is broken.

Also, don't post unintelligible nonsense outside of designated Games threads. This includes "leetspeak," "chatspeak," and other made-up internet languages. If English isn't your first language that's fine, but please let us know in your introduction thread so we don't mistake you for a spammer. Otherwise, use the best plain-language English you're capable of. We're not looking for collegiate essay English here, just good spelling, language, and punctuation.

• b.) Use common sense and good judgement when posting.

Basically, think before you post. Is this an incendiary topic? Would I say this out loud in school or the workplace? Don’t post things that could easily be taken in a negative context, or might cause offense to someone. If you want to discuss a hot-button topic (like religion, politics, anime dubs, or things of that nature) please do so in a sane and civilized manner. Be constructive with your arguments, and open to criticism and differences in opinion. And again, please use the best plain-language English you can.

• c.) No plagiarism.

Don’t do stupid stuff like posting others’ art or writing as your own. However, don’t let that discourage you from posting pics or other works at all. Just give credit where it’s due when doing so.

• d.) Don't hotlink images from sites that aren't yours.

Very important - please please PLEASE don't post an image that isn't hosted on your own web space or on a free image host. This includes your avatar and any signature pics you might have. If you're unfamiliar with how image hosting works, please read the image host tutorial.

• e.) No pornography, profanity, lolicon or other innocence-destroying stuff.

Please keep the forums work and child safe. That means no profanity, "sexual" references, and NO eeeeevil pictures. Posting certain material (swimsuits, etc.) is okay as long as the link is clearly marked with WARNING!!, "NSFW" or something similar.. but it's always best to ask a mod or admin first if you're even the least bit unsure. We do have children here as well as folks who browse from school and work. Please don't ruin their experience here.

Mods and admins may exercise discretion in linking or removing altogether written or visual material that depicts children or other "innocent" characters in violent or psuedo-pornographic situations. Again, ask before you post if you're unsure. If you don't ask and we remove something you post, don't take it as a personal attack.. just understand that this isn't the venue for it.

We do have a ZERO-TOLERANCE rule for child porn, lolicon, shotacon, or anything that might be mistaken for such. Don't even post it as a joke.. you will be suspended or banned without notice.

• f.) No website promotion outside of designated areas.

You can put links to other websites in your sig and there is an official website promotion thread here, but that's it. Don't go around posting links to SUPERAWESOME ANIME FORUM or other websites all over the place.

• g.) No celebration of postcount milestones.

Post count is a number - that's it. It doesn't earn you awards or special treatment, so don't start threads for it.

• h.) Read the pinned threads and use the Search function before starting a new thread.

We're a fairly mature forum in internet terms. There's a good chance that what you want to discuss has been discussed before. Necroposting is not prohibited here - in fact, we encourage it! So do a search before you start a new thread, and if an old thread comes up then go right ahead and bump it. We even have a search tutorial if you don't understand how to use it. And for anime series, we also have a handy-dandy thread index of every series that has ever been discussed here, and we do update it regularly. If you do start a thread and someone points out that it's a duplicate or a mod merges it with the older thread, don't get discouraged and don't take it personally.

And on the flip side, be polite when pointing out duplicate threads. "In before the lock" meme pics and posts are unnecessary, rude, and violate our no-spam rule.

• i.) No duplicate user accounts.

You get one account and that's it. Sorry. If you lose your password and can't get into your registered e-mail account, send a help request to wonderland@schala.net and we'll fix you up. Or if you don't like your username or made a mistake while registering, we can fix that too.. just send an e-mail or PM an admin. If you do create another account and try to post with it, we will find out and delete it.

• j.) Remain contactable.

The board staff needs to be able to contact you at any time. If your PM inbox is full and your registered e-mail is out of date, we can't do that. Please - keep your PM inbox clear (the limit is 200 messages, so there's really no excuse for letting it fill up) and your contact e-mail current. If we do try to contact you and are not able to, we will be forced to make you aware of the situation by suspending your posting privileges until you correct the problem!

• k.) Don't be a wannabe-mod. Use the Report button.

We have a tutorial for this too. Basically, if you see a post that breaks the rules, or if someone has a gigantic pic or bad stuff in their sig, use the button to let us know. Or if something is egregiously bad (child porn, etc.) then send a PM to a mod or admin directly if you see one online. Do not take matters into your own hands and call them out on it - it just makes things worse and makes our jobs harder.


4.) Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How do I upload an avatar? What's a "sig?"
A: These answers and more are now available in our super-duper updated and current tutorials thread. There you can read up on how to upload an avatar, how to put stuff in your sig, and how to use our many BBCodes in your posting.

Q: What exactly am I allowed to have in my sig space?
A: Anything that abides by the rules in this document, except for embedded Youtube videos and super-giant text. Images, collections of images, and multiple images in arrangements can be no larger than 750 pixels in width, 250 pixels in height, and no more than 300 KB filesize. If you reach that maximum, you are only allowed one additional line of normal-size text above or beneath the images. But within that space, anything rule-abiding goes. You are also free to link to your web page, other forums, videos, or anything else that abides by the rules here.

Q: Is there a place where I can post my fanfics, artwork, or music?
A: Anything arty or creative can go in the aptly-named Art & Creativity forum. If you're into building things we also have a builder/maker thread. Want to talk cosplay or post your projects? Head on over to the Conventions & Cosplay thread.

Q: I just joined and there are so many threads! Where should I start?
A: Well, first off we heartily encourage you to post an introduction thread in the Introductions forum. Basically, what you do there is introduce yourself, talk about your interests, why you joined, and so forth. How much information you reveal about yourself is entirely up to you - but the more descriptive you are about your interests the more likely people are to respond.

After that, check these threads out:
What anime are you watching?
Anime Suggestions thread. Get suggestions on new things to watch!
What manga are you reading?
What video games are you currently playing?
What music are you listening to?
What (music) can't you stop listening to?
The Daily Huh. Post about odd things you encounter throughout the day.
What books/magazines/western comics are you reading?
Models, toys, and figure collections. Post your awesome figure collection here!
Complain about the weather here.
The Daily LOL. Post humorous things you encounter throughout the day.
Bought something recently? Show it off here!
Random Outbursts thread. Go nuts here! WOOBLYWOOBLYWOOOOOO~

Q: I posted a couple of times in that Random Outbursts thread, but it doesn't look like my post count went up. What's going on?
A: Posts made in the Games forum don't count towards your overall post count. This was done because the Games forum is basically a sanctioned spam forum (common sense still applies, though.. don't abuse it) and years ago people would post nothing but nonsense in there to push their post counts up. Remember: quality over quantity. It's just a number.

Q: What are the little names like "Otakon Crew" and "Bucket" under peoples' names? How can I get one?
A: Those are custom user ranks and can only be added by the admins. You can get one of your own in two ways:

• Contribute to the forum. Create a banner or a flyer. Volunteer to help with a forum project when volunteers are asked for. Write a tutorial.
• Go to Otakon. Seriously, it's a blast and you won't regret the experience.

Q: I just logged in and a bunch of peoples' names have changed! Did we get hacked?
A: From time to time the admins will go on a silly streak and change a bunch of peoples' names for "teh luls" either as part of a theme or just at random. People will sometimes be given ranks for the same reason. Usually if the names are part of a theme (Star Wars, Harry Potter, and things of that nature) you can participate simply by asking via PM or in the announcement thread if there is one. The one thing you don't do to get a name change or custom title is to complain about not having one. Protip: remember the first and second rules of Fight Club. What we don't want to happen is for name changes to get locked down and ranks/titles to go away completely because it became a big dramatic THING.

Q: So I went back and read some old threads from 2004 and 2005, and I keep seeing people talk about these "clubs" like "the Azumisits." What was that all about?
A: TL;DR version: The clubs started off with good intentions but got to be a gigantic pain in the bunbun for the staff over time, so they were removed. Sorry. Trust me, it was no great loss there towards the end.

Epic story version: Back in "the day” there was a fellow by the name of The Psychomatic Poet. Nothing pleased him more than keepin’ it real with his Wonderland homies, so he created a title for himself and his like-minded associates: the Azumisfits. Ol’ Poet liked himself some 2D animated ladies too, so he and his merry men founded an all-inclusive club called the Pro-Anigirl Revolutionary Faction, or PARF for short. Some disagreement was had over what exactly qualified someone to be an Azumisfit, but once that was resolved all was good. As time progressed, more clubs were founded, and soon you could be a PARFer, a FAAFer (Futuristic Aniboys something-or-other), an APLSer, a BMRFer, or pretty much anything else you wanted to be. Then along came a nameless individual who took everything to the n’th degree by creating a gazillion clubs and arguing with anyone and everyone over why we needed them, what qualified someone to join them, and so on. Tempers flared, Domo-kun killed a couple of kittens, and eventually some ground rules were laid. The nameless individual went on to make himself unwelcome by being a “bosh'tet”, and he was eventually (not so) politely asked to leave. Then things calmed down for awhile, until August 18, 2005. During the first-ever meeting of Wonderland members at the Otakon convention in Baltimore a quasar was inadvertently drawn through a tear in the space-time continum, which itself occured when the combined awesome of Wonderland collided with the hobo hordes outside the Baltimore Convention Center. This quasar morphed into a 1.21-gigawatt death ray that would have destroyed the entire eastern seaboard had Admin Tom not directed it at the Games forum at the last minute. Unfortunately, the Games forum was blown apart and scattered across a billion universes. This later came to be known as the "colt forty christ" effect.

Q: I keep seeing these big gaps in threads around 2006. Some of them look like they weren't posted in at all until years later. What happened there?
A: As previously stated we were originally an Invisionfree forum. On top of that we were hosted on S1, the original Invision server from 2003. On November 22, 2006 at approximately 6:30 PM US Central time the server experienced a hard drive failure. Unbeknownst to any of the Invisionfree users on that server the last update had not been done since March of that year, so literally in the blink of an eye we (along with over a hundred other forums) lost 9 months of posting. For 2 months after the Invision staff promised us they would be able to recover the lost data, but in what can only be described as an EPIC FAIL the data center where the server was located sent the wrong hard drive in for recovery. Ergo, the missing 9 months were forever lost to history. After that the staff resolved to never let it happen again, and 5 years later we eventually moved to where we are now.. with frequent secure backups and vastly superior forum software.

Q: I'm seeing names of giant robots and anime characters in gray in the online users list, but they're not users. Who are they?
A: PHPBB3 allows you to add crawlers/bots/spiders (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) as online users when they land on the site instead of showing up under the mysterious "guest" label. Normally they're called things like Google [Bot] or Yahoo [Bot], but we gave them the names of anime robots instead to make things a little different. If you're curious, you can see which names go with which bot here. And if you're wondering to yourself what a "bot" is, you can read more here.

Q: How do I get to be a staff member?
A: It's a complicated process. You have to travel by foot to the Citadel in Canada (no, not the one in Halifax, a different one) whereupon you will must best Jerkface Shepard in a week-long battle of wits and pies. If you succeed you must revoke your shoe rights to Revan and train under the Great Admin Tom for a year in the ways of the bunbun. It's cold and grueling and there's no TV. You can't bring an iPod. The uniforms are all frilly skirts. The dropout rate is twice as high as the US Navy SEALs training program.

In other words, don't ask.


Aaaand on that note, we'll conclude the Wonderland Rules & FAQ. Post often, be merry, and enjoy your stay! YOU are our most valuable resource and we want YOU to stick around and become part of the family. You Belong.


Mission Statement
-To be the friendliest and most inviting anime community on the internet.
-To make every new member feel like part of the community.
-To ensure that everyone is treated equally, with no preference to gender, nationality, or sexual orientation.
-To work with people and resolve any issues they may have with the community at large.
-To be fair and even-handed when disciplinary action becomes necessary.
-To remain current and relevant within the anime fandom scene.
-To spread our unique flavor of fandom far and wide across the internet.