part 2 of exploring ufo town. if this hits a third part, i'm going to use the same image of akanishi from last post. might as well keep them all together, lolz.
after circle, we have... square. i'm not kidding. but it's sort of like town square, a plaza. and at first, the link on the home page doesn't work, so you get redirected. this time we get to the plaza subdomain, but within the forum folder... so, i'm not sure whether or not this is actually all that square was.
there's not much we can get out of the page we were redirected to, unfortunately. it's pretty much just forums and articles. humor, celebrity, and popular forums are listed on there, as well as some rankings. this page shows the same events and "premium links" in the circle page as well. a lot of the links i tried to click on either didn't work at all or were loading very slowly, which made me suspicious. i was able to load an snsd article, though. the images were very cute.
ah, also. i didn't mention it in the last post, but groups and accounts have a little icon next to their name, corresponding to a particular star issue. or "issue feedback" types, which is how i described them. but on the home page, they were called star issues. the little icons also had numbers on them, 1-5. i wish i could understand how this leveling / ranking system worked, but i have no clue. the best guess i have right now is that the user or groups mostly focused on or posted material under that particular type, or participated in forums and groups that heralded this one type of content. sort of like how you have to manage different stats in an rpg, you could manage different types of content and end up "proficient" in a particular type. but that's just a guess.
moving on, we have fanletter. i wanted to save this for last (at least, last in the navigation bar before i dived deeper into the stuff on the homepage), as this seemed to be the bread and butter of the site. and, thankfully, this has more content to explore than the other archived pages. forever gnawing on what those could be... but no more sadness!
first up in the fan letter section is fan letter star ufo. here, you could go to an artist's circle profile, check out the most popular messages (called fly, i'm assuming those are short messages instead of full fan letters) to them, and their mailbox, which is more short messages. i think they're arranged by time (newest posted). you could also watch a video clip and see a message from the artist themselves. dbsk's video was the wrong number mv, but the link wasn't archived.
through the flsu, you could navigate to an artist's "radio channel". it wasn't actually guidelines for tuning into a radio station, though. through the radio, you'd be given a number to call. and when you called that number, you'd hear pre-recorded messages or audio diaries from the artist of your choice. for instance, dbsk's was called the 동방신기diary. shinee's was called the shining shinee's journal, lolz. the number was open 24/7, and free (no extra call charges).
dbsk's profile also linked to a tarot card reading and something called "corner introduction". the links don't work, though.
within the radio channel folder, there were two more pages to access. on the first, you could request "keywords" to your artist of choice. if your keyword was chosen, they'd talk about it in an upcoming radio message. most of the ones i saw were pretty basic, such as asking them who their fave artists were, or what they would do if they couldn't sing or dance all of a sudden.
the second page was something referred to as "lifestory", but the title of the page was more like "survival guide"? i tried perusing through some of the posts they had there, but most of them were titled something along the lines of "keyword memorization", and the comments were people begging for the artists to reply. so i'm ultimately unsure what went on there.
that's enough for radio though, so we're now moving onto best star reply. i'm not sure what best replies are-- they're replies to the fans' letters, of course, but the conditions for the best reply aren't totally clear. when trying to view one, you get a massive missing image in return.
next up is fan letter star. in the url, this shows up as imstar. this appears to be the most popular user on the platform, for a week. not an idol, but a fan who's highlighted for a week. i also am not sure what the qualifications for this are, but on the main page, the fan star of the week answers a little questionnaire. people can comment on it. you can also view past fan letter stars.
it's interesting that they have this... i don't mean this to be a dig, but since fan letters would cost the users money, and they had some sort of paid tier (i think-- i'm getting to this later), i can't help but wonder if it's more of a statement on how rich the fan letter star is than anything else, and meant to encourage users to spend more money on their services. i have whole other opinions on fandom's relationship to money, but that's not important right now. that just came to mind.
after that is yuta / uta story. the word 유타 is something that pops up on the site all the time, but i'm still not sure what it means. by the looks of it, it appears to just be another type of post from the artists.
the final section within the fan letter section is fly book. none of the links work. at first, i thought it was some sort of exclusive photo book for the site. but as it turns out, they're books full of messages from the fans to the stars, which were stated to then be given to the stars. you could view them, but. well.
and that's it for the fan letter section. yeah, we're gonna need a third post. my back hurts.
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