It’s a Cosplay World!

We rounded out the year with a new release, mostly under-the-hood fixes. Hope you enjoyed using COS or NOT in 2007!

Happy new year everyone! May 2008 be a truly cosplaying experience!

My oh my, time flies. It’s been more than two months since the last post!

Well, we may not be posting much, but we are surely hacking a lot.

Just check out COS or NOT and you’ll see plenty of new features!

Hello everyone,

we are well alive and kicking, and user and visitor numbers have been continuously increasing since our release two months ago.

Over the last month, we made a lot of changes, but only two of those where visible features for users and visitors:

• You can now configure your display settings
• You can now filter by user name

Listening to your email, we’ve come up with lots of new features that we believe you will enjoy, and they are in the works! Stay tuned, and please keep letting us know what you like and what you want.

Week three of COS or NOT comes with a simple but powerful new feature:

• Filter by user name

You can now enter filter photos by user name. Just type the user’s name into the user name field in the photo filter, and you’ll get to see only cosplay by that user.

Sooo… if you want to point a friend to your cosplay portfolio on COS or NOT, you could send a link like:

• http://www.cosornot.com/filter?userName=myname

to your friend. Or put it on your website. This way your and everybody else can link to your photos on COS or NOT!

As a system administrator I can see how people praise the cosplay they see. I can also see the stream of praise they provide. (The user itself remains anonymous, of course.). So I can see if a user doles out 1s only. Which has led me to think about the way we praise cosplay on COS or NOT. Here are my observations.

1. The vast majority of people takes their time and provides an honest opinion about a photo. I can see that in a stream of 7, 5, 10, 8, 5, …
2. Some people want to look at photos only and not think about how much they like the cosplay they see, so they go skip it, skip it, skip it, skip it, …
3. Some people seem to settle on one opinion quickly and just keep clicking it, so it looks like 7, 7, 7, 7, …
4. And a small number of people just goes 1, 1, 1, 1, …

Behavior 4 may look highly obnoxious, but it doesn’t matter in the end: Those are too few people, and they’ll get overruled by the majority of people who put in an honest opinion. What can happen, of course, is that the initial praise a photo receives is skewed if a troll passes by who goes 1, 1, 1, 1, … But over time the COS or NOT community will correct this.

What about behavior 3? While not necessarily annoying, it still doesn’t look like an honest vote. One of you pointed out to me that “skip it” doesn’t show how a photo got rated. That’s correct, and we did it on purpose: We wanted to push users towards putting in an honest vote. It now looks like this was a stupid idea, and people go x, x, x, x, … just to see how other people praised a photo without having to have an opinion.

So thanks to the person who pointed this out to us! Thanks to you we’ll change “skip it” to show the praise for the skipped photo in our next release of COS or NOT. (But feel free to use this blog next time rather than email.)

Please keep the feedback coming!

COS or NOT is off to a good start. On the first day we had 20 unique visitors, on the second day we had 40 unique visitors, and today it seems we got even more than that. Thanks for stopping by, now please spread the word!

Gee, who would have thought that one of the first things to report about COS or NOT would be a case of vandalism. Someone apparently spent hours and hours looking at all the photos rating them consistently with 1 only. I hope nobody got offended by this! We can’t do much about it except for saying how pointless such behavior is: Over time, any such rating will be wiped out by the many honest praise cosplayers will receive on COS or NOT. So, please keep spreading the word!

Alright, the password protection is off! Please visit

• COS or NOT in English or
• COS or NOT auf Deutsch

About COS or NOT: This site lets you show, discuss, and praise cosplay work (costumes) made and worn by cosplayers from around the world. You can upload your own photos and you can search for specific characters and see how other cosplayers realized the costume. Enjoy!

Well, we did it. COS or NOT is live! Go to either

• COS or NOT in English or
• COS or NOT auf Deutsch

The site is still password protected, but since you found this blog, we’ll simply tell you the password. User is test, and password is nyaa. We are not advertising the site big-time, because we want to gather feedback. Please let us know what you think about this service. How can we improve it? (And in case you wonder why I’m not telling you what it is: Try it, it is self-explanatory.)

It can only be a matter of days until we start our new cosplay community site!