Cosplay.com will be holding a cosplay contest at Anime Expo on Saturday, July 5 at 12 noon. The location of the contest is on the stage at booth 101 in the dealers' room (Broccoli USA booth).

The contest is being held in conjunction with the following organizations: Cosplay.com, Cosmode, Cosmode USA and Cosmode Online.

Photos of the event will appear on Cosplay.com and in Cosmode magazine! Photographers are welcome to come photograph the event until we've reached the space capacity. Please check with Broccoli for any details on the space limitations.

The main winner will also have a shoot posted in Cosmode USA.

Individual entries only. Walk-on entries only (no performances). You must have made the costume yourself. Judges will be provided by Cosplay.com, Broccoli and Cosmode. Judging will occur off-stage, followed by a quick walk-on for photographs. Full rules appear below.

To sign up for the contest, you must visit the CosWorx booth (Booth #1433/1435) and fill out a form listing information about the costume you will be entering. The cutoff will be 11am Saturday morning, or if we have received too many entries. You may fill your form out anytime before the cutoff.

There will be tons of prizes from CosWorx and Cosmode, including over $500 in CosWorx gift certificates!

Official Rules

All entrants must fill out a form at the CosWorx booth (#1433/1435).

The entry form contains a few questions about your costume which you will be required to fill out. Forms may be filled out on Thursday and Friday. Forms may also be filled out on Saturday before 11am. 11am is the cutoff.

We are cutting off the entries at 50 entrants due to time limitations.

All entrants are asked to arrive at booth #101 between 11:30am and 12noon. Judging will begin at 11:30am, first come first served. Starting at 12, each entrant will go on stage and pose for photos.

Costumes must be from a Japanese anime, manga, or video game.

Individual entries only.

No performances allowed.

You must have made the costume yourself. Exception: obvious store-bought items like generic shoes, socks, etc.

Judges are provided by Cosmode and Cosplay.com. Each of the judges has over 10 years of cosplay experience.

Costumes will be judged on overall craftsmanship.

Prizes are as follows:
1st place: $250 CosWorx gift certificate, photos in CosmodeUSA.
2nd place: $100 CosWorx gift certificate
3rd place: $50 CosWorx gift certificate
Best Prop: $50 CosWorx gift certificate
Best Wig: $50 CosWorx gift certificate

Additional prizes for the winners will be donated by Cosmode, CosmodeUSA and Cosmode Online. Details to be announced soon.

Winners will be announced around 1pm, at the end of the contest.

Additional Judges Choice awards will be given out for other costumes that deserve additional mention. These awards are all at the judges' discretion.

Any additional questions may be asked at the CosWorx booth (1433/1435)

BBCode is now fixed in the journals - it was appearing only for some user levels but now appears for all. If you created an entry with BBCode it will automatically convert.

So, now that the journals are open, I figured this was the best format to use to talk with everyone about them.

I rolled them out kind of quietly to make sure we didn't get inundated at first, but they've been working out great so far. There are a lot of features coming up in them, but if you have any suggestions go ahead and post a reply to this entry and we'll talk more.

Keep in mind that we are also opening up "Upgraded" memberships in around 10 days, and some journal features will open up for those specifically.

Here are some planned features coming in the next few weeks after I finish testing them. Features with a * are upgraded membership features:

• Embed Polls
• Journal Templates (this is a cool one, you can choose a template like "review" and review your favorite anime/games, or a "tutorial" template which will give you the ability to make a tutorial with pages/sections, etc)
• Convention Report Templates
• Receive emails when someone replies
• Multi-page entries
• Journal cuts
• Subscribe to users' journals
• Comment Icons (kinda like livejournal where you can reply with different icons you upload) *
• Wysiwyg editor for posts *
• Embed Youtube videos *
• Embed photos from your gallery *
• Embed thumbnails from your gallery (essentially making your own gallery layouts) *

I'm probably missing some things I already have halfway finished, but since the journals are more for you guys to express yourselves creatively on the site, go ahead and list some things you'd like to see added in the future. Remember that the rules have to be kept in mind for future updates. Also, anything causing a huge jump in bandwidth or a lot of time creating might fall into "upgraded member" status, which isn't too huge a deal cause the upgrades really add a lot of cool features to begin with.

Journals are now open on the site.

You can use BBCode to make things bold or change the size of text. Most other BBCode works except IMG code.

Links can be made with the URL code inside of brackets:

Journals may not be used for selling anything, or promoting a commercial website. You are welcome to promote your personal website so long as the entry isn't just a plain link to your site. Full information is in the rules link below.

You are allowed to be off-topic in your journals but you must mark them as off-topic and may not cross-post off-topic entries into costumes or events.

Please read the full rules here before posting: http://www.cosplay.com/info/rules_journal/

If you find a journal entry that needs to be reported, there is a Report Abuse link at the top of every entry.

Starting drama on purpose or calling out/criticizing other cosplayers will result in the removal of your journal.

Commenting is enabled by default. Uncheck "Allow Comments" to disable comments in your journal entry.

The main journal page is now located at http://www.cosplay.com/journal/

The main cosplayers page is now a hybrid of journal entries and latest cosplayers, and branches off into their respective sections from there.

Have fun!

Note - a couple of quick template edits are being finished in the next few minutes. They required the site going live in order to do it.

A few new features have been added, lots of fixes applied, and the profile templates have been changed to the intended version. Not much has changed in the background other than a couple of code fixes to speed things up a tad.

The site is now much cleaner and easier to navigate. While things like the profiles have been in development for a long time now, many suggestions were taken into account with regard to the navigation of the profiles on the site. The most important issue was making sure that you had the same link format on every single page, rather than the user boxes jumping around depending on the section you were in.

Please note that the only real aesthetic changes have occurred to the profiles and the user control panels, along with the user navigation panels. The front page of the site is next to get ripped apart and sewn back together.

Browsing the latest photo galleries and costumes have not changed.

Here's a quick rundown of the new changes:

Photoshoots are now open.
There are some amazing photographers showcasing their work at http://www.cosplay.com/shoots/

Real profiles are now open (finally).
The old profile was just a placeholder (and a really ugly one at that) for the newer, more organized profiles now available. They are around one month late and I apologize.

Choose your 5 main photos from your photo pages. Move them around from the Photos section in the control panel. There is a quick example in the Site HQ forum under "Profile Preview" on how to do this, but I will put up more information in a bit.

You can PM someone from within their profile.

Change the middle section from your options. You can either show your About Me entry (now a field in your profile), your Q&A section, or journal entries. The default is the Q&A since most people have one filled out.

We'll have more customization available in the future. I'll get this out of the way now - no, we are not adding "top friends" lists or ways to add wallpaper backgrounds to profiles via CSS. There are many other sites to do that on. Your profile is a simple, streamlined format set up so that when you go to every profile, the layout is the same and the links are all in the same places.

If you want to allow people to leave you public comments, you can enable this in your options. It will create a separate page for comments on your profile. This is disabled for everyone by default, so you will have to manually open this feature if you actually want it.

All Items are now fully integrated.
Now your profile page is actually worth linking to. Everything you have added on Cosplay.com is now linked from the organized panel to the right.

Galleries and Photos are now separated properly.
The front page of your Photos link shows all of your latest photos.
The front page of your Galleries link shows all of your latest galleries.

When you view a photo, the user panel on the right shows the associated costume, gallery and event.

Journals are almost open.
If you would prefer to not use the journal and would not like it to appear on your profile as a link, you can shut it off completely by editing your options here: http://www.cosplay.com/profile.php?do=editoptions

Purposely start drama in them and we'll ban you. Seriously.
Associate your entry with a costume and it will appear in your costume's page too, allowing you to have a costume journal if you'd like.

Full rules/instructions posted soon.

The user control panel version 2 is now open.
Access is from the bluish-purplish control bar. Everything you do to your account can now be controlled from the same control bar.

Comments Expanded
Comment on more than just photos. Or don't.

Note: Comment email notifications are only working with photos for now. Everything else will appear in the comment viewer (next entry below . . .) We'll expand this to include the choice to receive emails on more items shortly.

You can turn on/off commenting on your costumes and photos from the options page here: http://www.cosplay.com/profile.php?do=editoptions

The comment viewer is now open.
You can view all comments left on your items by visiting the comment page at http://www.cosplay.com/user_messages.php. It is very basic for now. There will be much more functionality soon, including the ability to mark comments as "read" so they don't show up in the list anymore. Hopefully this will help some people who aren't getting email notifications until we get the email issue fixed.

Message Center is now open.
All of your messaging is tied into one section, which will be expanding over time. System messages and journal update messages will be available in early May. System messages contain important updates from Cosplay.com, such as if you have a photo moderated or you have received a showcase notification.

Favorites page is now open.
It includes the costumes now. You can view all of your favorites on one page, or browse through costumes and photos separately. You can also check your buddy list from this page. (Still has a few quick fixes coming for the costumes part).

CosWorx Rocks
10% off of wigs the rest of today, just for the hell of it. Coupon Code COSPLAY99

Have fun.
Thanks for being patient, everyone. Please take a couple of days to get used to where everything has moved to and I'm sure you'll like the more intuitive interface. And thank you everyone for emailing/PM'ing suggestions.

Updates Phase 3: May 15. No real changes to the layout, just tons of new features I'm sure everyone will get a kick out of, and some expanded international functions to help out the 51% of our active members who aren't based in the USA.