DLD #9 [Park right or get a fine]

I'm going to answer this in a more short-form kind of way because this is definitely something that needs to be part of a much bigger and in-depth conversation so I hope that you will understand that I am not going to be getting in to the nitty-gritty of everything in replying to you here. And you can see how long the "short" answer is so you can probably guess how it's going to be when we get to talking about everything properly as should've happened in the first place (little shot at ourselves there). The truth is that the lag issue(tm) is always being addressed. We're constantly talking with our 'Server Guy' (Good ol' Dom, or "Doom" if I recall the previous uh... wonderful nickname he was given). This is an ongoing thing, every time the server provides hiccups, we're looking at what causes them. Unfortunately... A lot of the hiccups boil down to what we've said before. Foundational issues - these are things that can't just 'be patched' or something like that. They're at the core of what this site is and to fix those is to re-build that core. This doesn't mean that improvements can't / won't / haven't be(en) made. They have been - but the fact these issues still persist should probably tell you something. I'll be upfront in that it doesn't just tell us something, it also gives us something to worry about. How are you meant to grow a site with these issues being prevalent, after all? When ultimately, the fact is that nothing you do with this foundation will fix them. There have been additions that we've made to the site - GOOD additions! - that have actually made this problem worse. For instance, the custom CSS that a lot of people use wasn't always a thing on PFQ and I think we can all agree that it's a pretty neat feature. One such thing that it allows people to do is to stack fields for ease of clicking, then they use keybinds to smash through fields - for some people in less than one second (which is really impressive) but the system wasn't designed for that. Keep in mind, the CSS was a feature added in to this site LATER. It wasn't built with this in mind. One of the key times we actually addressed this was when adding this in pretty much destroyed the website for a short while - Niet found the issue and addressed it by making it so that the clicks that you make... Instead of communicating with Sally individually... Are sent in "bulks". So when you interact that 40 times in a field, you're not saying, "Okay, I did this 1. Okay, I did this 1. Okay, I did this 1." - you are instead saying, "Okay, I did these 40." One single communication instead of Forty! The site came back immediately. The thing is just because we mitigated that problem doesn't mean it is gone. And that's obviously not the only example, it's just a key one off the top of my head. A lot of mitigation has been done - which is good - but mitigating an issue is not equal to removing that issue entirely. One such way that these issues *could* be properly dealt with would be if the site was built in a modular fashion. ...PFQ is not built in such a way. The problem with PFQ is that it has been built in a very interconnected fashion as opposed to a modular one (or anything else) - if you change one thing in one location, you must then change it everywhere. Failure to do so could result in a catastrophic failure. Or in less scary words, "Sally says no". It would just result in the site being inaccessible until the issue is resolved which wouldn't take long but I feel nobody would actually want that to happen. So... Why should you believe anything can be better with a new project? Let me pose you this situation. You have a hobby, or some skill that you're good at. I'm sure everyone has something, after all! How do you get better? Learning, practising... Improving, right? Well, it has been 7 years since PFQ launched. Almost 2,550 days actually - want to know how I can tell? Niet's online chain. He has logged in every day since he started working on the original PokéFarm. That amounts to almost 4,000 days, by the by (if not more, I don't know the exact day he started working on it) But for the sake of this conversation, almost 2,550 days with PFQ. Keep in mind that the original PokéFarm was up on it's own for about 3 years. Maybe 4. I admit to not knowing the exact timeline - that's something Niet would have to chime in on. Around that time there were complaints about PF1 as well. Not just regarding lag but a number of things, like how it wasn't super user-friendly. Do you like your capability to click on a Pokémon with a selected berry and... Well, that's it? Well, unless you were using a completely separate feature which literally removed everything BUT the clicking... You couldn't do that. In order to feed a Pokémon you had to go to its summary page, then click a berry then... Navigate to the next one, or if you were savvy maybe you opened multiple tabs. It... Wasn't user-friendly, like I said. x') Well, where am I going with that? Simple - PFQ was made when Niet was 20/21 years old (again, I don't recall the exact timeline - if it was early in the year he may not have had his birthday yet). He is now 28 years old and he has been doing this the entire time. This is a guy who was so good at his hobby that the company hosting PokéFarm at that time picked him up without a second thought. He then built such a good rapport with them that when he suggested they hire me, of all people, they trusted his judgement and, with a small test that I passed, brought me on post-haste. This, of course, happened after PFQ was made and was also before the recode (the recode happened, for us, when we lived in Leicester - so that I do know the timeline on! ^^') My point is that you don't just get picked up by a server hosting company that is hosting sites of companies that have worths in the millions so flippantly without being good at what you do. We then later quit our jobs there, moved our housing arrangement and went on to do the recode, as mentioned (note, this did NOT change the foundation I speak of *at all*, it only optimised everything as best he could at that time). So... Why should you trust in anything? Because PF1 was built by a 17 year old script kiddy who did a thing because he could. (To quote Niet: "I am upset by how accurate that comment is.") Because PFQ was built by a 20/21 year old young man who saw he could do better than he did in the past. In more ways than one, but that's something for him to talk about. He grew a LOT as a person around this time. And because the difference between PF1 and PFQ was only a few years with someone who wasn't mentally mature making them. Now, 7 years have passed. Skills have improved, mental stability has increased and technology has moved forward where PFQ has not. If these points don't give you anything to trust in then I don't know what will - the fact is that any distrust you have at this time is based on a foundation that was built 7 years ago and we're wanting to build a new foundation so that what PFQ has grown in to can be properly catered to and have a core base that will support what people want. If we got older but our body never adapted, we'd be screwed. That's PFQ in a very simplistic nutshell. 7 years of additional development but PokéFarm's body remains the same as it was when it was 4 years old and it's now 11. Of course it is having problems - it needs a new body. For now, that's where I'll leave that. There needs to be, as I said, a much bigger and clearer discussion for this topic and this really isn't the place for it. Interest has been expressed in another conversation about this so we will open up for a proper discussion in the coming future.

sorry, a new site? that was disastrous for deviantart. i will really miss all my pokemon if you do that... :(

[Question] Can we have a small general update? It's been a little while since the last dev log (2.5 months since the mini dev log), so I was just wondering how things have been going, what's been getting worked on and all that. Even just a little "We've been working on the new site, but nothing big enough to announce/show off/etc" would be fine! It's just been kinda radio silence for a while and it'd be nice to have an update. ;v; I know the art team's been working on galar/exclusives and stuff, but has anything else been worked on outside of art?

As it's now been almost another two weeks, what about the question above please?

Hey, sorry. Some work has been going on but mostly it's just been maintenance, tweaks, nothing major and nothing really worth showing. Life has been... difficult, as I'm sure you can understand. I do still plan on making a post about it, but for now I can only ask for your continued patience. Hopefully it won't be much longer, but I can't make any promises right now.

Totally understood, thank you for the update. ^^

Okay then! I'm sure everything will go well :)