As a result of one of our hosts ending support for the technology used by our Trainer Card Maker, News and Guides frontends on the 31st of January, we will be temporarily suspending all parts of the website other than these forums on Thursday the 30th of January for an indefinite amount of time.
Alongside this forced downtime, as part of a need to immediately reduce server costs, the PokéDex will be deactivated for the meantime and over the next few weeks, we will be removing any saved Trainer Cards stored on our server to bring down storage and bandwidth costs. We encourage you to download any you wish to keep safe ASAP.
The Trainer Card Maker will return in the future. However, we will no longer be offering hosting services for the generated cards, so it will become necessary to download them to your device and re-upload them elsewhere to share them. Future development and new assets for the Trainer Card Maker are also likely to remain significantly reduced, or not happen at all, going forward.
Development on the Creative Corner and the next version of the site around it has also been cancelled, with my apologies for failing to deliver on that promise.
Last year, personal reasons forced me to take a break from working on the website, and at this point, with my life no longer what it was just two years ago, there simply isn't the time, energy or money left to invest in moving the site forward any further at this time.
At the same time, the Internet itself is no longer what it once was. Social Media as a whole is, by now, largely a write-off. Meanwhile, creative platforms have to manage not only the impact of Generative AI diluting the User Generated Content but also being ethically responsible in trying to protect genuine users and their hard work from unethical, non-consensual scraping for use in copyright-infringing datasets being used to train the next wave of commercial models. Thanks both to a complete failure of Governments around the world to keep up with legislating this technology and to the regulatory capture and growing tech-based oligarchies threatening Western Democracy as a whole.
The Creative Corner, unfortunately, is a project that has been outpaced by the rest of the world. The scope of building, maintaining and managing it as a platform is no longer feasible, even if my circumstances hadn't also changed in the meantime.
It's been important to me to try to avoid letting everyone down as much as possible, even when it's become clear that the site cannot continue as it currently is, and that there won't be a place - at least any time soon - for future growth. That is why I've been working on a new version of the Trainer Card Maker that can run in a low-cost manner and can remain online, even if functionality and updates to it are reduced. Unfortunately, my hand has been forced by both the imminent lack of support for the current version's software and an increasing need to eliminate the significant financial losses I have been personally covering for years.
It will not be possible to release that version ahead of any necessary downtime or changes, so for now, we will redirect the other parts of the site to this announcement, and I will continue to work, when I can, on the new TCM to get it ready as quickly as possible. I'd like to hope that a soft deadline of the 17th March can be achievable, but I can't make that a promise.
Once again, my apologies for the bad news. Thank you all for your support throughout the years so far. Hopefully, we will return to grow again and be better than ever, but in the meantime, we'll always be here in some way or another.
Alongside this forced downtime, as part of a need to immediately reduce server costs, the PokéDex will be deactivated for the meantime and over the next few weeks, we will be removing any saved Trainer Cards stored on our server to bring down storage and bandwidth costs. We encourage you to download any you wish to keep safe ASAP.
The Trainer Card Maker will return in the future. However, we will no longer be offering hosting services for the generated cards, so it will become necessary to download them to your device and re-upload them elsewhere to share them. Future development and new assets for the Trainer Card Maker are also likely to remain significantly reduced, or not happen at all, going forward.
Development on the Creative Corner and the next version of the site around it has also been cancelled, with my apologies for failing to deliver on that promise.
Last year, personal reasons forced me to take a break from working on the website, and at this point, with my life no longer what it was just two years ago, there simply isn't the time, energy or money left to invest in moving the site forward any further at this time.
At the same time, the Internet itself is no longer what it once was. Social Media as a whole is, by now, largely a write-off. Meanwhile, creative platforms have to manage not only the impact of Generative AI diluting the User Generated Content but also being ethically responsible in trying to protect genuine users and their hard work from unethical, non-consensual scraping for use in copyright-infringing datasets being used to train the next wave of commercial models. Thanks both to a complete failure of Governments around the world to keep up with legislating this technology and to the regulatory capture and growing tech-based oligarchies threatening Western Democracy as a whole.
The Creative Corner, unfortunately, is a project that has been outpaced by the rest of the world. The scope of building, maintaining and managing it as a platform is no longer feasible, even if my circumstances hadn't also changed in the meantime.
It's been important to me to try to avoid letting everyone down as much as possible, even when it's become clear that the site cannot continue as it currently is, and that there won't be a place - at least any time soon - for future growth. That is why I've been working on a new version of the Trainer Card Maker that can run in a low-cost manner and can remain online, even if functionality and updates to it are reduced. Unfortunately, my hand has been forced by both the imminent lack of support for the current version's software and an increasing need to eliminate the significant financial losses I have been personally covering for years.
It will not be possible to release that version ahead of any necessary downtime or changes, so for now, we will redirect the other parts of the site to this announcement, and I will continue to work, when I can, on the new TCM to get it ready as quickly as possible. I'd like to hope that a soft deadline of the 17th March can be achievable, but I can't make that a promise.
Once again, my apologies for the bad news. Thank you all for your support throughout the years so far. Hopefully, we will return to grow again and be better than ever, but in the meantime, we'll always be here in some way or another.
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