There have been a few questions and misunderstandings going around with regards to the relaunch this weekend, so this is just a quick attempt to try and answer all of them as much as possible:
Q. Why has everything changed?
A: We've gone into it a few times in news posts about the relaunch, but for anyone who might have missed it, the short answer is that we were several years out of date on our forum software. This meant it was no longer supported with vital security updates that allow us to ensure that the site isn't vulnerable to being hacked and having all of your user data leaked (not to mention the damage it could do to the content we have if it happened). For all those years, we've been unable to upgrade to the latest supported version purely because absolutely none of our custom features - the News, the Trainer Card Maker or the Creative Corner - would work with it without completely throwing away everything we had and starting from scratch.
With the fact we had to do that anyway, we made the decision to ensure we can't fall victim to this problem again by developing the rest of the site completely separately to the forums. This also allows us to do much more in the way of new, original content on the main site, as well as much more rapid and meaningful updates to the Trainer Card Maker. The reality is, though, that it left us with no choice but to effectively start again with an entirely new website - the only thing we could even carry over during the upgrade was existing forum posts and existing user profiles.
Unfortunately, while we could fairly easily work around not being able to get existing content from the integrated versions of the News and Trainer Card Maker out of the forums, the same was not true of the Creative Corner. Combined with the fact that developing a completely custom version of the Corner would add even more time to a process that had taken years already - and we had, effectively, a ticking time bomb on our hands with our outdated forums - it simply hasn't been feasible to develop a completely new solution for this for now.
The good news is that now that the relaunch itself is out of the way, we can sooner, rather than later, start the process of looking forward into what we can do next. We already expect to roll out a lot more new functionality to the Trainer Card Maker and other new features now that we've established a solid development framework to be able to do so.
Later this year we will be expanding user accounts to the rest of the site, rather than just the forums, which will allow for features such as saving Trainer Cards to your profiles again. Once this next stage is completed, we definitely intend to revisit the option of a whole new Creative Corner, but I hope you can appreciate that it is no small undertaking to develop something like this and it's at this point we will have to determine whether the very limited time and money that we have to do this kind of work would actually make it feasible.
In the meantime we very much encourage people who wish to share their artworks and writing to do so in the forums and we will be looking into how we can improve how that looks and feels as much as possible now that we have the most up-to-date forum software.
We also have a lot of people sharing their artwork in our new Discord server's #creative-showcase channel so please also feel free to join them if you'd like.
Q. Where is all the old Creative Corner content?
A. It took us a little extra time due to some unexpected issues during the Relaunch, but the Creative Corner Archive is now live at https://archive.pokecharms.com (Creative Corner | Pokécharms)!
All existing Corner content should be safely available and will remain so at the new URL (if you've linked your work elsewhere previously, it should automatically redirect to the new one). If you encounter any issues there, simply let us know and we'll take a look into it.
Q. Where are my saved-to-profile Trainer Cards?
A. While you currently can't access these whilst logged into the forums, you will be able to find Trainer Cards you had saved to your profile pre-Relaunch by logging into your account on the Creative Corner Archive. The ability to do so will eventually be removed as we dial down the archive into being completely static later on, so we'd recommend downloading any cards saved here for safe keeping sooner rather than later.
Q. How do I report any issues or bugs following the relaunch?
A. Please post any issues or bugs you encounter when using the site to this Feedback forum. We also have a #site-help channel in the Discord server where people have been letting us know anything they've found or asking for any help understanding the new features, so feel free to join and ask there as well.
Q. Can I use the Trainer Card Maker assets in my own project?
A. The majority of the Legacy Trainer Card assets are completely custom, submitted by other Pokécharms users over the years, and are not available for anyone to use in any other project. The currently available assets in the Modern style cards are predominantly official assets but the specific assets used have been prepared specifically for the Trainer Card Maker and we'd ask you to simply source the original assets yourself if you wish to use them in your own works. The tl;dr is, no, please and thank you.
Q. Can I submit new assets for the Trainer Card Maker?
A. In the next few weeks we'll be opening up new submissions topics for people who wish to submit custom trainer sprites and backgrounds for the Legacy Trainer Card Maker again. We will be looking at the best way to do this for the Modern cards as well and will hopefully be offering that option soon too. We do have a lot of official content we can keep consistent updates for it going with, however, so we will be prioritising that for now.
In the past, we didn't keep as good track of the credits for custom assets as we'd now like to have done, so are working on trying to attribute all existing custom assets to the users that submitted them originally. In the future, all new custom assets will have this credit available alongside their work in the Trainer Card Maker.
Q. Will you be adding _____ to the Trainer Card Maker?
A. Once we've finished the outstanding work from the relaunch, we'll jump right into preparing the first update to the Trainer Card Maker with more modern Trainer and Pokémon assets. Future updates will add even more, as well as additional features such as selecting Shiny Pokémon or your Pokémon's gender and more besides.
This new version of the TCM is specifically designed around being able to deliver consistent updates, so you can expect at least one update every few weeks going forward while we have materials and features to roll out.
Q. Can I upload my OC to the Trainer Card Maker?
A. We don't allow uploading custom assets directly into the Trainer Card Maker. Everything on there is specifically curated for wider use by everyone. As we always have done, we encourage people to submit their custom content in the Trainer Card Maker submissions topics (once they're available) if they'd like to see their work available to use within it - though, again, we curate what gets added based on both quality and how well it would fit alongside the rest of the content, so be aware that there is no guarantee your asset will be added.
Q. ???
A. Feel free to add any other outstanding questions you have below and we'll update this post with the most relevant ones.
Hopefully that helps to clear up some outstanding issues and confusion. We definitely appreciate it's a big change, and not all of it has been good news - much as we'd wish that it could have been - but now that we've solved the biggest problem in developing and growing the site we're pretty optimistic about what we can do in the future and are pretty confident the site will eventually be better than ever.
Q. Why has everything changed?
A: We've gone into it a few times in news posts about the relaunch, but for anyone who might have missed it, the short answer is that we were several years out of date on our forum software. This meant it was no longer supported with vital security updates that allow us to ensure that the site isn't vulnerable to being hacked and having all of your user data leaked (not to mention the damage it could do to the content we have if it happened). For all those years, we've been unable to upgrade to the latest supported version purely because absolutely none of our custom features - the News, the Trainer Card Maker or the Creative Corner - would work with it without completely throwing away everything we had and starting from scratch.
With the fact we had to do that anyway, we made the decision to ensure we can't fall victim to this problem again by developing the rest of the site completely separately to the forums. This also allows us to do much more in the way of new, original content on the main site, as well as much more rapid and meaningful updates to the Trainer Card Maker. The reality is, though, that it left us with no choice but to effectively start again with an entirely new website - the only thing we could even carry over during the upgrade was existing forum posts and existing user profiles.
Unfortunately, while we could fairly easily work around not being able to get existing content from the integrated versions of the News and Trainer Card Maker out of the forums, the same was not true of the Creative Corner. Combined with the fact that developing a completely custom version of the Corner would add even more time to a process that had taken years already - and we had, effectively, a ticking time bomb on our hands with our outdated forums - it simply hasn't been feasible to develop a completely new solution for this for now.
The good news is that now that the relaunch itself is out of the way, we can sooner, rather than later, start the process of looking forward into what we can do next. We already expect to roll out a lot more new functionality to the Trainer Card Maker and other new features now that we've established a solid development framework to be able to do so.
Later this year we will be expanding user accounts to the rest of the site, rather than just the forums, which will allow for features such as saving Trainer Cards to your profiles again. Once this next stage is completed, we definitely intend to revisit the option of a whole new Creative Corner, but I hope you can appreciate that it is no small undertaking to develop something like this and it's at this point we will have to determine whether the very limited time and money that we have to do this kind of work would actually make it feasible.
In the meantime we very much encourage people who wish to share their artworks and writing to do so in the forums and we will be looking into how we can improve how that looks and feels as much as possible now that we have the most up-to-date forum software.
We also have a lot of people sharing their artwork in our new Discord server's #creative-showcase channel so please also feel free to join them if you'd like.
Q. Where is all the old Creative Corner content?
A. It took us a little extra time due to some unexpected issues during the Relaunch, but the Creative Corner Archive is now live at https://archive.pokecharms.com (Creative Corner | Pokécharms)!
All existing Corner content should be safely available and will remain so at the new URL (if you've linked your work elsewhere previously, it should automatically redirect to the new one). If you encounter any issues there, simply let us know and we'll take a look into it.
Q. Where are my saved-to-profile Trainer Cards?
A. While you currently can't access these whilst logged into the forums, you will be able to find Trainer Cards you had saved to your profile pre-Relaunch by logging into your account on the Creative Corner Archive. The ability to do so will eventually be removed as we dial down the archive into being completely static later on, so we'd recommend downloading any cards saved here for safe keeping sooner rather than later.
Q. How do I report any issues or bugs following the relaunch?
A. Please post any issues or bugs you encounter when using the site to this Feedback forum. We also have a #site-help channel in the Discord server where people have been letting us know anything they've found or asking for any help understanding the new features, so feel free to join and ask there as well.
Q. Can I use the Trainer Card Maker assets in my own project?
A. The majority of the Legacy Trainer Card assets are completely custom, submitted by other Pokécharms users over the years, and are not available for anyone to use in any other project. The currently available assets in the Modern style cards are predominantly official assets but the specific assets used have been prepared specifically for the Trainer Card Maker and we'd ask you to simply source the original assets yourself if you wish to use them in your own works. The tl;dr is, no, please and thank you.
Q. Can I submit new assets for the Trainer Card Maker?
A. In the next few weeks we'll be opening up new submissions topics for people who wish to submit custom trainer sprites and backgrounds for the Legacy Trainer Card Maker again. We will be looking at the best way to do this for the Modern cards as well and will hopefully be offering that option soon too. We do have a lot of official content we can keep consistent updates for it going with, however, so we will be prioritising that for now.
In the past, we didn't keep as good track of the credits for custom assets as we'd now like to have done, so are working on trying to attribute all existing custom assets to the users that submitted them originally. In the future, all new custom assets will have this credit available alongside their work in the Trainer Card Maker.
Q. Will you be adding _____ to the Trainer Card Maker?
A. Once we've finished the outstanding work from the relaunch, we'll jump right into preparing the first update to the Trainer Card Maker with more modern Trainer and Pokémon assets. Future updates will add even more, as well as additional features such as selecting Shiny Pokémon or your Pokémon's gender and more besides.
This new version of the TCM is specifically designed around being able to deliver consistent updates, so you can expect at least one update every few weeks going forward while we have materials and features to roll out.
Q. Can I upload my OC to the Trainer Card Maker?
A. We don't allow uploading custom assets directly into the Trainer Card Maker. Everything on there is specifically curated for wider use by everyone. As we always have done, we encourage people to submit their custom content in the Trainer Card Maker submissions topics (once they're available) if they'd like to see their work available to use within it - though, again, we curate what gets added based on both quality and how well it would fit alongside the rest of the content, so be aware that there is no guarantee your asset will be added.
Q. ???
A. Feel free to add any other outstanding questions you have below and we'll update this post with the most relevant ones.
Hopefully that helps to clear up some outstanding issues and confusion. We definitely appreciate it's a big change, and not all of it has been good news - much as we'd wish that it could have been - but now that we've solved the biggest problem in developing and growing the site we're pretty optimistic about what we can do in the future and are pretty confident the site will eventually be better than ever.
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Im not sure if this is a bug or something, but when I try to sign in onto the old site (i wanna look at old pokemon card trainers i made) it says itll send my email a verification code but ti never goes through 