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I know it's been mentioned on the Discord as well, but yeah - it's weird how social media showed how moderation has a point, even if you can disagree about the boundaries. I'm glad to hear that people appreciate it - the discussions about it weren't always that friendly!

And I'm happy to keep the forums around - the server is one I use for a couple of other things, so I just do bits of maintenance to keep things running when needed, but mostly it just keeps working without me doing much anyway.

That seems like the right order. I can confirm I'm still around - paying the bills and making sure everything keeps running, luckily the forums have been quiet (yay Discord) so there's little for me to keep up with.

Still good friends with Mike too - that's carried through as the site became smaller, we end up meeting up a few times a year and occasional holidays - we were in Singapore together a few months ago.

But it's great to see you here, it's been great occasionally seeing a sign of your success (congrats on the award!). Good to see we've not yet outgrown you! I think it's fair to say that by the time I joined, the tone and feel of the site was already set, and I think you had a large hand in that as well.

They are called spiders, yeah, although they're not just Google's - I believe a lot of them are LLM related (AI like ChatGPT). There's no harm there.

Despite appearances, the spam isn't worse than before, although it's more visible now obviously. We had a short period where they broke through some of our anti-spam measures, but I've changed some things around to stop them.

[8 July]

We're organizing another PKMN.NET meet this year! It will take place on 8 July in London.

As it's where our social activity has moved to, we're organizing this on Discord. Join now to sign up!

I wasn't ever hugely active on the forums but, I loved the IRC and chatting to folks on there... enigma, zangooseclaw, raven, Alex (can't remember username), lottie, mewz, dan and many many others. I hope you're all doing well in life and if you see this then do respond! I want to know how you're doing.

Join the Discord! A bunch of us are still hanging out in there. That goes for everyone looking to chat

I pop by every so often (increasingly sporadically now) to see if the site is still up - if nothing else it's a time capsule of a bygone era and I hope it sticks around.

i lurk now and then, but i weep for what once was. though surely this is super expensive for joeno (?) at this point... its been so many years.

It's a server I use for several different things, so the cost is priced in to me keeping several other things open. I got a decent deal on it, so it's pretty manageable at the moment. I try to fix problems where I can, but the site may have an issue occasionally (I still have a PHP 8 upgrade I need to do that requires a lot of code fixing).

But yeah, as far as I'm concerned, it'll stick around for a long time. I'm not really investing in anything major, but let me know if there's something quick I can fix and if anyone ever wants to put anything up, I'm happy to do my best to help out.

And as said, a lot of us hang out in Discord now. I'm not as visible, but reading along and dealing with bits where I can.

And I should figure out the Name Rater some day.

It's a bug/feature tracker that I used when development on the site was more active.

Yeah, unless you have a very specific reason, you should only have a single account. The only reason I can think of for having a "backup" account is to avoid bans and similar punishments, and obviously we don't want you to do that. I would suggest you stick with your single account.

Can you link to the post you were trying to edit?

Yeah, available time has always been the issue. We had plenty when we were young, still in school and with long holidays to work. I'm at the place now where I have a job that I love, but that eats up a lot of the creative energy that I used on my projects for the site.

I'm happy to try and help out where I can, show people the ropes on most systems, and I'll keep running what we have (I checked the caption contest and it looks like that's completely up to date again) - I have been trying to keep on top of all discussions - but for anything new, we'd need someone who can keep things running, has the time to do so and is able to.

Can you post the image that is that size? Because the one you showed above is 126x100, so too big.

That wouldn't be fair to anyone who has already submitted and has been waiting for ages. Plus the backlog, based on previous experience, will fill up in a few days anyway.

I've added the new Pokemon to the database. I don't have graphics you, so those may look odd for a while.

The job is pretty exhausting and time consuming - you can't just keep repeating the same rating, it's also about being entertaining.

[create]

I'm pretty sure it's legal to create a virtual machine with Windows XP on it (assuming you have appropriate other Windows licenses), but not to distribute it.

Even if it's legal (or you'd use another free operating system), you are still distributing other illegal software or other products if you do this. The distribution method - torrents, zip files or inside a Windows installation - doesn't change yet, you're still sharing what you are not allowed to share.

It's probably worth emphasizing this isn't site policy - this is the law that you should follow.

Can you go to your Site Options and let me know whether you have "Play Jukebox" turned on? It's one of those holdover features from the site that might not be working in your browser (anymore).

Yeah, that's possible, the cookies that keep track of this can get confused sometimes