There's a lot in this post, we haven't posted in a while!

We're back on F95Zone!

What does this mean?

It's a huge boost and it couldn't have happened at a better time. As you're likely aware, we were starting to run into real funding issues. Part of this is my fault as I insisted on keeping infrastructure we didn't need. I was thinking ahead and planning for our torrents being allowed much earlier and it added a bunch to our costs. Our goal now is to scale back our monthly costs to closer match our funding and then, grow in tandem with traffic.
Otherwise, the flood of extra traffic will also speed up the torrents for everyone else! On another note, it's a big win for everyone on the team - we really needed some good news. I think at times it started to feel like a slog, like there might not be a light at the end of the tunnel. Ultimately though we're very thankful to Sam and the F95Zone team for allowing our return!

What kind of traffic numbers are we talking about?

Web traffic: (we added analytics via Umami towards the end of June - you can also see where I messed up a deployment and forgot the tracking code...)

(Light blue is visitors, darker blue is pageviews).
In short, we were doing fine and then daily users roughly doubled once we started posting on F95Zone again. Number of accounts on the 25th was 18,206, it's now 23,554. Accounts are a rather poor metric though.

What else happened?

We finally finished one of our projects! We're constantly making new torrents when games update but part of our plan is to archive all old games too. This means gathering up all completed, abandoned and on-hold games. Recently, we finished all completed games.

We're gonna take a few weeks break before starting on the other lists which thankfully, are much smaller.

The Life Selector archive will also finish in 3 days, there's only 27 remaining and we automatically release 10 every 24 hours. We are still missing a bunch, we published a list here. We have 1424 and we're missing ~600 or so. If you're bored and want to help out, looking for any of the games in the above list and pinging us in #housekeeping on Discord will be a huge help!

Our team grew!

If you're on Discord you've already known this for a while, our team now consists of 6 people in total. Cake, Daxter, Vision, LoneRanger, Rowan and myself. LoneRanger and Rowan are our newest members.
We're super happy with our team currently and we likely won't be adding anyone else until 2023 at the earliest.

Discord changes.

We added two music channels which have proven popular and we actually had to add a second #general channel. It's been awesome watching our community form and grow over the past few months, if you're not there already - join us!

docs.rpdl.net

We have temporarily shelved the game-developers part of our documentation. We do still think there's value in having a "linktree" for developers, we're just not sure this is the right way of doing it.

Hosting websites for developers.

For a long time we've been trying to figure out a way of giving back to developers. One such way might be hosting sites for them (for free).

LeFrench, developer of Red Lucy, is testing it out here. If other developers are interested in trying this out, poke @rpdl in our Discord.

Our plan for the rest of 2022

We have quite a bit of work to do with the underlying codebase, torrust. The project itself has re-organised the repos and we need to update ours to match it. Here's how it worked before:

torrust-tracker was the tracker and torrust-index was the backend serving accounts, torrents and the site itself dl.rpdl.net It's now been changed to torrust-tracker, torrust-index-backend (basically the API) and torrust-index-frontend - the website itself. This means we need to port all our commits on this repo to the new forks here.

This in itself is not a lot of work but there is a lot of work being done in the development branches of the main repos located here. So to wrap this up, we're waiting for the new fixes/features in development to be deployed to master before we incorporate them too.

Aside from all that boring nonsense, we don't have any other immediate plans (aside from the abandoned & on-hold games mentioned previously). We're concentrating on little tweaks and making sure our return to F95Zone goes as smoothly as possible.

Funding

Our funding is fantastic! Nuff said. We're so thankful, thank you all 🤟