I'd like to extend my thanks to each and every one of the dedicated volunteers who've been helping distribute all the gallery art into their appropriate artist folders. Thanks to your efforts, we now have left than a thousand images left to organise.

That said, we still need that last thousand dealt with! If you're still willing to help, please, don't stop now! Also, if any of you know of any specific images whose artists have no folder here, say so here!
http://agn.ph/site/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?462

It's wonderful to see AGNPH getting back up off the ground, and I hope the site will someday once again reach its old peak. Hopefully soon we'll see some more positive changes to the site (likely nothing ground-breaking, just mostly fixes and editing the UI), and the return of the original, site-exclusive art from AGNPH's glory days! We've got it on backup here somewhere, we'll get to it eventually.

Finally, as for why I'm making one of these posts in person for once...Hatch isn't currently available. Some of you may have (accurately) heard that he's having some personal health issues at the moment, but I assure you it's nothing he won't recover from and I think we can expect him back on the site within a matter of weeks. Give him a hearty welcome when he returns, he deserves the attention.

That's all for now. ^^


-Wilon

Not being satisfied with the current skin, I'm developing a new style skin ready to port to other color schemes (pokemon types).

It is a work in progress and is not complete (some parts will be broken), both the functionality and design are not final, but if you wish to see/use it anyway, you can select it from the Select Theme box at the bottom of the sidebar.

To revert back to the current Water theme and restore functionality to certain areas, simply select it from the box again.

~ Hatch

A recent poll asked if underaged human pornographic art should be removed from agnph. This morning (Australian time), a glitch occured in the poll which caused the votes to mess up.

We have therefore concluded the poll earlier then expected, and "No" was the majority vote. (Yes - 28, No - 37)

Please note that this poll affects only our pre-emptive proposed decision to remove underaged porn. If the law compels us to do this anyway, it will be done, but for now, all content will be kept as is.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

~ Hatch

We've heard some of your concerns and prayers, and we're working on them.

First of all, the biggest concern raised was how the gallery was orgnanized.
The gallery will be resorted into folders based on known artists instead of uploader, which I will be commencing straight after this post.

Until I'm done with this process, the gallery may appear to be in complete disarray, so please bear with me.

And yes, the fics. Many of you are concerned about this too. It's coming, I assure you, but it's been delayed a little due to recent events.

On top of these, I will be making some significant changes to the skin soon to make it more professional and streamlined, and give it a consistant style that can be easily ported to other pokemon-type skins.

~ Hatch

It appears there's been a lot of confusion and miscommunication among the less in-the-know users about what happened to the site this morning.

This morning, AGNPH was the subject of a large DDoS attack, and has been down for most of the day as a result. Unlike the last attack, we have confirmed that this one was aimmed at us.

As is my understanding, our god of the server, Varkius the Great, is I am putting in place some measures to prevent or at least reduce the likelihood of it happening again in the future.

Thanks to all you for your patience through all of the crap we experienced.

~ Hatch

Many changes have been made to try to better resist DDoS attacks.

~ Alynna

We're aware of issues some of you are having regarding sending PMs. We are working on identifying the issue and fixing it. (The problem is NOT related to Chatbox probation, as the two systems are not linked.)

The Fics section is nearing completion (only chapters system and search system left to code), but expect bugs when it opens, I'm just one Dragonite. Report all bugs with the new fics system when it opens immediately, as I have ironed out the biggest bugs already, most potential issues should be fixable on the spot.

I'm also preparing a set of pages called "The Pokemon Center", which will serve as a knowledgebase and FAQs page for AGNPH. The answers to the most common questions will be posted here, so drop on by, have a coffee, drop your pokemon into the bleepy-bloop machine (that shit feels GREAT by the way), and learn something new about the site!

But despite all these plans, I may occasionally be taking breaks (for health reasons), so I know how it feels to long for something, but please please PLEASE be patient and bear with us.

Yours truly,
Your Pudgy, Adorable Dragonite Admin

~Hatch

It seems some of you seem to not be aware of the chatbox rules.

A lot of you have been throwing full-fledged RPs into the chatbox, which is something that we had restricted in an effort to reduce flooding.

The chatbox ONLY retains shows a certain amount of messages, and because of these ongoing RPs, many legit messages get discarded before they're even read by anybody.

We HAVE an RP Forum. We set it up for this purpose. The forums are better equipped for your RP needs, so please, for the LOVE of Arceus, please use the forums for RPs, NOT the chatbox.

Normal chatting with shorter messages and miscellaneous topics is allowed, like talking about your day, or even asking a site related question, and a TINY amount of RP (as indicated in bold) attached to your messages is allowed:

Example:
"Holy CRAP what a day I've had! *eats his now cold chipotle*"
"What's wrong?"
"My mom's on my case about my room again. Had to clean it. Now my chipotle's cold!"

Please know this is not just for the site's sake but also for yours. The forums can handle the flow of messages from an RP, while the chatbox really can't. Plus, the forums will retain every message that's posted, meaning you can look back to past events, while the chatbox will discard older messages automatically.

I have hardcoded a chatbox probation system which can restrict individual users from posting in the chatbox. I'm praying we never have to use it.

~ Hatch

PS: Try the IRC. Seriously. You can RP there all you want, and you don't have to keep refreshing to see whats going on, and you can make your own channels as well so you can RP with a private group.

~ Alynna

From day one of this new site there has been an anti-flood trap running on the system. I've noticed quite a few accounts that are getting auto-banned from the system due to unusually high amounts of HTTP requests (posts, page loads, etc) per minute. This is to protect the system, and if you think your account has been auto-banned due to this mechanism, please shoot one of us an email at:

hatchlingbyheart[AT]agn[DOT]ph
flygon[AT]agn[DOT]ph
alynna[AT]agn[DOT]ph

(replace [AT] with @ and [DOT] with . where appropriate)

The limit is 100 HTTP requests per minute, which is more then 1 request every second. I shouldn't need to tell you that this is PLENTY for normal site use. This trap is intended to weed out flooders and DoSers, so if you are one who is continuously getting caught by this trap, we may need to keep your address blocked for the safety and stability of the server until we can figure out the issue.

~ Hatch

Well, guess I should owe you an explanation as to why there's still no Fics section in this new version of AGNPH.

I'm hard at work on it, but some features have proven harder to implement without issues then first thought.

I mentioned previously that features like the favorites may have had to be removed if they proved too much of a hassle... well, I regret to report that that's exactly what's happened.

The following things have been removed to speed up development and eliminate complications:

• Favorites System. (You can always just use Bookmarks after all)
• Scoring System (User Ratings)
• Reviews (You could still use comments or start a forum thread to post a review)

I've rewritten the fics in a modular fashion so that it will be possible to add these features in the future should they be desperately needed.

Anyways, look at the bright side, this means it will be done quicker.

~ Hatch

#1
The Fics system is invisible to users at the present moment because it's not finished!! Everyone was told in the news on the old site that fics would not be a launch day feature, if anybody was active enough to read the news, they'd know that. Please do not ask about this anymore, and we'd appreciate less complaints about it's absence too.

#2
I've noticed quite a few of you are confusing species icons with avatars. They see that they have a missingno icon in the chatbox and assume that their avatar didn't make it across. Your avatars are FINE, and will appear in your forums posts and comments only! Chatbox posts use your species icon instead.

#3
A lot of you are putting the BBCode in the species field of your profiles instead of the Pokemon's name. The BBCode is only necessary to embed a poke icon for chatbox posts, forum posts, or comments. For the species profile field, use the Pokemon's name and nothing else, e.g. "Pikachu".
You are responsible for your settings and the admins will not automatically change them for you (unless there is a technical reason that you cannot change them yourself).

#4
A few accounts have attempted to hack the new system to bypass email verification. One such account has succeeded, but that account has now been deactivated and the IP now blocked from the VPS entirely. This will NOT be tolerated, and all abusers of the system's security will be reported IOFlood and even their local country's authorities if the case is deemed severe enough.

Sorry to sound so harsh, but the new system is functioning amazingly well, and to have that being compromised by a few idiots doesn't sit well with me.

For those of you behaving yourselves, thanks for using the new site system and I hope you all have fun with all the cool new features.

~ Hatch

Basically put, the new system hates spaces in usernames.

All names were ported to the new system as-is from the old system. e107 uses spaces as delimiters in particular scripts to process user information, which causes issues with usernames with spaces in them.

Anyone who is affected can email me at hatchlingbyheart[AT]gmail[DOT]com for a manual password change. Please include the password you want, and expect your username to have all spaces replaced with underscores ( _ ).

Keep in mind usernames can still be shown on pages with spaces, but any account that we fix, you will have to log in to using underscores instead of spaces.

~ Hatch

OBTW: Fics are still in progress. No, no fics have been lost. Hatchling is working on it. They will be there. Sometime soon.

UPDATE: Setting your species is done in the registration options of your profile. DO place the species of the pokemon you want to set, capitalized. Do NOT place the bbcode for your species in there. Also MISSINGNO displays for any entry in species that is not a pokemon.
~ Alynna

I tracked down that bug and fixed it. If you were a new user since the site reopened, you should be able to edit your profile.

Hatchling and I finally got everything migrated over and the new site is ready to go.
Let us know if there are any issues.



--Alynna and HatchlingByHeart

Also please note you will have to reset your password, but once that is done, you'll find everything should be the way you expect it. Which means, don't create a new user, if you were here before your profile is still here, just use the 'reset password' link and get the new password in the mail.

Another note. If you get blank thumbnails when loading a gallery, just hit refresh on your browser. The new gallery software creates the thumbnails on the fly, and blank ones means it hasn't made them for that gallery yet. Once they are made it won't come up like that again.

Documentation for AGNPH's unique features can be found here.

OBTW: Go to your profile and at least set your species (especially if its a pokemon one) cause it matters!

--Alynna