Welcome (Back) (Again) to RPGFan

Well, August sure has been a time for us at RPGFan. We started on quite a high note, finally transitioning to a new, modern architecture after literally a decade-plus of talk and several years of planning and hard work. Then, less than two weeks into our new digs, we learned that our web host couldn’t keep up with our site now that it wasn’t all manually-written HTML pages. I’ll spare you the full details, but I’ll tell you this: If you ever want to start a website and look into hosting, and learn that a company doesn’t have things like an actual support system, and suddenly introduce file size caps and file limits that literally did not even display before… find another company. I have never witnessed such poor customer service as I have over the last two and a half weeks.

While I have done all I could over the last several weeks to make our downtime as minimal as possible, I still apologize for how long it has been. RPGFan is deeply important to all of us who work (well, volunteer) here, and we know it’s important to you, too. If not, you wouldn’t be reading this! We will continue monitoring the new site, though we expect our woes in this area to be a thing of the past.

That said, we are now with a new host, and so far our relationship is much stronger (the new people return my emails, for example!). So, hey, let’s try this again, shall we? Welcome to a new era, etc, it’s been a long road in getting here.

Searching by Platform

While I’m here, I’m going to mention something I had planned to discuss the week our site went down: Searching by platform. An incredibly large amount of feedback we got from our contact page was requesting that we bring back the ability to search or filter games/reviews by platform. We hear you!

We already had planned to introduce this ability, even if we weren’t able to have it ready by August 1st. It’s the star item on our “version 1.1” roadmap. We knew it was functionality that people would like to have, but I admit we underestimated just how much people wanted it! We’ve been a bit delayed by the events of this month, but we have adjusted our roadmap and we will be rolling out an updated search before any other change in version 1.1. If all goes to plan, you’ll see it in September, hopefully sooner than later.

Forging Ahead

Beyond that, we do have some other exciting announcements that are still on track, so please look forward to those! Otherwise, we have a ton of backlogged news and reviews to bring you, along with continually updating our past content from the old site. We know there are plenty of features not on the site at the moment, and we’re working as fast as we can to bring those back without sacrificing attention on new content.

With all of this content porting to be done, and the inconvenience of this month, we appreciate your patience as we’ve worked to get RPGFan back up and running. Everything we do here, we do for you, after all.