Please update and make the news and information of PO more accesible (And other random suggestions)

NOTE: THIS IS AN EXTREMELY LARGE AND SILLY POST, ONLY READ IF YOU ARE BORED OR HAVE THE TIME, THANKS AND SORRY​

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In the past days fuzzy posted a small announcement about the discontinuation of the clients older than 2.6.0,, i wanted to make a few comments about the post but sadly the post is locked so at the end i decided to make this post and comment that and a few other things and suggestions in general

First of all i want to highlight a small detail in the simulator, and that is the "news" section that appears in the left of the server list in the desktop version



I've been noticing that a lot of projects like the "PO News" and important announcements like the discontinuation of older clients are being announced this days in PO, and my question is, why this space is not occupied by such important news and announcements?, i understand that theres a lot of work to do and probably the staff is busy, but it really doesnt make sense to still have an announcement about a version that was released in april of 2015 and that was officially obsolete with the release of 2.6.1 in may of 2015

My suggestion is not only to update such news in the list of servers but to specifically include the articles of the "PO News" , (a project that in my opinion is very interesting and has a lot of potential), since the article is a little big to (probably) fit in the small space of the list of servers, the article could be divided in various small fragments that appear at random, so basically each time you reopen the list of servers you can get a different piece of news and if it catches your attention you can just click it and visit the forum to get more info, of course the most basic thing that is needed is a person that is in charge of updating those news in the server list

This may look like a small thing without real importance, after all im pretty sure that the staff and developers are always busy doing things to improve the simulator, but precisely because im aware of that is why i dont understand why the downloads page is not updated too???, i mean, the link there is to download the 2.6.2 version, however the version 2.6.3 (for pc) was released since February of this year according to github and NOBODY knows that it exists simply because nobody has updated the link (or put the info about it in the list of servers by the way), this doesnt make further sense considering that many new themes were created for the site and even the download buttons were changed and redesigned, but the link is still for 2.6.2, so basically after a lot of work to put new things in the simulator like the damage calculator the users arent enjoying such update because the link wasnt updated and they dont know a new version exist, again my suggestion about this is to put someone in charge of that or simply to put more attention to that detail in the future (i suppose 2.6.3 is not a testing version or something like that since it was released 8 months ago and you are now working in Sun/Moon)

Now, deeper in the issue is incredible that a legacy version 2.6.1. that works in old devices with android 2.2 was developed and the users dont know about their existence, although im pretty sure there are very few persons with old devices, is a waste that the users dont have information about it, just imagine you are a guy with an old device trying to download PO, after looking in the downloads page that you need android 3.1 can you imagine that if you click in the "view source" button and explore through various pages in github (in an old and slow small browser for phone probably) you can find an updated version that still works in your old phone???,i hope the legacy version continues to be developed, specially with the discontinuation of the old versions of PO, but please include a link for it in the main page of downloads, even if it is with a note specifically saying that it is only an effort to have a playable version for old devices and that it may lack certain features of the regular version

My main comments were about those things, but i also want to give a small comment about certain designs in the main site, i already commented about this in the discussion about the reorganization of the forums and fuzzy said that he was working in it, so just ignore the next paragraph if the works are still in progress, i just wanted to mention it again just in case

More precisely i mentioned that the forums didnt have a friendly interface for phone users, something that i noticed was recently improved with the change of the default theme that works better in tablets (thank you), but sadly the small image with a screenshot/description of PO is not present anymore in the new theme, and now the "home" page dont look like a page to download a game but more like a plain forum, something that can drive away some potential new players, to make this comment shorter im directly going to say again that the home page needs some screenshots of the program, and a description explaining what type of game this is, honestly, take a minute to visit the main page and think if a random visitor can deduce what type of game is this, or even deduce that this is a game

Deeper in the issue i must mention that the descriptions of the site need a little tweaking in the form of added descriptions, since one of the main ways of getting new users is through Internet searches the description of the site must be as attractive as possible to tempt a person to click in it, just look what it says about the site when you search "pokemon online" in google and compare it with the description of pokemon showdown, also take into consideration the comment of the previous paragraph and you can understand my point immediately



Basically the description of SD is more attractive in the sense that you can immediately know that is a game and what you can do, so a good way to fix this and increase the number of potential visitors and players is to change the title of the page to something more descriptive like "Pokemon Online - Battle Simulator" or something like that, also please add in the code of the page a small description of the simulator and the site to appear in the searches instead of the random extracts of text that google puts, and add some search tags in the code too, this is a simple change that can bring a few new users without much effort

And talking about new users....

Is not a secret that the number of users decreased since the app was removed from the play store which opens a new point that i want to discuss that is the download of the app on other sites, this is an issue that has not received the attention that it deserves, mainly because is not under our control but is one of the reasons for what certain users still have outdated versions, something that must be taken into consideration now that this old versions are not going to be supported anymore, normally when a user enters and ask a battle and has a team in XY or BW2 is almost sure that he has an outdated version (we see a lot of them in the spanish servers), the regular solution is to simply inform them that their app is old and give them a link to the downloads page, some players update and return and others think is a lot of effort and leave, (and some others are plainly stupid and dont follow the indications), in any case this is going to be impossible with the dropped support for old versions (i expect that the users of old versions at least get a message with the download link even if they cant enter the server)

However my point is not that, my point is: why these users download these old versions in the first place?, well, after questioning a few individuals they have said that they learn about PO in certain pages or links in youtube videos, and since those links are old and not updated they end downloading these old versions
This may seem out of our control, however i have a small idea to (try) to fix this, and is the creation of a "directory of sites where PO is uploaded/promoted", this could be a very basic pinned post in any section of the forums that could fulfill 2 main functions:

1-To serve as a place where the users can suggest pages or sites where the PO app/program can be uploaded (sites of free apks/pc programs to be exact), remember that a lot of persons search for free apks in numerous sites and since we cant upload in the play store anymore our best bet is to try to enter in sites like that to catch some users, although im not familiar with such pages im going to put this one as an example, http://android.vshare.com/ (i randomly found it in a quick google search to give an example), also this is not limited to apk pages, it can also be pages of pc programs and even browser games directories since we have the webclient now,

2- The directory can serve as a handy list to know the places where PO was uploaded/promoted and we can update to new versions once they are released (a person(s) can be in charge of that) but also we can little by little and with a some luck find the dark places where the old versions are still roaming and replace them with the new one, preventing some future problems

I know is a difficult idea and that probably is not well developed, but i just wanted to at least think in a possible solution to it

Those were my main suggestions and comments, but to take the most of this post im going to add a list of possible small stuff that can be implemented in the future, im not going to fully detail these and i know some of them have been suggested before, im just going to leave them here as an extra, but they are not really important, you can ignore them if this post is already too long

Spoiler

-Increase the limit of characters in the infos to at least 800 and make the android version be able to load the html in them (i really have a lot of fun creating infos :3)

-Allow us to order the current battles in the server by the total rank of the players (for example, that a battle between 2 players with 1500 of rank appears at the top so we can watch the most interesting ones ;) )

-Allow us to save individual recipes of each pokemon instead of using the boxes (for example, if i select a excadrill in the teambuilder i can immediately load any of the standard recipes that i saved and conveniently named, like "assault vest", "rocks/spin supporter", "sand rush sweeper" etc instead of looking for them in the box, this could simplify teambuilding and save a lot of time for various players)

-Create a command that allow us to see how many players are currently searching a battle in certain tier, for example "/findlist" and it appears something like "ORAS OU: 20, ORAS UBERS: 5, ORAS UU: 3, ORAS NU: 1" this could help players to know when someone is waiting to play certain unpopular tiers, if i for example see that someone with Metronome tier is in the list then i know is the moment to load my own metronome team and press find, or if i want to play metronome and nobody is in the list then i just press find and people can see that someone is waiting and are more likely to load their own team to play

-Allow us to see the chosen color of the person in PMs: i know this is a silly request but is really boring to see only the default colors in PMs, also an option to maintain the default colors can be added for persons that like them

-Make a revision of the current channels and delete the unused ones (really, the channel list is insanely big and it mostly contains channels that are used only for decoration but nobody chats .-.)

-Reduce the battle timer to 2 minutes (i know everyone requests this and that you are tired of hearing it but even in a recent debate here in the forums everyone agreed that the timer must be reduced and the staff hinted that the timer was going to be reduced soon, but such update never comes, i just had the urge to mention it again because is important .-.)

-Allow us to use personalized images as avatars: im not sure if this is even possible and i know that the main problem is that we are going to end with tons of obscene images, however we can reduce this by only allowing accounts that are older than 1 or 2 months to use personalized avatars, this can also give an incentive to players to stay in po and reduce the number of possible trolls, another solution is a system in which a personalized image is first checked and approved by some staff members before appearing in the game (a system that a lot of sites and games use, and im pretty sure we have enough personnel to do something like that if we consider that we have like 3 or 4 grammar checkers for articles...), realistically i know this is pretty difficult to implement, but allow me to dream...

-Add a small notepad to save some text: I know this is another silly request and that i can simply use the notepad of my computer, but i hope im not the only one that sometimes is desperately looking for a place to write something, or in my specific case to save and check all my infos instead of creating a new nick to save each one...

My post ends here, i know this is an insanely long post (almost 2500 words :o) so im sorry for writing too much and thank you very much for reading until the end ;)

 

Thank you very much for the answer, just to clarify a few points of your answers i want to make a few comments:

-The Version 2.6.3 for windows was according to the github page oficially released in february 21 of this year, heres the link (https://github.com/po-devs/pokemon-online/releases), as you can see it even has some notes for the general public with all the stuff that was updated, the version is fully functional and is even the version that im using since months ago, sadly the general public never knew about it and the new version with Sun/Moon is probably going to be 2.6.4

-The last legacy version was 2.6.1 for android, so it is only one version behind than the regular version for android, and of course it has ORAS, ( https://github.com/po-devs/android-client/releases ), since i have PO installed in multiple devices (pc, tablet, phone) i even personally use it sometimes in one of my old phones, and i must say that not only it is perfectly playable in the actual generation but also it has practically all the features of the regular android version and looks identical, so it is really sad that this project is not know by the regular users.

What i should grant is that is probably too late for the current legacy version to have an impact since Sun/Moon is almost released and is going to become obsolete, but i hope that (if) a new legacy version is released for Sun/Moon it is included in the main directory of downloads since it really deserves some attention

-The results in google are indeed because of a lack of metadata in the html code, but not precisely for the change of themes, since both the old and the new theme only have as description "Forums for the Pokemon Online Simulator", thats why i suggested that with a better description in that small part of the html, the site can get a more attractive link in google searches, the same by adding some search tags in the meta so people are more likely to find the site

-The "news" window is just a small detail that always catches my attention, i know is not important but for some reason i feel uncomfortably reading about an update of 2015, as i said is probably not important but it has a small "moral" effect by making users feel like PO is not advancing, so if an inclusion of the news articles that are being written or just some updated message is not possible or is too difficult to keep track i must agree that such window must be at least completely removed

-I agree that with all the work with the release of Sun/Moon other small changes are not a priority, so im not going to further detail my other suggestions or comment them again for now, except for the number of characters in trainer infos since i really want it and i suppose iy only requires a small modification, i understand that the main issue with increasing the number of characters is a possibility to cause some lag, however im a player that was lucky enough to see the PO in its glory days with 1000-1500 users connected in the main server, in those days the number of characters allowed were of only 300 without any apparent problem, soo by logic shouldnt that mean that if we now have only 300 users with trainer infos of 1000 characters it should be ok?

Thank you very much again for your reply

 

Thank you very much for taking the time to read and reply to this post, im very pleased with the answers and i await with enthusiasm the new version

(And i have the urge to say again to please reconsider an increase in the number of characters in the trainer infos, at least 100 or 200 more, even if the html cant be displayed in android, please ;-;)

Thats all, thank you again

 

The news comes from http://pokemon-online.eu/files/announcement.html
I'm actually surprised no one has noticed that.. :D Anyone with FTP access to the server can edit it. I wrote it as a temp measure as I lost registry access, but then the new registry didn't use it at all so I never got around to making a better solution