Hi everyone!
I'm sorry things have been so crazy around here for the last few weeks. As many of you are aware, the website is a custom labor of love and can have its growing pains. In this case, the amount of traffic and data in our systems hit such a level that a few of our pages had issues on their initial loads: Archetypes, Backgrounds, and Feats were the big ones. The amount of calculations and SQL calls these pages were doing caused ripples of impact throughout the site, and its only recently we've had time to get things re-written in a way that will reduce the problems going on now.
With tonight's update, we are in no way done with the changes. Archetypes and Feats will be much improved after tonight, while Backgrounds may still be choppy for another week or so until I can get things switched over to the newer table.
Additionally, we know that users have had issues with our search engine for some time. The search engine is another custom piece that we created years ago and, while we've always been proud of what we made, there are certainly third party tools that can do the job better. As many of you have pointed out, Galdiuz's "Nethys Search" was an incredibly efficient search engine that allowed users to filter through our data in a quick and intuitive manner.
Well, I agreed with all of you - so much so that back in late April, I reached out to Andreas (Galdiuz) and he agreed to join our team and bring that search engine to the website. While we aren't quite done with the changes yet, we have already setup Elastisearch on our server and Andreas has been plugging away at getting things converted over. So those of you who have enjoyed his search engine will continue to enjoy it as we expand upon it and hook it more directly into the Archives data source.
I appreciate everyone's patience during these times and for limiting the vents of frustration. I take the lion's share of responsibility for these delays, having made myself a bit of a bottle-neck in a few areas unfortunately. The Archives can be a bit of a weight sometimes and after over 12 years of working on it, its not always easy to find the will to work on it week after week. The support you all have shown, however, has been phenomenal. I was shocked that even while I was stressed and tearing my hair out over the site's performance issues, people were still donating to the Patreon and sending in what they could. I have felt the website's performance lately made it less deserving of such support, but the messages and outpouring of well wishes have been extremely touching.
Thank you all for the support of the Archives, and again, I am sorry for how rough things have been lately. Rest assured that we are aware of what needs to be done to improve things (.NET version update to allow us some improved caching options is a big one) and are always working on making the site a better experience. Thanks as well to everyone on my team for their hard work, and to our newest team member for creating such a fantastic search, I can't wait for you all to see it. We'll have more fixes and changes in the weeks to come!
- [Adventure Path] Blood Lords Player's Guide
- [Adventure Path] Pathfinder #180: The Smoking Gun
- The Core Rulebook has been updated to the latest 3rd printing errata
- Art still needs to be processed for the last couple Pathfinder issues. The files we get sent from Paizo require some work in Photoshop and file adjustments before use, just haven't had time yet. Will fill in the backlog soon. For those of you who are fans of Starfinder, I hope to have Alien Archive art coming your way as well.
- Backgrounds list page may experience loading issues for another week or so.