Happy 11th Birthday, Flashii!

...4 days late, but I have a reason for my tardiness as you will soon find out! Just like last year I would like to take this post to do a bit of reflection on the past year of development on the website. After that you can check whether you have new messages because the Private Messaging system finally exists, have a nice day.

Despite not being able to complete all the features I outlined in the post from last year, I still managed to get 22 pages worth of changelogs in. In other words it was a relatively productive year! I fully committed to the shared code libraries for the various websites I run under Flashii to speed up development and reduce code duplication and that has really paid off. The chat clients were also finally split onto two different subdomains, but that was already addressed in a dedicated news post, so I will not mention that again.

You probably already gleaned it from the introduction bit, but I have finally created an on-site private messaging system. I suddenly caught a wind of motivation to work on it and cobbled it together in the past week, so it is still a little bit rough around the edges. Originally, I was hoping to have it finished by the 27th, but things did not work that way and thus this post was delayed as well. It currently only allows you to address a single person, whether this will change in the future or not, I am not sure yet. Please be sure to report any problems you run into while using it and I hope you will enjoy using it!

Another significant project this year was the relaunch of the Minecraft server. A big part of this was writing an mod to allow for authentication while the server is in "Offline mode" where it does not contact Mojang/Microsoft servers to verify whether someone actually is who they say they are. Many people did not agree with the account migration and others who did agree with it were met with a botched process and lost their paid account regardless, this project sought to fix that. Before this I had never written a mod for Minecraft before, let alone written any Java code that was not for a school project, so it was an interesting experience. This mod written using the Fabric loader, but I still have somewhat of a desire to set up a Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 server at some point for that true classic survival feel, so maybe I will even get to experience Forge or Bukkit!

I, unfortunately, was not able to get around to the quarterly news posts thing that I promised last year. The period from March thru to June was relatively busy in university and I was not able to get myself to sit down and write news post about seemingly minor stuff, and for the rest of the quarters I honestly just completely forgot about it... The new approach I will take is to just write posts when big changes are pushed through so I am not burdening myself with arbitrary deadlines and a fear of not having done enough to write about. That was pretty much what I already did end up doing last year, so that should work out pretty well.

This time I am not going to outline any planned features for this year, however if I do not have the Centralised Authentication/Flashii ID implemented by next year, I will jump out of a window.

Also a quick shout out for the 88x31 button gebruikersnaam made if those are your thing and you had not run into it yet!

I think that is all I have to share for now, so much for the trend of the year review posts getting longer.

Once again, thank you for your continued use of Flashii!