Retirement

This post has been a long time coming but after months of inactivity I think it only fair I make an announcement than continue the silence. As the post title suggests, I am officialling announcing my retirement. This means I will no longer be actively developing the Adoption Agency. What it does not mean, however, is that the Adoption Agency is closing. The server is paid up for well over a year at this point so the Adoption Agency isn’t going anywhere. Nor am I.

The Pika Club has been around since 1999 so will be 14 years old this year. Since I am 23 this means TPC has existed for more of my life than it hasn’t at this point so as you can imagine it’s a hard thing to give up. I used the Adoption Agency (and its predecessors) as a means of teaching myself how to code and I used to develop it in my spare time outside of school/university. However since graduating I no longer have the spare time I used to and the code it’s based on (phpBB) is outdated at this point. I want to branch off into other areas of coding, such as actual video games. As a hobby project I created entirely in my spare time and offer completely free of charge I can no longer justify sacrificing the spare time I have nowadays like I once could.

I’ve updated the live version of the Adoption Agency to include the new modifications I was working on for 2.3. Unfortunately no new ‘big’ features are included since a few were under development but none are complete enough to be released.

As I said, though, I’m not going anywhere. I do still like coding and I really enjoyed making something a lot of people got entertainment out of. The AA is certainly not one of the bigger adoptable sites, but it did develop a close-knit community of regulars which is truly what kept me going for as long as it did. I’ll still be hanging around the forums and I’ll still fix bugs. I’m not ruling out any new development, either. But if it happens, it will be one new feature at a time rather than the large ‘updates’ that were used up to this point. I’d really like to release all the inaccessible Pokemon and finish the 2.3 ‘big’ features as believe me, there were some cool ones. But no promises.

Thanks for the memories,
Pikachu3828