I’m a day late at posting this. Yesterday was the 16 year anniversary of Vizzed Board but I wasn’t able to get to this due to a combination of being stuck at work all day (I do 12 hour shifts on the weekend) and then getting home and being dead tired.
2020 has been a crazy year for every single person in the world. It’s also been one of the worst years in recent history for the world. However, for Vizzed, it was not a bad year. Traffic stayed consistent compared to last year (with 2019 having a significant boost compared to 2018), I got a lot of site issues fixed and also added many must needed features. I was also able to find ways to cut server costs by almost half without sacrificing anything, which resulted into many of the games downloading so much faster.
I should point out that Vizzed had a rough start to 2020 though. At the beginning of the year back in early March, most of the site’s database data was accidentally
deleted. Thankfully I had a backup from 6 months prior, but it took me weeks and 100s of hours to restore as much of that data as I could. So, it was about a month long project and many site features were down for most of that time. It also took place the same month Minuano revived the classic VCS competition. After that incident was resolved, I continued to focus on fixing the site and adding those much-needed features, and there were a lot. And Minuano was able to successfully revive the VCS the following month instead.
As mentioned multiple times already, Vizzed had a lot of site fixes and improvements made. I wanted 2020 to be the year that I focused on fixing things (and replacing the RGR Plugin) so one of the first things I started with was the site’s layout. I had
greatly improved the site’s layout to make it more responsive by making it so that the site can adapt to almost any browser size and device type. My personal favorite enhancement, which was so big it was practically its own new feature, was the
Complete Revamping of the Video Game Music Room. Other fixes and improvements included:
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Vizzed.co Minecraft Server Fixed and Upgraded
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Some Old Post Layouts Getting Fixed
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Old Page Comments Got Restored
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Profile and Page Editing Issues Fixed
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Memberlist Search Updates
-Rebuilt a lot of the site’s logging system, which most of you don’t see but it adds better site security and makes content restoration easier
-Enhanced the load speeds of most pages on the site
-Fixed countless errors and bugs throughout the site
-Too many other things to mention here
There were a lot of features that the site needed or had but were severely outdated. One of the big ones was the new
Image Uploader / Photo Album feature. Another new feature I started working on but haven’t finished yet (haven’t even posted about yet but will in the near future once finished) is a “page details” feature which not only shows lots of useful information about every page on the site, but also allows you to rate and bookmark any page on the site. Other new features included:
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Game Queue and Game History
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Video Game Characters Features Rebuilt from Ground Up
-A few site features for the Minecraft server, which are still in development but will soon be finished
2020 is also seeing the end of the RGR Plugin. The RGR Plugin relies on Flash technology but as of December 31st 2020, Flash will be discontinued in almost all web browsers. There’s still a possibility of a new plugin for the site that
replaces the RGR Plugin but for the time being, I’ve been putting my focus on enhancing the RetroArch HTML5 emulator on Vizzed. It works on almost all operating systems and plays on almost all devices, including mobile devices, so it’s a great
replacement. I’ve been customizing my own build of it for a while now by adding my own custom features, an on-screen touch controller for mobile devices, better playability for all devices, adjustable options, etc.
For the remainder of 2020, one of my goals is to get the remaining site pages that use the old site code/layout upgraded to the new site code and there’s really not many left. My focus in 2021 will be the community (I know that was suppose to be my focus for 2020, sorry ?) and replacing the RGR Plugin.
You can find all of the awards and additional information here
https://www.vizzed.com/boards/thread.php?id=103370
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