You may have noticed that during breaking news lately the site has been pumping out more errors than page loads. That’s a big, big problem for us right now. Sadly I couldn’t even update the CoroCoro post while it was an ongoing story because the site would only sporadically load enough for my edits to go through. If you’ve been curious about the problem, it’s actually our site hitting its RAM usage limits or the CPU limit which automatically renders an error to whoever gets lucky enough to be the visit that the site can’t handle. Lately it seems most of us have been (un)lucky enough to see these white pages instead of a friendly Sewaddle.
I have a HUGE request: please donate now if you can so that we can upgrade to a virtual private server (VPS) or even a semi-dedicated server so that we can continue to provide you with high quality news, articles, and more. This affects all three of our current sites and two which will be launching this year; PokéNe.ws (Twitter news service) and Leavanny’s Library (our long-time-coming wiki based Pokédex and game resource site). Although the site does make some money from advertising we need to raise $500 for this transfer so that the site doesn’t go up and down as news comes out.
If I felt like we did the exact same thing as any other Pokémon fansite out there I wouldn’t waste your time or money with this request, but I feel like I’ve spent 9 years cultivating a unique experience for users based around original content, engaging stories, and a community of quality commenters. I’m a college student with college loans and the rest of the staff are in similar situations, which is why we’re reaching out.
Please, consider donating. Even $1 makes a difference because we would only need 10% of our visitors to donate to fulfill our goal in just one day. I haven’t had to ask in two years, and I would have preferred not to have to ask at all, but after what happened on Monday I can’t provide a quality experience with our current hardware.
Thanks for reading. If you can’t donate, don’t worry. The staff and I do this because we love Pokémon, we love creating content, and most of all we love you guys. Sharing this on social sites such as Twitter and Facebook also helps us out a ton.
By the way: the errors are NOT caused by the new layout. Still very much open to ideas about how to further improve the site 🙂 Please feel free to use the contact form!
Much love,
pokejungle
ps- I will update periodically with donation totals if we can raise some money. Currently at $145.77! Hopeful that we can raise the remaining $354!! Awed and humbled by the messages of support and am eternally grateful!