Psythor :: Eight years of PKMN.NET Articles

It's hard to believe that it has been eight years since I first started PKMN.NET. Back then, I was only 12 years old, and thus, in all likelihood, an idiot. Pokémon UK, as it was back then, was developed by someone who didn't even have a rudimentary grasp of the process of osmosis.

Of course, these days I'm much older and probably moderately wiser too. And throughout that time, PKMN.NET is probably the only thing that has remained constant in my life - well, okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. I still spend far too much time on the internet and waste hours playing video games. The only difference here is that thanks to the magic of broadband internet, I don't have to endure an agonising half an hour of profound boredom between the end of children's programmes on terrestrial TV and 6pm, when my old dial-up internet became free to access after 6pm.

I'm not terribly surprised that PKMN.NET is still going, to be honest, because after a couple of years, we built up a solid team of administrators who look after the site - including Pokédude and Iceduck, who joined me back in January 2001, and are still with us today, on and off. Obviously since then theyï¿½ve been joined by the other admins, Joeno, Typhlosion, Rex and Phil, as well as countless others who have helped turn the site into what it is today.

What I do like about PKMN.NET these days is that is pretty big, so makes for an exciting boast, should any of my real life friends and acquaintances discover that I have a Pokémon website. Before they can cast me out of society for being a big nerd, I can hit back with statements like "we have over 30,000 registered users" and "Pokémon site?! Don't be ridiculous, dudes, I'm far too cool for that!"

PKMN.NET's size today is amazing - to try and quantify this, we have 729 regular pages of Pokémon articles and information. Which I think is pretty impressive, as last time I checked out the competition websites (quite a while ago, admittedly), it was usually a case of packed sidebar navigation that all linked to under construction pages, with the biggest section invariably being, er, "webmaster tips" sections, featuring website making tutorials and the like. So I think it is nice that we have some actual stuff to read that's useful - and I can't thank our many, many contributors over the years enough for this.

And the community aspect of PKMN.NET is massive too, as you've probably noticed - as I've said, we've over 30,000 people now - or to look at it another way, roughly equivalent to the population of Liechtenstein. This actually gives me an idea - how about we all meet in Switzerland at Easter time, and then all march across the border together and declare the tiny principality as our PKMN.NET homeland? I don't think they have an army, and a sizeable chunk of their population is going to be old people, whereas our people are all relatively young and thus able to kick some ass - so I think this is certainly doable (as long as we don't use a turn-based fighting style). Who's with me?

Page written by Psythor.

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