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 they�ve 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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