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The FNaF Archive Blog

The FNaF Archive is back online. Here's thoughts on it's future.

By Retroity · June 30, 2023

Hello? Hello hello? Is this thing still on?

Hi everyone. Welcome back. If you don't know, The FNaF Archive recently had some extensive downtime, where it was completely unavailable for a while. However, the site is back now, and I will ensure that a downtime like this does not happen again. I’ll go into specifics later, but the short of it was that it went down for this period due to neglect. I let it rot until it died and then I had to bring it back to life.

I may not be as involved in the FNaF fandom as I was previously, as I’ve pretty much completely moved on now, but FNaF and its community is something that has very much changed my life. The number of domino chains within my life that have been set in motion by this franchise and its fandom are countless. I’m also still very proud of the resource I’ve built here and the fact that so many have found this site so useful.

I cannot apologize enough for letting the site decay like this, and eventually letting it go down entirely. For everything this franchise and this community has done for me, and for how much traffic it still gets, indicating that at least some people find it useful, I feel at the very least I owe keeping the site operational and stable. Thank you for all your support for the years, and I cannot apologize enough for the issues, the recent downtime, the increased outdatedness, and the numerous broken promises made over the years.

What Happened? (Downtime Technical Details)

To be honest, I had forgotten about this site. I’ve long since moved on, and I’ve been very busy with numerous other things. However, this morning, I remembered the site and decided to check on it, only to see an error from Cloudflare, our DNS, CDN, and protection provider, complaining that the host server was unreachable.

This site is hosted by nearlyfreespeech.net, they’ve always been reliable and affordable, especially for a project like this. Upon logging in to my NearlyFreeSpeech account, I had found that the site was gone, completely. I quickly discovered that this occurred because I was so neglectful that The FNaF Archive’s hosting account ran out of funds and then went past it’s grace period, leading to it being completely deleted by its hosting provider.

Luckily, I had backups stored locally, so there was no data loss. The site is now back as it previously was. Even though I had backups, I was tasked with rebuilding the infrastructure that I had set up that powers TheFNaFArchive from those backups. This took me about 2 hours of effort. This involved creating the new sites within NearlyFreeSpeech, adding funds, configuring everything, adjusting DNS, creating new certificates within Let’s Encrypt, reuploading the data from the backups, etc.

I also took the opportunity to fix some bugs in my PHP that had recently cropped up, most likely because newer PHP versions had broken/deprecated some of what I had written. You therefore should no longer encounter PHP errors, if you see any remaining bugs, please let me know. The site might be a bit slow as it comes back online, as Cloudflare’s caching has been completely wiped, but this should fix itself in time.

What Comes Next

Now that the site is back online, as I’m looking it over, I’ve realized that there is so much of the site that I am dissatisfied with and could be much, much better, so I want to make numerous improvements and additions. I do acknowledge, however, that one might not be inclined to trust me regarding promises of improvements and/or additions, as I have quite a history of making and then subsequently breaking promises. So, to try and ensure that as many things get done as possible, I’m breaking it up into stages: groups of planned improvements that I plan to make, which will be done one at a time.

  1. The first stage of planned improvements involves getting all the infrastructure and development processes of the site organized and under control. So, organizing everything, double checking configurations, getting the site properly version controlled, etc. This will substantially improve my ability to work on The FNaF Archive and assist the development of each subsequent stage.
  2. After this, the second stage mainly consists of various technical and quality-of-life improvements. Improvements currently planned for this stage are:
    1. Replacing Google Analytics with Cloudflare Analytics (which takes far less bandwidth, records far less data, and is significantly more respectful of privacy)
    2. Entirely rewriting the privacy policy to reflect this. The new privacy policy will, in all likelihood, be significantly shorter than the current one. This is a FNaF fan site, I do not need that much data.
    3. Conducting a thorough review of the site’s accessibility, and making all necessary changes to ensure that the site is fully usable and accessible for users with colorblindness, screen readers, etc.
    4. Removing 3rd party assets and dependencies and moving them towards being self-hosted. For example, the menu font is currently hosted by Google Fonts! This will be moved to being hosted on the site itself.
    5. Making various improvements to the contact and about pages.
    6. Improving the layout for various parts of the teasers section
    7. Reworking audio sections to make the audio players better, and in more formats for more compatibility
  3. The third stage will primarily revolve around catching the site up, seeing if there is any content that is missing that I need to archive and uploading it to The FNaF Archive.
  4. The fourth stage revolves around more quality-of-life improvements. These include:
    1. Reworking part of the site’s visual design. This is not a total visual overhaul, but some changes but to ensure that site navigation looks nicer and makes more visual sense, thus making it more accessible.
    2. Replace the brighten button on teaser images with a brightness slider
  5. The fifth stage involves expanding the site with items that were promised years ago, including:
    1. Adding a “games” section that contains all of Scott Cawthon’s past games (games that are currently available officially will be linked to, otherwise they will be hosted here)
    2. Adding Scott Cawthon’s past websites
    3. Adding description tags for ScottGames sites (where found)
    4. Start sourcing from the community dates for teasers
  6. The sixth and final stage are things that I’ve wanted to implement for a while but that would take some effort, and are far down the priority list.
    1. Adding site options, these include AMOLED/Black & light themes in addition to the default ones, the ability font size, etc
    2. Open-sourcing the site (this is site code only, not what’s on files.thefnafarchive.org which is all the content, although you could probably scrape that yourself)
    3. Search, if I can figure it out

Of course, I also want to know if you want anything added to the site in addition to this. I've created a Reddit thread from this article on /r/FiveNightsAtFreddys, so if you have any suggestions leave them in the comments. I intend to ensure transparency for progress on all of these by creating a page listing all planned improvements and progress on them, so you can track them. Updates will also be posted on Twitter.

Conclusion

Perhaps I am again being too ambitious, but I feel as if there is a ton of improvement to TheFNaFArchive to make it better, and that I should at the very least try to do as much of it as I can. We’ll see.

I left the FNaF fandom a long time ago. I’m still interested in new releases, and I’m going to watch the movie as soon as I possibly can, but I’m no longer actively involved with the fandom. Even so, it would feel awful to leave the site to die, or, if I’m going to abandon it, to not try and get it as good as I can. So, I’m going to try, and see how much I can do.

After a certain point once I have everything that I want done, I’ll probably hang it up and leave the site in “maintenance-only” where the only things happening are essential upkeep and keeping up with new content should it come in.

Thank you very much to everyone for your support of the site over the years. It really does mean a ton. I’m glad you found it useful and hopefully I can make it more useful in the future. ❤️

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