Happy birthday to PPM! 23 years old!
In PPM's last year of existence, we had a huge influx of news posts. I mean, I had a hard time finding the news about its last birthday. It was on page 9 already, where each page has 50 news posts. In the previous years, I'd find it on page 3 and sometimes even on page 2. And this is a result of how our news system evolved. Today we cover a lot of news every month and a lot of new subjects. We cover mods hidden in the depths of Discord, YouTube, ModDB, GitHub, and some other places. Sometimes we even announce the release of a project before the project itself announces it. This is a result of a very hard work that made news posts be created in terms of a few minutes, while it used to take some hours to write a single news post a while ago. The very hard work goes from our internal system that hunts these news posts and BBCodes them (and sometimes we had to write special scripts for special cases, such as Dawn of the Tiberium Age releases or Chrono Divide updates). We also have a system that speeds up news posting and helps me with the keywords, but I do have to edit them by the end of the day. I also use third-party solutions for grammar checking.
The huge flux of news posts changed the behavior of our visitors. Today, most of the news posts do not receive comments, which is a bad thing. I mean, it is more fun when people interact with us, isn`t it? And there are more people browsing the forums as a guest instead of registered. A small reminder is that registered users see less propaganda than guests (or no advertisements at all in the forums).
Our news posting system is just a start. We can do much more than simply create news with it. In the future, we may create or organize content with it, such as tutorials, graphic/map resources, and coverage for new games. To be honest, we are using it to track news from games that are not officially covered on our main site and subsites, such as Tempest Rising and Storm Gate, although I am not posting everything I see about these games yet.
Regarding the birthday itself, I do not have a present this time because it is hard to handle several things that are happening in my real life right now, but hopefully, most of these problems will end in six months or less.
The best I can offer is our lovely traditional cake:
The credits for this birthday cake goes to this Reddit topic
