Alumy world's grand opening

Hello all Alumers, welcome to our new and fresh official Alumy World's website!

The staff wants to sincerely thank everyone for their patience during our extended hiatus. We appreciate you all so much for sticking with us for so long, and we hope you all enjoy the new site! We’ve put a lot of time and effort into it and tried to give the best experience we can. There’s a few little things we still need to iron out, but this has been a grand undertaking and we’re very pleased to finally show you all!

For starters, here's a quick summary of all the things that happened during that hiatus :

• Hiatus started with the intention to port the masterlist from Instagram to Charadex, a small masterlist-oriented Neocities site, but due to some unforeseen circumstances about a month in, that had to be changed. We decided to switch to LoreKeeper and officially move the Alumy species in the direction of an ARPG, as the species was growing bigger and needed more than just a Discord or an Instagram platform. That means we had to restart over and manually port nearly 3000 entries into the site by hand with a two- to three-week notice, hence why we had to extend our hiatus significantly more than planned. Thanks to the help of the open source and community nature of LoreKeeper, (as well as the help of our PGA's who very kindly helped us with the full masterlist port) we could launch our site on short notice and with relative ease.
• We did some staff rearrangements as well as moved and added some staff positions. You can see the new ranks on the site itself, via https://alumyworld.com/users , where you can see the whole staff and all users of the site. We do plan on having a staff-specific page in the future!
• We decided to still hold the Valentine event during the hiatus to keep the community alive and active while we were preparing and changing things around internally, as well as keeping the crystal economy flowing until we had the site set .

Now that the site has been released to you all, here are some more exciting announcements!

With the opening of the site, we have released a Welcome Home box for every user to grab once for free at Vulcan's Free Hoard! It will be available until (date), and it drops a few neat rewards! Make sure to check it out as everything is explained in its description.

• Admin Blu_x_Jay and the rest of the Species Moderators and Admins have worked on a complete overhaul and update of the Alumy traits and redefined, changed, and added a few new traits. Blu is still in the process of drawing guides and previews from them, but for now, you can take a look at this trait doc, with new details and definitions, as well as additions about what has been changed for certain traits. The trait megasheet will be shut down once we have every description over to the site and formatted as we need, but it is still up in the meantime while we figure everything out.
• Admin and Site dev MarskyMessier has been working on item art revamping, and new items have been given new art! Every item will be given a redesign for the LoreKeeper site, and we will give updates on the process whenever everything is done (like trait guides). New art items currently include the Jar of... Googly Eyes? and two new other items specific to the upcoming event!
• We have also planned a new event that should be released in a short while (A week or two), which will be bigger than the Discord Valentine event! An event news post will be posted as soon as the event drops, as well as discord updates and a post on Instagram.

Given that we are officially on LoreKeeper, here are some additional notes to keep in mind :

• Due to how the original Instagram Masterlist was incredibly messy, old, and not updated, some Alumies are either missing, wrongly traited or assigned to incorrect owners. We have worked on a guide for users to follow for claiming pre-existing masterlist entries (those that are recorded on LoreKeeper) for getting your Alumies updated and secure on your account. The full guide can be found here.
• For missing Alumies (aka Alumies that have been created before site launch and have not had a masterlist entry on Instagram), we opened a Google form for you to submit said missing Alumies, which our Masterlisters will check and upload as we receive submissions. Keep in mind we are a small team, and a lot of people have been busy lately, so it may take a bit to get back to you!
• Users can handle the storage of currency and items on their profile, meaning currency spending is fully automated. Trades can be opened by you (via the submit a new trade button) but are still approved by staff behind the scenes to make sure everything is all set. Everything is centralized and tied to your profile when you register and log in.
  -> However, because the masterlist was our priority to port over to the site, we have not worked on moving the storage over. The Instagram storage is temporarily frozen, meaning you cannot use, deposit or request anything from it, but you are free to buy or trade what you have on LoreKeeper! That ensures us that Instagram storage is not being tampered with while we start moving it over. As we move it over, Instagram storage will be progressively shut down and closed, and the plug will be pulled on it once everything has been ported. Storage port notice will be given in a few days once we are more organized on it.

Now we know most of you have been itching to get some Alumy adopts and we’re very excited to open the gates to allow for our artists to finally start making more. With regards to adopts, here are a few important things to note going forward:

• Designs and adopts MUST be uploaded to the Masterlist before they can be sold or traded. This applies to all members and artists in the community. We’re implementing this change in the hopes to avoid missing Alumies in the future! Any non-registered Alumy created after site launch is considered illegal and is not recognized as officially part of the ARPG.
• Following that rule, we will be working on guides for Design updates and various new features of LoreKeeper which will come later this month. We've been very busy and we preferred directing our time to masterlist and stabilizing the site, and getting guides out at a later time.
• We will also now be using LK and Discord to host all adopts and sales, and Instagram will be used solely for advertisement. We will share more information about that in the future, but it should make things easier and simpler for the artists and staff. This is also to avoid having to manage both LoreKeeper and Instagram comment sections, given that would become very messy. LoreKeeper makes it possible for us to schedule preview batches and open comment sections automatically, which is a great step forward for consistency!

We sincerely thank you all for your patience and support, Alumers!! Trying to set up everything during that hiatus has been a wild ride, but we finally made it!

Web dev's note: Hello hello! It is I, MarskyMessier, writing part of this announcement (helped by @Dragon), and being the main handler for the site alongside Vilagyent . I wanted to add a few points concerning a more technical side of this hiatus, given I have dedicated my full time as an Admin doing developing for here (which will be given its own announcement section in the future, as dev notes) :

• The site was launched 2 months ago, and I have been working on it nearly every day now ever since. Our LoreKeeper is not the vanilla experience, and we have around 20 extensions added, and 13 possible ones to be coming on soon! A lot of it requires time and patience, and LoreKeeper is not an easy beast, hence why it took a while, on top of me having never touched a linux based environnement and Lavarel / PHP build.
• There has been a lot of bugs squashed as we added and tested different things, but some have been tough to hunt, therefore the site might be a bit glitchy. It's normal! Don't worry, we have a channel on the discord alongside the on-site bug report feature which allows you to submit any issue you encounter.
• Because of personal matters Vilagyent has not been able to fully tag alongside me for various debugging and installation aside the multiple subtype extension (and I thank her a lot for porting that over, what a nightmare...), meaning if you have any inquiries or questions about the site, I am the most able to answer! Vila will soon be available again so she should be open to questions sooner or later.
• We currently have three main themes : the base light theme, a Lyuna themed one, and the Generic Dark theme that has not been fully fixed, I apologize as I had not been able to go back to it! It's a lot of work, but hopefully we'll get that up for you all soon.
• That's all I have to add! I hope you enjoy the site- We worked really hard on it, and it's has been a really cool learning experience for all. Even though its been a bit rough and messy, we're really proud of what we've created so far.