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[Kosta]

Hi!

As you all know, I started Abandonia as a hobby project, something that I developed and maintained in my free time. Over the years the site has grown exponentially and has reached a point when I started struggling coming up with and developng new features, concepts and server platforms, especially parallel to the university work.

You've probably noticed that during the few years behind us, design and features have really remained pretty much the same. I've also tried to do some work on improving the hosting but that ended up with questionable results as you might have noticed during the past weeks. All my efforts in developing an improved feature set and layout failed because maintaining the content and site proved to be too demanding by itself. I felt that this wasn't fair towards the site and the people in the community and that it deserves more.

This is where Studentis group comes into picture. They deal with big community sites, concentrating on student portals. I got in touch with them and they felt that Abandonia, together with its community, is very strong and would be worth investing time and effort into in order to improve and bring it to the much needed next level. That is how the partnership was formed. They have agreed to offer an advanced hosting platform consisting of 5 load balanced servers as well as technical support and programming help from 4 professionals that work for one of the leading brittish IT consulting firm, in exchange for marketing rights and ad inventory. Don't worry, there will be no popups

I have been attending some meetings and we have lots of interesting and exciting things planned for Abandonia in the upcoming months. The feature list is long, but some of the main ones are an improved layout, recoding the scripts to a professional CMS platform, company profiles, advanced search engine, "my profile", better integration of forums into the site, easier content submission, game browser etc. I will keep you informed of the features as they will be in production, and I hope the response to these changes will be positive. Once the initial feature set is developed and implemented, I will be asking for your ideas as the new framework will be completely modular and easy to update.

I know that most of the people got used to the system that has been working well for the past few years, but if we want Abandonia to keep the status of the coolest and most dynamic site on the abandonware scene, we need to make this big step. Overall, I felt that this was the right thing to do in order to also ensure the future stability and growth of the site, as well as to provide the community members a nicer place to spend the time in

If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to ask and I would also like to hear any feedback regarding this!