Posted by Kim on July 31, 2019, 10:08am
Operation Audacious Phoenix - the rebuild of the RPR - is in full swing.Audacious means...
- showing a willingness to take surprisingly bold risks.
- intrepidly daring
- adventurous
- recklessly bold
- rash
- marked by originality and verve
This is exactly how I feel about this rebuild. It scares the heck out of me. It excites me to distraction. It is easily the craziest idea I've ever undertaken with the RPR and yet the payoff can be so very big for the whole community.
And a phoenix, of course, is a mythical creature. Generally, there is only one at a time, and every century (or in our case, decade) it remakes itself - becoming something new, strong and vibrant, and yet is still recognizably the same bird.
Operation Audacious Phoenix is about the RPR renewing and modernizing itself, making everything about it stronger -- and yet recognizably still the same site and community. 
I know what you're wondering: Will we have to rebuild all our characters? Will we keep our RPs? All data will be transferred over. You won't lose anything.
I've been working on this project since the start of the year, and I'm a little more than halfway through. Accolades, kudos, private messages, forums, the help section, the shop, inventories and items, the news, user settings, user profiles - they've all been rewritten completely from scratch to get the RPR ready to meet 2020.
Some of this is just pure necessity. Some of the site's code is nearing 10 years old, and will soon be made defunct by the simple passage of time. But I've chosen not to simply replace those pieces in isolation, and instead am rebuilding the entire thing on a more modern code base, because of what that will make possible. Features we've only dreamed of until now.
Now, the main obstacles left to releasing this new version are re-creating character profiles and groups -- and all their templates, and all the apparatus to build and manage them. This is the big one, the beating heart of the RPR. I've been holding off to do them last, to buy myself as much time as possible to plan how to make them both backwards compatible and as forward-looking and feature-packed as possible.
But I've also known that these things are so challenging, to get them done right, I'll need to focus on them like a laser beam - not steal whatever moments I can in the evenings and weekends, when I'm not distracted by other client work. I want to live and breath characters and groups for as long as I need to until they are done, ready to emerge from their phoenix pyre as gleaming, glowing, powerful new versions of themselves.
That's why, starting next week, the RPR will be hosting a fundraiser for Operation Audacious Phoenix, to buy me the time that I need to take this project to completion. It will, in fact, be a bake sale. 
This digital bake sale will combine some aspects of a kickstarteresque fundraiser with some aspects of more traditional RPR flower sales for something that I hope is fun, unique and helps to give us the necessary boost we need to complete Operation Audacious Phoenix. Plus, you'll be able to earn cool backer rewards through your support!For more information about Operation Audacious Phoenix, please visit the Operation Audacious Phoenix Group, where I've been posting progress updates and previews.
Comments
LakotaSiouxWarrior
July 31, 2019
10:26am
So ready to spend to make RPRepository a better place.
Oh, boy! Color me hyped!
JetStorm
July 31, 2019
10:21am
so how long will this take on rebuilding the RPR if u don't mind me asking
Lumaslily
July 31, 2019
10:14am
Yaayy!
I am tickled pink for everything about this. Baked goods, flowers, getting to help 'buy time' so that epic awesome sauce can be launched giving us all a new set of armor? This is the best. So many good things. 
Oh boy oh boy oh boy
IT BE A COMING
IT BE A COMING
Kotomi657
July 31, 2019
10:29am