judda

@Justin

1 - No

2 - No

3 - None - the code is pretty easy to understand once you look through it.  The code for the layout updates is a lot easier to understand and a lot more self documenting.

Yes I would be willing to do that.

6 hours ago, Mew said:

@judda

Hello! How much are you looking for exactly? Very interested.

As previously mentioned, I have a number in mind however, I am not sharing it in order to get offers.

2 hours ago, Pat said:

1. Is it entirely financially self-sustaining?
I mean, does all the money from "I.C.E. purchases" pay for everything that the site needs or do you need to pay for some things from your own money?  If so, budget-wise, do you have an estimate on how much it would cost to run for at least a year less the money from "I.C.E. purchases" ?

2. Is it okay to "clean house"?
I mean, I have a group of friends that I have worked with for years that I have bonded and built trust who have the skills that the existing staff has such as artwork and moderation.  Would it be okay to fire all the existing staff and bring in all the people that I have known and trusted for years? or are there some kind of contract stipulations in place that I have to use the existing staff?

3. Also, for tax and liability purposes, how is the business legally structured?  Is it a sole proprietorship, partnership, or LLC?

1 - Gold Accounts and ICE Purchases should be able to help sustain it for it a bit however, may not be able to pay for a ton of art at the same time.  The budget for a year depends on your overall expenses.  I am a programmer, so all I needed to do was pay for hosting and art.

2 - I have no control over what the owner does however, I do believe that if you cleaned house, the community would not like you as a lot of the staff are long time members who love the site.  If I were the new owner, I would not do this.

3 - It is all held under my sole proprietorship.

@Mobotropolis I have a number in mind however, at this point I am not sharing it with anyone in order to not muddy the waters.

Hey All,

First and foremost, I want to say thank you for the last 5 years! Your continued support and friendship has meant a lot to me. Unfortunately, I come to you today to inform you that IcePets.Com is now going up for sale.

Although the website is up for sale, the team is continuing to add new Items and run events. The only thing on pause will be any new features and the progress of our alpha website. All I.C.E. purchases will continue to go back into the site as it always has been, but we understand if the site for sale gives you reason to pause in purchasing. Our goal is to continue to give you a fun place to play as well as events to keep you busy. You have given us many great years, and we hope with a new owner IcePets can give you many more as well.

Why is it up for sale?

Since purchasing IcePets.Com in 2014, the amount of time that I am able to devote to IcePets has dropped to the point that it is no longer fair to the most important part of the site. You, the users.

I (and the rest of the team) have put countless hours into IcePets and definitely do not want to see it fail. That is why I'm looking to sell IcePets to find a new owner who has the passion that I once had and drive the layout updates past the finish line.

What Are the Layout Updates?

The original code for IcePets was written back in 2009 back when PHP was a much different language. There was no "composer" to install third-party libraries into your code, or anything. It was also coded with a bunch of back doors by the original developer. Because of this, the goal was to give the whole site a fresh coat of paint. The problem was to do this, we needed to change how the pages were built. They moved from being dynamically created in a PHP script (as a string) and being emitted with "echo", to use a full templating engine (twig) to handle them. In the meanwhile, we also improved some of the functionality (i.e. galleries were made nicer, and quick stock now works with every location instead of just your shop). These changes are all available here: icepets.dev. The majority of this is complete, including the biggest thing which were the items, just a few kinks need to be worked through, and enhancements made.

So although this was branded as layout updates, after going through the first round, I quickly realized that it was going to be bigger than I had anticipated.

What you get:

• A highly motivated and flexible team to work with
• Ownership of all of the art assets
  • Pets - 17 Species with up to 37 different colours
  • Trophies - 600 different
  • Items - 4,500
  • World Maps
  • Avatars - 770

Features:

• Adoptable pets
• Forums
• Messaging
• Multiple Flash games (most rebuilt using Construct 3)
• Weekly Raffle
• Trivia
• Trophies
• User Profiles
• Wishlists (layout updates)
• NPC + User Shops
• Trades
• Quick Stock (way better version in the layout updates)

Technology Stack:

The technology stack is currently in flux between the live site, and the layout updates. All of the code is stored on Gitlab for the purposes of source control.

Live Site:

• PHP 5.6
• Mysql Database
• jQuery
• VueJS
• Must use Apache

Support Site:

• Laravel 5.2
• VueJS
• PHP 7.1
• Slack Integration

Staff Site:

• Laravel 6.2
• PHP 7.3
• VueJS
• Slack Integration

Slack Bot:

• Laravel 6.2
• PHP 7.3

Discord Bot:

• Laravel 5.6
• PHP 7.1

API Site:

• Laravel 6.2
• PHP 7.3

Job Site:

• Laravel 6.2
• PHP 7.3

Layout Updates (in the main repository):

• PHP 7.3
• VueJS
• Twig Templating Engine
• MySql
• Must use Apache

HTML 5 Games:

• Built with Construct 3

Please Note: The API and Job Sites could be merged into one application, this was originally split up so that we could scale up the API infrastructure if needed without running the risk of having scheduled jobs run multiple times. There are tools out there now (i.e. Laravel Vapor) which would automatically handle this for you instead of having it split out this way.

Additional:
I recently purchased a 6-month subscription for Laravel Shift (Shift CI Plan) which allows for the automatic dependency upgrade of any number of Laravel applications, as long as they are currently on running Laravel 6.0 or above. As long as I have that subscription active, if you do not have any issues with me having access to the code, I am more than willing to have it set up as one of my projects to automatically receive the upgrades (PRs will be submitted from time to time). Also, if you upgrade the other applications to Laravel 6.0, I can enable it for those repositories too.

@Dinocanid - You can't unset $this because it's a PHP object that defines itself.  The only way to do it is to unset the variable using the object.  That will free it up.

@Digital based on this thread - could we have @PaulSonny's "Programmer" title revoked for now?

You've heard the rumours. You've seen updates. You may have lost faith. But we're here to tell you the layout updates are happening in the very near future!



Starting on May 4, we will be opening an Open Alpha Testing Server for all interested Users to participate in finding bugs and working out kinks before the live launch. This will be on an entirely separate server, so your actions over there will not affect your account in any way, but rather serve as a dummy account for you to play around with.

The layout updates aim to provide a clean, modernised user interface and improved game experience, as well as large amounts of behind-the-scenes programming to make your IcePets experience the best it can be. We've prepared a preview of some of what's to come!

Everyone is welcome to join in the alpha testing, and for your help you'll receive a Participation Trophy. Bugs discovered will be recorded publicly, and there will be special rewards for anyone who brings new bugs to our attention. Please be aware that because this is an alpha test, there may be lag and glitches, which is why we need your help to smooth things out before transferring it all to the live site!



We appreciate everyone bearing with us this far. We know it's been a long time coming, and we have heard your feedback in the meantime. After the updates go live, we will be able to refocus Staff resources on new features and games for the future, as well as continued improvements to existing features and artwork. Everyone on Staff is excited for what's coming, and we hope you will be, too!

@Tasinei awesome Can't wait to see the application!

@Tasinei Can you PM me a screenshot of what you see and the error?

@Tasinei - If you started with the link, you will be logged in as a guest on the support site for 10 minutes (a small hiccup based on the way we handle one thing).  Can you try again now?

We are still looking for writers!

~judda

I pushed through another biggish PR this morning.  Removing the config.php file from the code in favour of using a .env file from the auto-loaded dependency.

12 hours ago, Mobotropolis said:

Generally speaking, I just wanted to make them darker so they looked less like McDonalds. 

Instead of doing a reinstall I just went in and fixed the code myself and it seems to be working now. 

I'll look/play around a bit when I get home tonight. 

Edit: I decided to do a fresh install and got the following after it was done - 

 

Yup - I got that too.  It has to do with the attempt to cast as a Mystring.  I've put in a PR to add in PSR-0 autoloading support which also fixes that (since I couldn't test).

~judda

Well for things like configuration - you can use:

https://github.com/vlucas/phpdotenv

And stuff like that.

#1 is literally just moving everything down one folder.  That way when deployed to a consumer's web server they can have things stored at least a bit more securely.

#2 use composer for common libraries that you can use from the internet (packagist.org)

@Dinocanid A few small suggestions:

• Move all of the web content down one folder in the repository and make this in a "public" folder.  That way in the future you can have a safe environment.
• Set up composer for at least some of the dependencies/namespaces.
• Instead of making the repository under your username, make a group/team "mysidia-deluxe" with one repository for now (this one)

~judda

@BeingI had Syntax set up to work on my stuff and then she just disappeared

June 15th was the only day I heard from him.  I messaged him a little while later (June 23rd) and low and behold, he had vanished again.

~judda

The umbrella company is something that I plan to do in the upcoming months.

Please Note: I live in Canada - so some of this may not apply to you.

If I make an incorporation for my "brand", I separate my personal assets from the company (therefore protecting me from losing everything).  I will then spawn off several different companies from this incorporation.

For now, they will be:

1. Freelancing
2. IcePets.Com
3. CheckItOn.Us

With the intention of adding more as I build up more sites.  With it, I will also be able to write off some purchases (or portions of them) during tax season.

In essence, the LLC/Incorporation helps protect you, and by using that, you can have other companies under it which have the same protection because of the parent brand.

I've tried to reach out a few times about buying MyVPS - are you guys willing to sell the assets?

Are you on Discord?  It may be easier to discuss there.

For data types, if you are just doing on/off - TINYINT(1) would work.  Even with multiple options, TINYINT may work better for you.

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/storage-requirements.html

I'm a little confused about what you are saying.  You say that the database as a whole is 150 MB but for every 5-10k rabbits, it grows 1 GB.  This tells me that the issue isn't with your database but with the actual images that you store for the rabbits?

You say that most of the rabbit data is INT in order to save space - do you have a need for such high numbers?  Or would smaller data types do you better?

I would love to help if you have anything that I can help with - I have been working with larger data sets for a while now (doing point of sale analytics and reporting).

~judda

I have had the same thing happen to me on several occasions sadly.  I even paid him upfront because he was doing a lot of work for me trusting that I would see the code ... I have yet to see it (this was about a year ago now).  I have limited to no faith that I will ever see that code which I paid for.

IcePets.com is looking for help.  We have been working on some massive changes to the site recently.  We are converting the layout from using strings built up in the code to use a proper templating engine (Twig V1).

Technical Requirements:

• PHP 7
• Eloquent Models
• VueJS
• jQuery (removing most of it - but it's still there)
• npm/yarn
• Composer - We use this to bring in the models
• Twig
• git

You will be working directly with me (developer) and my team to convert not only the layout over to using Twig, but also lots (all) of the database queries from using the mysql_* functions over to use Laravel's Eloquent models.  I have done a fair bit of work already setting up the groundwork for it, however, to take it home I may need a bit of support.

Applicants - please provide:

• Resume
• References
• Code Samples

@Vix is amazing to work with.  She has a great (non-technical) understanding about what is going on behind the scenes of the site and is very understanding about time commitments and devotion.