State of DTI: 2023

Hello, dear friends! I'm Matchu (they/she), the coder-person of Dress to Impress! Here's a little note about like… why the site is stuck where it is rn, and what we're thinking of doing about that.

I started building DTI 2020 back when I was healthier, and was pretty sure I could finish it all up and transfer everything to the new site by the end of the year. The name made sense at the time! 😅 But, well, now I'm too sick too often to finish 😖 (Long covid? It's hard to say.)

I'm happy we have a site that's much better on phones and works with the new HTML5 systems! But Classic DTI still has a lot of the essential item trading features and a few other nice things… so we're kinda just stuck with the two sites for now, I think 😬 We won't be making any improvements to Classic DTI anymore (changing it is a REAL pain), but we also won't turn it off until the day it's no longer needed, and that's… very far from today.

For now, our technical focus is making sure all Neopets customization data is archived, in case Neopets servers become spottier or go offline. (We see the way the wind is blowing with the NFT Neopets project, so we want to be ready if the executives shut down Neopets.com, just in case.) And we have a small support team keeping an eye on things—thank you Chips and Dice for all your help!!

But yeah, we're open to having more hands help finish DTI 2020! If you have practice with React/Node apps, and are eager to spelunk into a codebase that was unfortunately never really built for a team, please send me a note at matchu@openneo.net and I'd love to talk about it! 💜 I'm not ready to offer the kind of hands-on support I normally would, so it's not really a fair ask on my part—but I know there's lots of folks who would be grateful, if it's something you can do.

In the meantime, mostly just… thanks to everyone for being so kind to me over these, gosh, 12 years now. The Neopets community is where I grew up, and I'll do my best to help keep it alive in the coming decades, whatever form it may take. We deserve that.

Best wishes in all things, Neopians 💖
—Matchu

P.S. I've dropped our little feedback form at the bottom of the page here too, so you can let me know if like… anything in here sounds especially right or wrong. I want to make sure I'm doing right by you, as best I can!