Welcome to our profile page! Here you'll find a bit of information about who the webmasters are, and a little insight into their interests, favourites and personality. You'll also find Psypoke's History, as well as our Banner Hall of Fame - a collection of previous site banners.
Psypoke started off in early 1999 as a small Pokemon website. Its original creator, Abra Kadabra, or Abra K as he become known later, was a talented webmaster who managed to attract scores of Pokemon fans around the world to his website. With the Pokemon craze sweeping the world, Psypoke became one of the most popular fan sites.
It was in late 2000 that Abra K decided to stop work on the website, and he announced his resignation. In his place, four people were to take over as webmasters, and thus Psypoke's first Elite Four were appointed - Nova, Kirbster, darkmind and Deadeyedave.
Abra K had left the site in shambles. Things needed to be updated, each page was littered with advertisements and popups. But the site was hugely popular. The forums (Which were hosted on an EZBoard) and the chat rooms (which were hosted on Mediadriven) bustled with Pokemon fans from around the world. Psypoke.com was at one of its peaks.
One day, the site vanished into thin air. The server mysteriously died, and none of the four webmasters had any ideas. With most of the chat traffic entering through the site's Java applet, the #Psypoke chat room died (At this stage, the chats were now on a new server, aXpi. An unofficial Psypoke chatroom still remained on Mediadriven for some reason that no one knows). Only the forum members and mIRC users stayed, but it was quiet.
The Second Website
It must have been around June 2001 that we were treated with a wonderful surprise from the Elite Four. They revealed to us a new server, with plans for a totally new site. We had a cool new UBB, a new domain name and webspace! And so, Psypoke was reborn at www.psypokes.com - the second website.
The UBB also gave rise to another event - the moderators of the forums were titled "Gym Leaders" and a creative spark from Amphy launched the Psypoke Challenge, the PPC. Each moderator was to represent a Kanto or Johto Gym Leader in an online battling competition. Challengers would sign up, fight 8 Gym Leaders and 4 Elites to become the Psypoke champion.
All good things come to end.. as we saw the second website myseriously vanish as fast as the first website. Thus not only did the community suffer a blow without the UBB, it meant the Psypoke Challenge could also not operate.. and it wasn't like the PPC was doing that well anyway. It was too time consuming, too disorganised, too difficult, too unmanageable. Our plans for a website were dashed and that was that. Worse still, it was at this stage that the Elite Four began to break apart - Nova had his real life to take care of, Kirb left after being disgruntled with the lack of appreciation (and other things) and Dave was just hardly online. Only darkmind remained, and aren't we all just glad to have her?
Psypoke underwent hibernation for a long while after this. Rockets_Moltres, better now known as Tom, set up a better EZBoards - the old one had been run down with spam and was no longer accessible due to Kirbster's departure. The chats remained quiet.. commonly less than 7 people would be there. And to worsen matters, members began leaving over feuds that lingered - senior members that were well respected among the community. The only thing keeping us together were Tom's games - The Weakest Link, The Psypokes Versus, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire... and Amphy's projects - Banana and Gaia.
The Third Website
At the end of October 2002, TonberryKing was offered a position on aXpi Staff (The chat server) as a HelpOp. At the end of the year, Amphy too scored a position on the aXpi staff, joining TK, KingNidoking and darkmind as Psypoke's four IRC Operators.
What happened next was truly quite remarkable. Amphy and TK had decided to start looking for some web space, and in desperation, Amphy stuck a cry for help in the #Psypoke channel topic. This request was answered by none other than ^Chessman himself, aXpi's server root admin, who had said that aXpi would be willing to host Psypoke. tex, the other server root admin, offered us some webspace, and as a bonus, two domain names. On the 19th of December, 2002, Psypoke was reborn under www.psypoke.org and www.psypoke.net - our third website.
Amphy and TK assumed responsibility for the site. Psypoke needed a new Elite Four, so naturally, darkmind, being a former Elite, was an obvious choice. The last member was chosen from a pool of senior members that were former moderators at the EZBoard, and thus JamesTR, now known as Frost, made up the final member of Psypoke's second Elite Four.
This new server offered us some awesome features. The introduction of PHP not only meant a new language to learn, but also the ability to do more dynamic things with the website. The most remarkable feature, however, was our Pokedex. Slow start at first, but the combined efforts of all Elite Four Members saw the Psypoke Dex, the "Psydex", become the best on the Internet. Word quickly spread and the site began to gain momentum. Site traffic was good, but the community involvement was lacking. It was around this time too that darkmind and TK began work on the Ruby/Sapphire Battle Bots, yet another effort to restore the community to what it was a few years ago.
In June 2003, aXpi shifted webhosts to something more extravagant. Here we had databases - another language to learn, and the ability to speed up the Psydex processing by at least three times. This was fantastic - the site became so efficient and spectacular. As a result, the boards were hosted on the old server which became www.psypoke.net, and the site on the new server, www.psypoke.org
But we were a victim of our own success - we continually exceeded bandwidth allocations. People had been stealing our content, externally linking to our pictures and we probed into the web languages of the Internet to find a solution. Eventually www.psypoke.org went down and we shifted everything back to the old server. But the old server began to experience lag and downtime. The inability to control the server and FTP frustrated the webmasters, and Psypoke began to lose credibility among the Internet's Pokemon Community.
The Fourth Website
With www.psypoke.net and www.psypoke.org having been down for over a month, we found a quiet Romanian server with everything we could possibly want - free webspace, MySQL, PHP and unlimited bandwidth. There had to be a catch, but we didn't see anything wrong with it, so the Elite Four decided to stick with it, and thus Psypoke was welcomed to its new home at www.psypoke.3x.ro - the fourth website.
Frost began working on a new Anime section, and TK finished off the LeafGreen and FireRed sections. A few things needed to be fixed here and there, but nothing major. Things seemed good, but it was too good to be true, as on the 24th of April our site had been deleted, and the the zombie www.psypoke.org had reappeared from nowhere. We had no FTP access to fix the errors on www.psypoke.org, so we decided it was as good as dead. We needed another webhost...
The Fifth Website
Having searched the Internet for something suitable, we began to get frustrated and dishearted. The aXpi Chat server was experiencing troubles, and it was in early 2004 that it finally shut down. With no chat server and no website, we were stuck. We needed a breakthrough. Frost had suggested that we try ClassicGaming, but TK was kinda skeptical since he didn't think Pokemon was "classic" enough to be accepted. But nevertheless, a submission was entered and we waited for an approval email - the form had said that they would get back to us within 48 hours. As two days (ie, exactly 48 hours, TK and Frost were counting the seconds on that one) passed, we began to lose hope again.
But as you can imagine, our impatience finally paid off, and we received the magic email: Welcome aboard! You have been invited to join the GameSpy Network community of sites. Soon after we gained access to the dynamic cluster, granting us the power of PHP and MySQL. And so, on the 1st of May, 2004, Psypoke had its fifth, and hopefully, final, website at www.classicgaming.com/psypoke.
In 2005, the site continued to expand; new games were coming out and it was a struggle just to keep up with all the info to be added to the site. Thanks to numerous contributions on the part of our forum members, the site was growing in many ways. As more and more pages were added to the site, and more info to the database, we found ourselves revamping the way things worked several times. In November, we managed to reclaim one of our old domain names: www.psypokes.com (which is how you got here today).
2006 was more of the same. As news started filtering in from Japan and E3 all about Pokemon for the Wii and the new DS games, the site kept on expanding in other areas. Things were reformatted left and right, constanty getting more efficient. The PsyDex was growing all the time, with new information being added as it became available.
2007 has been an interesting year for us. We started off with the hype over the English releases of Diamond and Pearl. Translation data was pouring in fast as the release date neared.
March 16, 2007. After more than 4 years, PsyPoke's Second Elite Four decided to step down, needing to focus on more pressing matters, like university studies. In their place, the "Lite Four" of the forums (FireStarter, Krisp, sN0wBaLL, and TheCyberMew), along with a 5th Webmaster (Jigglypuff), were given control of the site. Though there was initial panic that the Elite Four had abandoned the website to simply die off, these fears were quickly calmed. The Elite Four remained a part of the community, with Frost even continuing to make site updates in his spare time. The new admins were quickly managing to get a feel for the site, and before long had successfully begun making updates.
Diamond and Pearl were released later in the year, and the site continues to grow. The PsyDex is still our most popular page, bringing in well over a quarter-million hits per day. The forums are bustling, our sections for Mystery Dungeon, Diamond and Pearl, and Battle Revolution are growing larger all the time, and there's some BIG projects underway that are really going to rock your world.
We're glad to have you here. This page is just a brief summary of everything this site's been through in the past 7 years. We'd love for you to be a part of this history, so feel free to join us for the ride. With your continued support, we'll be around for years to come. ~Psypoke Administration