Hiya, Poptropicans! I wanted to let you all know that besides the two recent posts, I’ve been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make this blog better for everyone. There’s still a lot of work left to do, but I am slowly and surely improving it! What, may you ask, are the updates? Well, get ready for a long post…

Header

If you remember our old header, it looked like this:

Although beautiful and given to us by Skinny Moon, it became outdated awhile ago when Poptropica mostly moved on from Poptropica Worlds. Worlds is hard to access now, so it was time to update it to:

This is one of the simpler updates I’ve completed. Also, don’t worry — our title of an “Official Poptropica Fansite” still exists!

Mobile Friendly

The website is now mobile friendly! Before this update, you would have to pinch and zoom to read text. The theme the PTFP uses is a retired one, so it wasn’t optimized. Now, it automatically adjusts for you based on whatever device you use! Click the “Menu” button to view our pages, and you’re good to go!

Additionally, the mobile-friendly version only shows excerpts of posts to speed up the load time for users. This alone changed the loading time for mobile devices from a score in the 30s (the red zone for Google) to a whopping score of 57 – above the 75th percentile for websites.

 Contact Information

This is a short one, but although we’ve always had our Contact page with a contact form, our old email was awkward. Poptropicatip@gmail.com? What happened to the “s”? Well, the confusion is over! Our email is now staff@poptropicatips.com. Feel free to contact us that way, or you can contact us on our Discord, through comments, or on Twitter.

Island Walkthroughs

Our Island Walkthroughs page got a simple makeover. There used to be pixelated icons of islands, but now the entire island image is shown above a link to each walkthrough for easy navigation. It’s also in alphabetical order!

The island walkthrough updates don’t stop there, though. I’m not done with editing pages, but some of the current islands on Poptropica also have a makeover inspired by the PHB. There is now a “Preview” section, “Video Walkthrough” section, and “Written Walkthrough” section. However, that’s not the best part…

Each updated walkthrough comes with links to the exact part of the page you’re looking for. For extra long guides like Survival Island due to its five episodes, this saves a lot of time of scrolling and looking for what you want. Go test it out for yourself. There are still plenty of pages left to update, but it’s getting there!

Another guide I’m particularly happy with is Poptropolis Games, which was so old the image links were broken. Now, it has links to each type of game you may need help with.

Other Behind-the-Scenes Work

Unless you’re a developer of websites, this section may not make much sense. Basically, I upped the security a little bit. I gave the PTFP an SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, record. I also set up DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Both of these prevent spammers from sending mail with this domain. I also set up DMARC, which has the same purpose and helps with email authentication. It’s not full-proof, but it should help make any emails from us more trustworthy!

Future Updates

I plan to keep updating the blog and making posts in the foreseeable future. If you have any ideas for new pages and posts, comment them! Also, if you’re interested in becoming an author, feel free to contact me through any of the ways listed above. I want to make this an active and fun community again!

-Silver Wolf 🐺