We’ve gotten this question a lot. Why did PlayByWeb change from the old look a few years ago? It’s a long story…

PlayByWeb was started around 1998. It shortly was organized into a nonprofit organization. That organization, PlayByWeb Inc, lived on donations which mainly went toward hosting costs. The site was written in PHP, a popular web programming language at the time. The site grew a lot in the early 2000s as RPGs grew in general. The site attracted the attention of many people, good and bad.

The bad actors began to attack the site using some methods that stayed pretty constant thought the years. The attacks grew more and more frequent as the PBW admins spent more and more time putting out fires and dealing with these attacks. After a while, the site’s code grew so complex that it was very difficult to defend against these attacks effectively.

On the business side, the nonprofit organization was not renewed, and it wasn’t keeping up with the paperwork. Essentially, Play By Web Inc faded away. This was bad for the admins, donators, users, and those who still paid the hosting costs, since the legal liability protection of the nonprofit organization went away.

Then, the RPG world seemed to go through a renaissance of sorts in the 2010s. More and more people, young and old, played more RPGs. The time was ripe to expand the user base of PBW. The technical world changed quite a bit in the 20+ years of PBW’s life. More and more users were using mobile devices for web access. So a technical rewrite might also be attractive to mobile users.

These three situations led to the refresh of PlayByWeb. The site was taken over in 2021 by Emrich Consulting, LLC. PBW was then redesigned to be both mobile-friendly and significantly more secure. Some took this to be good, and some took it to be a big step backward. I hope that the reasons above shed some light on why it was done.

There are a few things still left to be done. First, the user base isn’t as large as it once was. There is a goal to expand this. I plan to write about that in the future. There are some technical things to accomplish, like web search engine optimization. This goal shows some of the need for more software engineering help. As a free web site, it’s impossible to pay software engineers, so such help would need to come from volunteers. You might see the circle here: It’s hard to recruit help without more users to draw from, and it’s hard to attract more users with some technical needs unfulfilled. The coming months and years will see effort put into these two areas: Attracting Users and Attracting Volunteers.

I hope this sheds a little light on the workings of PlayByWeb through time. I want to write more about these things as time goes on. Thanks, everyone.

You already know about this, since you’re reading this! This is a blog closely related to PlayByWeb, but not limited to it. I’d like to include PBW development news, gaming thoughts, and various input from people related to PBW.

The original reason this blog was conceived is to help spread the word about PlayByWeb. I hope to write more about the long-term plans for the site later. The more information there is about PBW, the easier it is to spread that information.

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned.