*lies in wait*
Btw, what happened to make you so active? Almost nothing changed for 13 years (
) and now you added and changed tons of things.
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Haha. The TLDR is that I either needed to get to work on it, or close the site down. I chose to work on it 
I had a lot of things go on in my life over the last 8 or so years that caused me to put Grouvee on the backburner. Had a kid, wife got cancer, had another kid that was born 14 weeks early, moved, etc. etc. Itās life.
The need to fix Grouvee had kind of been building ever since I thought Giant Bomb was going to go away (it hasnāt, but I donāt know if their API will ever come back the way it was), and I had to switch over to IGDB fairly rapidly. I got the data downloading properly, but I was overwhelmed by trying to figure out how to merge 80,000 games, and I stalled out.
Then I got bombarded at some point last year with a bunch of bots. Some were AI, some were I donāt even know what. I didnāt know how to deal with them other than to use Cloudflare, and that was barely working. I was pretty close to just giving up because I couldnāt figure it out.
I could also tell people were frustrated by all the duplicate game entries, and the inconsistency of the site. I could tell people were leaving. There are plenty of options out there, so I donāt blame anyone for going somewhere else.
Iām skipping over a lot of things, but about the time you and I had an exchange about Grouvee closing up (which I recall you saying was a nightmare of yours), was when I decided I needed to do something. I needed to just finish the transition from old pages to new pages. I needed to merge the GB games to IGDB. I needed to finish up all these half finished features Iād built over the years and just stopped. Iāve talked to a lot of people over the years about this site, and it really helps to hear from someone like you that you really like the site. So I just decided to do it. Hopefully it all pays off eventually.
Hopefully that answers your question Thanks for being around since the beginning.
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Boy am I happy that you reconsidered. Grouveeās shelf system is unparalleled in the space. If it ever goes away thatās probably it for me with game trackers. Iāll go fully self-hosted. Either some dedicated tool for games thatās flexible enough for what I want, repurpose some other tracking software like calibre, or just go basic with tracking everything in excel or some sqlite db.
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I think some really good shelf ideas would be to have the games like on a game collection shelf.
I have finished this work and pushed it live today. Please let me know what I screwed up. I did a ton of testing and it all seems good, but I know I missed things because thereās a lot of moving parts on that page.
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