A minor update: I have been making some tweaks and additions to the affiliation requirements. In particular:

• I now explicitly reserve the right to reject websites with obviously AI-generated content out of hand. I kind of hate to have to set rules about this at all, but it is what it is.
• I've updated the section on how affiliates get removed (and extracted it into its own subsection on the page). It used to say that I remove affiliates that haven't updated in three months, with exceptions for sites that have been revived after going a while between updates before. In practice, I hadn't actually enforced that theoretical limit in years; the hobbyist fansites that are running today are mostly run by busy adults for whom updates are normally a fair bit slower than back in the day (mine included!), and three months are no longer anything like an indication the site is dead and gone, besides that there are just much fewer Pokémon fansites out there and I'm happy to keep linking to some of the ones that exist and remain online with good stuff on them, even if they aren't being actively updated. So, in other words, if the implicit requirement of updating at minimum once every three months might have previously scared you away from applying to affiliate, that is now explicitly no longer a requirement.
• Instead, I have made explicit the real criteria that will make me remove an affiliate these days: going down or defunct altogether, or making some sort of dubious pivot towards advertising casinos or cryptocurrencies or AI-generated slop, etc. (you cannot imagine how much I hate to have to set rules about that, either).

I feel a lot better with the rules officially updated, at least – and if you're a real human running a passion project Pokémon fansite in 2026, by all means do apply for affiliation if you haven't! I used to be a bit of a hardass about it back in the day, but these days honestly I'm just really happy to see new Pokémon fansites at all.

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Happy 2026, everyone! It's likely to be a big year ahead for Pokémon, what with the franchise's 30th anniversary in February; I'm looking forward to whatever we're getting.

2025 has been a pretty big year for me, from Pokémon Sleep legitimately improving my sleep schedule to publishing my first non-Pokémon fanfic to visiting Japan to having an actual child. Updates on the site were a bit on the sparse side in all that, but the Mew trick essay that I published in March is one of my favorite things I've ever done for the site, and in the second half of the year I managed to pick up the update frequency and get a fair amount of good, necessary or just useful housekeeping work done on it that I'm very glad to have completed, so all in all, I'm reasonably satisfied with how things have gone for the site this year in spite of everything.

As usual, even if I didn't get the New Year's update done until the second of January, I'd like to extend some thanks to some of the people who helped brighten my 2025:

• All of the lovely internet friends that I've chatted with over the year; I couldn't possibly name all of you here and don't dare try lest I manage to forget somebody and make them feel bad for no reason in the process, but you know who you are and I appreciate you all
• Dannichu, Jackie and Chibi, for coming to visit in person and being lovely company as always
• elyvorg and seatherny, for VCs, cats, birds, crochet, and In Stars and Time
• Negrek, for greatly increasing the number of movies I've watched and the amount of time I've spent on actual writing during the year
• Psychic and Teagan, for Japan tips and VCs and of course the regular Pokémon baking that makes me smile
• Altissimo, for continuing to send me corrections and creating such an ambitious resource for Pokémon data
• The Johto Times staff, whom I feel privileged to work with on a great newsletter
• The Thousand Roads and Cat Café Discord servers, where I love to hang out
• My husband Shadey, for being a lovely husband and a great dad
• My daughter Caterpie, for being a relatively well-behaved baby
• My cat Birta, for tolerating this new creature who keeps occupying my lap
• My parents, whom I love and appreciate
• As ever, those who support me on Patreon
• TheScythe and Jolt135, for their invaluable contributions to Pokémon fandom through popularizing the Mew trick in 2003 and for now in 2025 finding, reading and leaving comments on my Mew trick essay, which truly meant a lot
• Game Freak, for making a series I continue to love in spite of its flaws
• Everyone who visited the site or is in general visiting and creating old-school fansites in 2025

Hope 2025 was good to you, regardless of everything going on in the world, and that your 2026 will be better!

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Another kind of technical upgrade: something that has been bugging me for a little while now is that the site's URLs since I rewrote the backend in Python in 2016 have been a little nonstandard. The FAQ, for example, was at https://www.dragonflycave.com/faq, but if you went to https://www.dragonflycave.com/faq/ - which is a more common way for URLs to look if they don't end in a file extension - you'd get a 404 page. My own Firefox's address bar was sometimes automatically adding a slash when I manually entered a URL without it, meaning it would direct me to the 404 page instead of the actual page I wanted. All in all, it was just a bit odd that it worked that way - and it wasn't 100% consistent either, since there were some URLs that did end in slashes.

Long story short, I have now made it so that the site's URLs should always end in a slash if they don't end in a file extension. The slash-less version will seamlessly redirect to the version with the slash, so hopefully you shouldn't notice much of a change.

Alongside this, for boring technical reasons, I also updated a large number of links to other pages across the site, where I was still linking to old pre-2016 .aspx URLs. These URLs already seamlessly redirected to the new URLs for those pages (and they still do), but I'd meant to get all of those updated to link the actual new URLs instead of the redirect soon after the Python migration, and then it only ever happened for a few scattered pages when I happened to be updating them for something else, so it was well past time to actually finish that.

As usual, I tried to make sure I didn't break anything, but do let me know if you notice anything off. While doing this I did notice a couple of things that were broken and now no longer are, and I made some general tweaks - most prominently, some screenshots in the spriting guide are now just shown on the page rather than being linked.

A couple of things then went beyond tweaks: I got carried away making rewrites to the ancient Proving Sprite Theft page and the Reviewing Guide. The former was distinctly outdated and just written in a very teen-me sort of way (it's not really a page I'd make today, especially since spriting is not nearly as popular as it was, but rather than remove it altogether I tried to just keep all the advice that was there while updating it a bit), and the latter was something I'd been wanting to rewrite for a while for many reasons, most prominently that I'd grown to find some of its takes and presentation downright weird. Hopefully now they both make a bit more sense for a modern audience, and I can breathe a sigh of relief.

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