Major upgrades & news - 2026-05-16

[Maurice]

Hello all!

 

The planned maintenance is now finished, and the forum and wiki are back online! They will remain in "read-only" temporarily while I complete a few actions after the DNS propagation of the domain (over the next day or so). This update was more than just a quick fix—it was a complete overhaul of our platform to ensure it runs smoothly for years to come.

 

Here is a quick look at what has changed:

What’s New

• Faster performance: We’ve moved to a more powerful server. You should notice that pages load faster and the site feels more responsive, even during busy times.

• Fresh new look: Both the forum and the wiki have received a little design refresh. It’s cleaner, more modern, and easier to use on mobile and desktop.

• Total system rewrite: Behind the scenes, I’ve updated the core code and frameworks to the latest versions. This makes the site more secure and more stable.

• Smoother backups: We’ve improved how the site handles data, meaning less slowdown and better reliability for everyone.

A New Way to Support the Site

To celebrate this new milestone, I wanted to try something different: I have removed all ads from the site for the time being.

As some of you know (and as I indicated in a separated pinned thread from many years back), running a community of this size on high-end hardware costs quite a lot every year. My goal is to keep the experience ad-free, but I can only do that with your help.

• If you enjoy the new, cleaner experience, please consider making a donation toward our server fees. To do so, please contact me. Thanks a lot!

• If donations cover a good portion of the yearly costs, I may be able to manage the financial aspect and keep the site ad-free. If we can’t reach that goal, I may eventually have to bring ads back to help reduce costs.

 

Thank you for your patience during the downtime. Enjoy the new and improved site! 🙂

 

Maurice

[Mario-WL]

Thanks for all the upgrades and the, for now, ad-free experience! Much appreciated!

[r0o0di]

your work is much much appreciated man thank you so much ❤️❤️

[Manvel]

Amazing work, Maurice. It’s really great to see DCW getting this kind of care and improvement after all these years. Thank you for keeping the site alive and making it better for everyone!

[DavidHolandaOne]

I cannot thank you enough for finally stepping in and give the wiki a major upgrade in functionality, stability, readability and speed. I pray for times like this.

We can finally make the website alive and maintain the wiki without having to worry about the servers crashing down and tolerating the slow speed that it had.

 

Surprised that we got Vector skin now and didn't break anything on the wiki, although the menu is now at default skin. One thing I wish is that we can make the wiki look a bit more customized, something similar to JoJoWiki who did a great job at designing their wiki for the readers' attentions.

 

Some pages from DCW wiki really needs to be more organized and fulfilled, but because of the server crashes and instability, it quite made the job harder. So I'm glad that it has finally been updated for us, the wiki users, so we can focus on trying to be the #1 encyclopedia for everything Detective Conan in English.

[Maurice]

Thanks a lot everyone! I'm really glad you like the changes - anddd the much increased stability!

 

Regarding skins, we can look at options. What was important to me was the seamless transition between main parts of the site (homepage, forum, wiki, etc...). The overall look-and-feel is consistent across the board and makes it very user-friendly to visitors. That was my main goal on the design side of things.

 

But for that upgrade, my main focus was really on performance and stability. I spent most of my time on that and also the entire rewrite of the code (on top of a new backend framework). All done by me btw - no AI coding. The design was tertiary and I mainly looked at harmonizing of the look-and-feel like I said. I also stayed true to the original design elements of the site from 2009 (17 years ago!), with background colors changing throughout the hours of the day and Conan overseeing all pages from above. 

 

So, over time, I believe we can further customize the wiki skin. But the next focus I believe would be to better organize the landing page (Main_Page) on the wiki. There's something in motion regarding this with a few people working on this already.

Last, one important note: Please either be patient or refrain from registering new accounts for now as the mail server network configurations (i.e. addressing) is still being updated and emails from the new server can't yet properly be sent out. It may take another day or two. Thank you for your patience!

 

Thanks again for your cooperation!