10 Years - A "short" look back through time

Hey, thanks for checking out this article! Before you read on, I just want to clarify that this article is pure nostalgia and has absolutely zero news content. There is no new info about the quiz and no pet battling details in here. It's a very personal (and very, very long) recollection of the past by Aranesh, meant for those curious about the history of this web page. After all, an anniversary is the perfect time to look back a bit, right? But if you're not into that kind of thing, it's cool to stop here and do something else with your precious time :-)

With that out of the way, ten years Xu-Fu! Can you believe it?! I can't, and I've followed it more closely than anyone... obviously! But hey, let's go down memory lane for a bit. Initially, I wanted to pull out some old backups and show something like a yearly screenshot of what the page looked like. I do have those backups, gigabytes of data, but turns out it's really difficult to make them work! Mostly because of the database that has evolved massively over time, and was constantly changing. I can't just plug the old data in the current database because the slightest discrepancy will make it crash. It would have meant an insane amount of work to do that. Gives a bit of appreciation for WoW classic, to be honest :D
So I almost scrapped the idea until I remembered, the Wayback Machine!

Luckily, it has snapshots of almost the entire time of Xu-Fu's! Idea saved! Not perfect, because many of the pages aren't saved in their entirety and everything behind a login is missing, but it's much better than nothing! So let's jump in :D

2015 - Humble beginnings

While there is no snapshot of the page right at release day, I do remember starting with something like 15 strategies or so. The Pandaria tamers, spirit tamers, and that was basically it. After working on the page for half a year, I just wanted to get it live, into the hands of people, and to hear some feedback. At this point I was thinking, either I will keep the page purely for myself and not invest much more time beyond what's needed for me to see my strategies, or perhaps some other pet battlers were also looking for a more convenient way to view strategies, meaning I would spend more time no developing Xu-Fu's further. The original intent for me, by the way, was to store my strategies somewhere easily accessible since I played on different PCs regularly.

Once launched, there weren't many visitors at first (yes I do suck at SEO and have no intention to change that) but I did get enough comments and encouraging words to punt the above decision and simply continue in my own pace, see where it's going. But hey, I promised pictures, here we go!

Let's start with the landing page. It always had news, but they looked like this:


Very different and ... odd. I knew I had to write updates somewhere and this was the best idea I had, just an alternating list of articles. It became too long very quickly! You can still read all those old articles if you go to the archive, btw.! Word of warning, there was absolutely no concept behind it and the type of news vary wildly. You have been warned.

The Wayback machine also had details about something very, very old, the first comment system!



A modal window to show the comments, isn't it a beaut!? That was comments version 1. Another thing I knew was needed so people can interact with each other, or leave feedback for me, but it was very crudely put together. Fun fact, I wanted my own comments to show up in a different colour but since I had no user accounts and didn't want to spend much time in verifications or such, all you had to do was to use [email protected] as the email address. The comment was then automatically named as from me and in a blue colour. No one found out, thankfully! :D

Back to screenshots, this is how the strategies looked like:



You can recognize the direction, but it's quite a bit different. The "Alternatives" on the right didn't even exist at the very start. I added those soon after release because for some reason, not everyone liked the single one strategy I had uploaded for each fight. Weird, right? :D

See that "Pop-Out" button? This is what it did:



Pop-quiz, what's that for? Any ideas? No? Do you remember the times when most people had only 1 screen and it had about 4 pixels resolution? So when you played WoW in window mode and wanted to read off a strategy in a browser window next to it, it became tricky? Rematch didn't have notes, yet, and TD Script didn't exist, so that was a very common problem. The pop-out moved everything to the left so you had an easier time arrangin your windows. You don't remember that? It wasn't a common problem you say...? Ah well, worth a try. Truth is, I did create that feature just for myself ;-)

2016 - Comment System 2.0!

The first year brought mostly one thing: more content. More sections and more strategies made it onto the page. It was still very much me testing every single strategy that was suggested (through a crude form) and hacking them manually into the database. That part took *forever*. One thing got a full overhaul, though: the comment system! Enter version 2.0:



A comment box that opened up towards the bottom, no more pop-up window! Much better. But still rather clunky and... character encoding issues, everywhere! I remember spending many hours fixing the mistakes I've done by incorrectly encoding the page from the get go. I had to go through every single file and fix it, so that special characters weren't displayed incorrectly anymore. Oof.

Oh and one other cool thing existed back then, the Celestial Tournament Planner!
If you don't remember those days, pet battles were difficult once! Especially the Celestial Tournament, it was the hardest pet battling content ever in the game up to now and those strategies were the most looked for. The tournament was, a bit simplified, a hardmode dungeon with changing fights in it. The fights weren't easy but mostly we didn't have huge pet rosters, yet.
The Tournament planner took me ages to build and was the first attempt at a customized guidance for visitors:



Remember, no user accounts, no collection import, no automatic checks. Instead, the planner prompted you to go through the fights one by one and selecting a strategy you liked (read, where you have the pets for). In the end, you had your personal strategy plan to follow each week. And you got a "Planner ID" to look up your strategies again :D
It wasn't elegant but it worked! At the time, the page already had a nice followership (maybe 100 people a day visiting) and feedback was steadily trickling in, as well as strategy suggestions. This planner helped quite a few people, I remember.

2017 - Bonjour!

A little before the end of 2016, Xu-Fu had learned German already, but 2017 was the year when the page became truly international. All the setup was done and it just lacked translators. So whenever someone offered to help with a language, I happily accepted and one by one more languages were "unlocked". The Xu-Fu team also grew a lot! I'm intentionally not naming anyone here because I would undoubtedly forget someone and it would be a true shame and not fair.
What the team was up to, besides translations, was mostly checking and entering strategies. In the backend, I had built a very simple admin page that could be used to enter strategies. It was the absolute opposite of convenient but myself and helpers powered through the dozens of suggestions coming in every week. Testing, verifying, entering - arduous to say the least! To edit a strategy it was often easier to redo it entirely instead of changing steps. I can't thank those people enough for the immense help!

The landing page also received yet another overhaul and became very simplistic, mostly highlighting the team of people that was working on Xu-Fus:



What also made it in in 2017 was the Collection Viewer - 8 years old by now! That was one of the first times I worked with an external data source and the data Blizzard provided. I have no screenshot of how it looked back then (Wayback Machine doesn't offer that) but it was extremely similar. Under the hood, the entire thing changed multiple times to be more efficient, but the display of the collections stayed almost identical.

Oh and... one more thing, that was a busy year, user accounts! Finally :-) They made it in before some of the biggest changes later on but from November 2017 onwards, visitors were able to create an account and post comments with it. No more need to re-type your name. And no more "[email protected]" to go blue :D
There really wasn't much more that you could do with an account at that time but it was a prerequisite for what was about to come next.

2018 - Battle Table Redesign

The core of the page, how strategies are displayed, was at this point one of the oldest pieces of code. Not really in the meaning of many years but in terms of how much I've learned in the meanwhile and had re-written most of the other parts. The strategy table was incredibly inefficient. For example, most of the design elements were images pieced together using HTML tables. Not anymore! Mid 2018 saw the biggest update I had ever done for the page. I had re-written those battle tables from scratch, modernised them, used CSS color gradients instead of images, PNGs with transparency instead of JPGs with baked in backgrounds... things like that. But most importantly, I added tech so that users could add their own strategies comfortably. It had to be dynamic, seamless, easy to understand... I learned a LOT of new coding techniques while going about this project. How strategies are now added and edited is something you couldn't imagine the page being without anymore. It still looked quite different to today but it's much closer:



This update removed the biggest bottleneck preventing the page from having up-to-date strategies: myself. It was truly a step change for myself because up to that point, I had spent a lot of my time ingame, testing strategies and then entering them or modifying them. After this update, there was no need for that anymore. Visitors added their own strategies and curators took over a lot of the maintenance, thank you!
It was a daring step at the time and we did have some heated conversations internally. Not everyone was a fan! Opening this possibility meant a clear loss of control over the quality of strategies and the rating system was very rudimentary at the time. Dynamically sorted strategies didn't even exist either at the time, if I remember correctly.

But even if I had agreed with those disliking the idea (which I don't), there was no choice. Later in 2018, Battle for Azeroth was about to be released with a bunch new tamers, and at the same time I had started a new job, moved to a different country, and was already stretched thin. The previous expansion had been an insane crunch and with the popularity of Xu-Fu's by this time, it would have been impossible for me to keep up with strategy testing, even if I had double the amount of helpers. A lot of the work was still on me due to antiquated or non-existed backend tooling. So instead, I spent most of my weekends that summer (which was a really hot one here!) in air conditioned cafes, plucking away and trying to get this thing out the door.

And it worked out, undoubtedly! But it also meant that I fell out of touch with actual pet battles. There truly is a "before" and "after" of this update for me, hence why I am writing so much about it. After this update, I was often faced with the choice, do I play the game and maybe build a strategy, or do I fix a bug, improve a feature, work on the next thing on Xu-Fu's? In the majority of cases, I chose the latter. I still played and play WoW. i collect pets, and I do pet battles from time to time. But I do what most people visiting this page do: grab the top strategy for a fight and simply follow it :D So after this many years, I was basically back to the start, where Xu-Fu was a help for myself to do my pet battles, just much more sophisticated and not just for me by now :D

It's a bit ironic though, because I run one of the largest pet battling pages in the world (still feels super weird to say or write that), and yet I am probably one of the worst people to ask about pet battle strategies or what pets have which strengths or weaknesses in battle.

All in all, 2018 was a really busy year, and it also brought one more revamp, yet another landing page :D There's a whole collection of those but this one makes a big step towards the current design:

2019 - New Landing Page(?)

Well, that didn't last long! Already in 2019, I built a new landing page :D
Despite being one of the least important parts of the page, it's a must have and I do think it should be useful and informative. I took inspiration from a bunch of different news pages for this latest design and it stuck around for many years, thanks to being modular and easy to adapt. A lot of the widgets I had do not exist anymore (like the "development status updates"), while others were added, like the XP opportunities or the leaderboard.



2019 also saw a lot more traffic on Xu-Fu's. Several hundred people visited the page every day at this point and the number of strategies kept increasing as well. In terms of development, this was when the majority of key features were pretty much done. Still a lot of things missing to make the page as helpful as it is now, but it was working. So from this point on, there weren't that many huge updates anymore. I'd still say, significant ones, but no game-changers like user strategies anymore.

2020

2020 truly was a mixed bag. The world was pretty busy with a very specific topic, as was I, so all of the Xu-Fu updates were a bit more light.
Somewhere, someone mentioned that it would be cool to be able to see what pets another person has that you don't have, to find trading opportunities. I think it was a couple who both collect pets and want to make sure that no one has a dupe pet that the other one could use, but going through your collection for that search is incredibly difficult. It was a very sweet moment of someone just having a specific use case and contacting me about it. Many of the smaller features (and even some bigger ones) came from exactly such places, a random message or email.
I took that idea and built the Collection Comparator. No screenshot this time, because it's still exactly the same as back then. I have no idea how often it is actually used, but it was fun creating!
That's a theme you'll find often with stuff I do for Xu-Fu's: I had fun building it :D Honestly, would have never imagined to ever be part of a project as cool as this, let alone run it. And having the freedom to do and build whatever I like is such an incredible privilege. Thanks for that!

Another odd thing of 2020 was a donation run:



I honestly don't remember the reason, maybe just because my company at the time matched donations...? It still felt special to go to the tiger sanctuary's webpage and transfer them $1k. I hope it was put to good use! :-)

But back to pet battles. Pretty early on, Xu-Fu had a feature that many, many people loved: The "Ready Checker". Again, I sadly can't pull up a screenshot because of how Wayback Machine works. But in short words, it worked a little bit like the collection viewer. You had to enter your character details and it was then comparing your collection against the strategies on the page and told you what pets you should get in order to use the #1 strategy for each fight. Back then the order of strategies was fixed, so myself and curators decided which one was "on top". However, when I introduced user strategies, the ready-checker sadly had to go - the tech was entirely incompatible with the new page version. But in 2020, it came back in the way you might now:



The whole thing became a lot more clever, and it had to, because now it checks each section not just for the #1 strategy but for which is the best for *your* collection. This also, finally, replaced the old Celestial Tournament planner which I also had to retire long ago. But using the "Hardmode" option for dungeons works just the same for the tournament, yay!

Last but not least, 2020 also brought some of the biggest changes that ever happened to pet battles: Shadowlands. A set of very controversial changes to some of the core functions of pet battles meant that a lot of strategies simply wouldn't work anymore. We had some internal discussions around this as well and decided to flag every strategy with a tag. Once the changes were live, we'd go through them one by one to check. It was a massive undertaking and I added a disclaimer to make it easier for people to see:



Many strategy creators also went through their own strategies to make sure they were still working but the majority was done by the curators. Thanks so, so, much!

2021 April.. Fools?

I mentioned that I have a lot of fun working on Xu-Fu's, right? In 2021, I took it maybe a little bit too far. Just maybe! The page was in such a good shape that I made the decision to... do something weird :D Enter, Xu-Fu's Big Treasure Hunt!

I always wanted to create a game. I've built little prototypes of games before - a puzzle dungeon crawler, a pen&paper inspired RPG, even a little arcade shooter, but I never got close to finishing any of them because frankly, I'm not a great coder and game systems are so much harder than cobbling together a webpage. But I love video games obviously, and I work in video games since forever (not really a secret but I'm not a developer or designer). It's quite natural that I always wanted to make a game that's actually complete and played by people.

Xu-Fu's treasure hunt was the one, the first game I finished and released. Very different to what you would usually describe as a video game but hey, I'll take it! :D
I announced it on April 1st like a proper april fools joke, with screenshots and explanations of the whole game idea. etc. - but... on April 2nd it actually launched and people could start playing :D Hilarious, right? Almost no one got it. I'm still a bit salty how under the radar that joke in a joke went :/ You can still read it here: Link

The game itself was greatly inspired by a very old Austrian online-shop with a gazillion of individual pages for each item they sold. The pages could hide special collectibles randomly that you could gather and exchange for discounts. The Xu-Fu version was a lot more complex than that though.

If you never saw it, let me try to summarise it as short as I can. While the game was active, you could find coins and other special items on random strategy pages. You could pick those coins up, they were the main currency, but you could only store a certain amount before your account = profile page was attackable by others. Instead of hoarding, you had to stash them somewhere, on any strategy page of your choice. And, you could use some coins to buy warrior pets in order to protect the stash. If someone else happened to find it, they could try to attack and steal it with their own warrior pets. In the end, who held the most coins was the winner.





To say the least, the game was really, really successful and had a lot of fans who spent waaaayyy too much time browsing through the pages. It needed tons of tweaking and the whole PvP aspect wasn't everybodies cup of tea. Shortly into the first version, I even did a vote for some more drastic changes to make the game a little less competitive. A vote, but how, you say? Yeah I know, nobody is asking but I want to tell the story. I wanted to capture as many of the players opinions as possible so a Discord poll was not an option, so I did the sensible thing (lol) and coded a little poll system :D
Voting systems are fun because they are pretty small and don't have many dependencies on other systems. Now that we have the feature, we used it exactly ... two times!
Definitely worth the time investment. Let's make it a third time to show it off:

Poll: Do you have fun reading this article?

This is a self-reflection question for yourself. Depending on your answer, maybe do something else? :D

➜ Yes (4)

Very insightful!

➜ Meh (0)

Could be funnier. Where are the cookies?

➜ No (0)

I'm going to play some games now.

You need an account in order to vote

In later editions of the game (we ran it 3 or 4 times), it changed every time and mostly became less competitive and more about the finding/collecting aspect. But it was still quite popular! Maybe I should run it again some time...?
The best thing though, no one was mad at me for spending a few months to develop something that had absolutely zero benefit for pet battles.
Thank you!

---

But back to the page! Did I mention that I hate SEO? Search-Engine-Optimization? The processs of tweaking your page so that it comes up more often or higher up on Google? Yes, I hate it, with a passion. I never did anything big on the page towards SEO up until 2021. It all happened because I got in touch with the owners of a really big WoW fan and community page. I'm not gonna name it, just so much that it's not wowhead, not that big.

Their page is a business and runs mostly on ads and they gave me some pointers what I should do so the page works better towards that. I implemented a few quick things (that didn't change anything) but the big one was replacing the *entire* menu structure and link system. Previously, Xu-Fu links looked like this:

• wow-petguide.com/index.php?m=6&s=26

Whatever came after the question mark controlled the link, M = main category, S = strategy, or:

• ?Comment=58558

• ?User=2

It's very simplistic and bad practice (ofc) and the main thing, search engines don't like it.
To change this, I had to learn a bunch of new things and while at it, re-wrote the entire code section of the top menu and how page routing works for everything.
If you look at the page address, you'll undoubtedly see the difference. Now it's more readable and not using such obvious variables anymore. A good example is the collection viewer:

Before: wow-petguide.com/index.php?m=collection&name=Aranesh&realm=lothar&region=eu
After: wow-petguide.com/Collection/EU/Lothar/Aranesh

I spent DAYS on this project. And the worst part, in hindsight, I'm glad I did it! Despite being a SEO thing, it just looks much tidier and whenever something new comes to the page (like pet pages), it's so much easier to add a section and proper routing. But the kicker: It didn't do shit for google rankings. There was no change at all. So, in conclusion, I still hate SEO!

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Someone just mentioned pet pages, what a coincidence! These also made it in in 2021! By pet pages I mean this: https://www.wow-petguide.com/Pet/143820/Kunchong_Hatchling
Or the tooltips here: Xu-Fu, Cub of Xuen

Neither existed before and the tooltips where just from wowhead (like this one).

They are a pretty obvious addition but it took a long time to come up with the design, especially for the tooltips. I wanted them to be more useful than the Wowhead ones and I do think they are. Big kudos to my partner for, basically, coming up with the entire tooltip design!
The pages then gave some more headache and I had to dive into lots of formulas to get the stats right but hey, they turned out pretty neat, right?

2022 Moving server

We are coming towards the end slowly, not much longer, I promise! By 2022, Xu-Fu had firmly placed his paws into the wow pet battling community and visitors were a few thousand per day. That also attracted the attention of bad players more and more. Bad players such as bots and hackers targeting pages with a certain amount of traffic to check for vulnerabilities, or simply to bring it down by overloading it and trying if any info is spilled while it errors out. It was a serious problem and the page was down for hours on end, so I finally, after 7 years, moved away from my old webspage provider.

Moving a webpage is not that simple and the whole process took days to all figure out. I'll spare you all the technical details, I'm just glad it's done and the new server is much better. A little anecdote though that is really funny in hindsight!

When I created my very first webpage in ... 2001 or so (yes, it was one of those, this is me and my dog cat - pages), I looked for a webspace provider and found a tiny little 3-person company. It was the best! They had their own servers in the basement (or so I imagine), were really passionate about what they do, and the cost was comparatively low. Whenever I had a problem, I often talked to the CEO directly who sometimes helped me with some coding issues simply because he had fun with it!
Some years later, he sold his company to one of the big webspace providers in the country, and my contract was rolled over to them. That is the only reason why I was with this specific provider when I started Xu-Fu.
And once Xu-Fu started to grow, the fun with them started as well :D

On that new provider, Xu-Fu (and my other tiny pages) were hosted on a shared server together with something like 20 or 30 other customers. Some of them were online shops, I later learned. Nothing big of course. It was all under a fair use policy so if someone used too much traffic they moved them off and forced them into a more expensive contract.

Not me. I was on a legacy contract that had no specific end date and included unlimited traffic with zero limitations. They were pissed. Not the whole company of course but I imagine there was some tech support team leader looking at the situation and fuming. I had lots of email conversations and angry notifications from them, and sometimes they let some information slip. Xu-Fu brought the entire server down many, many times. They once told me Xu-Fu used >80% of the entire server load and the other 20something users shared the rest. It was a bit of a d*** move but I simply saw no reason to do anything about it. My contract was my contract and they could either solve their shit by beefing up the server or cancel my contract (that was an option available). They did neither. Instead, the threatened, they complained, once they blocked my entire account which resulted in me shouting at them and (digitally) waving the contract until they caved. It was an entirely laughable situation but also not one that could go on forever.

So, 2022 saw a new webspace provider and I'm not looking back honestly!

2023 Steady as it goes

Now that is a year I simply don't have much to talk about. Lots of little tweaks, new pets, game content etc. but the entire year was pretty much easygoing. I focused a lot on work and moved to a new flat but there's really not much exciting to discuss here.

2024 Changes, so many changes

... but not on Xu-Fu's! The page still ran and runs incredibly stable thanks to the work of so many. I had my hands full with some very specific things which I'm going to talk about in a little while but let's wrap the pages development up first.
The most notable thing in 2024 is the connectoin to Pet Sim! How to measure the reliability of strategies was always a very contentious topic and we tried a few systems, from "staff pick" to "RNG" tags, but it was never accurate. Pet Sim changed all of that! If you don't know this amazing tool (not created by me!) - it's a strategy simulator. Feed it a team and script and you can simulate the fight as many times as you want to know the success chance of it. This is such a game changer that the Pet Sim creator and I worked on connecting Xu-Fu and Pet Sim. Now, you can easily load up a Xu-Fu strategy on Pet Sim (like so: https://wow-petsim.com/?strategy=14252) and vice versa, the calculation results are fed into Xu-Fu's and shown directly here as well. They also inform the ranking of strategies by now.

Connecting Pet Sim is probably the most impactful change to Xu-Fu that happened over the last 3-4 years, so it's definitely worth mentioning here!




But what else changed? Well, lots, but the following section is purely, purely personal stuff so I'll put it in a drop down. Read if you're curious or skip for just Xu-Fu related stuff.

A bit of Araneshs story

2025 and beyond

The big year, 10 years of Xu-Fu's! I knew I wanted something special and truth be told, I've started prepping for this anniversary already in the year before. I have no clue anymore where the idea came from but as you know, enter my second every game I created (and launched)! The quiz was a ton of fun to create and I'm glad it's working and people are actively enjoying it :-)
Creating it was surprisingly fast. Not... fast fast, but much quicker than I expected. By now, the page has so many elements that I can take and reuse that it sometimes reminds me of a box full of half-built lego stuff that you can take and reassemble. I also added a bunch more things and played with animations. In short, I'm proud of it!

The prizes were an entirely different thing. The idea of a custom Xu-Fu I had early on but I looked for a long time to find someone who could create them, and I'm super glad with how they turned out in the end! :D



I might commission one of my own some time, as a physical reminder of how amazing this whole experience and community is. We'll see!

What comes next? First of all, I'll have to figure out what happens to the quiz! It's popular, no question. I'd like to keep it around but how exactly is to be determined. Maybe a good topic for a poll?
Next up is very clear, Mists of Pandaria Classic is around the corner and it will include pet battles! My current plan is to have a separate version of the page that is MoP or Classic themed that only includes classic content - and you can easily toggle between the versions. It's a massive project and I hope I can get it done in time for the release!

There's a lot of other projects I can think of that would make Xu-Fu even better. Let's see what 2025 has in store first.

If you made it this far, thank you so much for your time and attention. I hope you enjoyed my ramblings and stories. I'm always happy to read your comments, thoughts, ideas - let me know!
But for now, I wish you all the best, a wonderful weekend, week ahead, summer, and 2025!

Thanks for being here and for being part of this amazing community! <3