FLIGHT RISING REFACTOR: No, you're not going back.
I am seeing a lot of people ask for a toggle or a way to go back to the old site design, in a way that implies such a thing should be easy to implement. It does sound easy to implement. We have three different colour modes we can switch between, right? We can go between mobile view and wide view? They have all the old code and assets, why can't they just let people pick in their settings to look at the old site again? It's not how it works. It doesn't really matter what your feelings about the refactor are, and I'm not going to give my opinion on it here. I just want to help people understand what exactly happened yesterday and why it's pointless to ask for it to go back.
i. HOUSE
Imagine a house.
It's an old house. It's been around for a while. It was built many years ago, and it's creaky and weird but it's our house, and we like it. There's leaks and the wood is a little aged and it stands out in the block of modern flathouses, but it's still our house.
As much as we love this house, there are issues with the house. Not everybody can get into the house, or navigate in there while they're around. There are things about this house that we can't change while it's made of the same materials that it is.
This is a structural flaw inherent to the house. The house is two-storied. Not everyone can get to the second story. In terms of the site, there were features that were unfriendly for people with visual impairment, people who could only play on their phones, etc.
ii. DARK MODE & INTERFACE
What did the old site look like? Why couldn't we have dark mode? The site was built out of layers and layers of PNGs made to look exactly like the light mode interface. All the NPC images, the old message and friend request icons, they all had white backgrounds or white fragments around the image because they were made assuming the site had a white background.
You couldn't just make the background of the site dark, because every single feature and image was created assuming the background was and would remain white.
This is why the logo was 'doubling' upon itself when the refactor first launched. The Flight Rising logo was a part of the banner image. Now the banner has been removed from the image and it's a floating element on the top of the page. This means it can react when the screen is made smaller. This is the equivalent of being able to move our lightswitch.
What did the site refactor do? Among other things, it decoupled all of these in-built images and features from each other. They added repaintable 'drywall' separate from the site's structure. This was necessary so the site could be reactive. For example, the iconic red sidebar of the page was actually a background PNG with a white part for the site content and a red sidebar, built into one single background image. Now these parts are defined with CSS, which you can think of as the 'wallpaper' of the site.
Every single surface of our house can be repainted now!
iii. Rollback or toggle to old site pls??
This is the refactored site. Among other things, it's been changed to improve accessibility for everyone. It now looks a little bit more like every other house on the block, but it is still the house that we live in. It no longer has two stories to climb. It has a ramp, so people can get in and out with ease. It even has some additional rooms, and renovation is still ongoing. (The contractors are still fixing up the washroom.)
Yes, the site is now designed to be mobile friendly. It no longer has a second floor. It's going to look 'designed for mobile' (people who can't access a second floor.) It's going to look more 'modern' (because the materials people use to build houses has changed.)
People are not used to the new site, of course. Can't they go back to the old house? Why has the door location changed? They keep walking into the walls of the new building. The light switch isn't there when they reach for it anymore. This is understandable. It takes some time to get used to living in a new house. It's a big change. You're going to be fumbling at where the light switch used to be for a long time.
You may even hate how the new house looks. You may not want to live in it anymore. But you can't go back to the old house. It isn't there anymore. You can't have a toggle, because the new site is the infrastructure uploaded to the site's servers, where it is built, and while you can change the colour of the wallpapers or even move the location of the light switch on your own, the house is rebuilt and you cannot 'toggle' it back to the old house.
The database calls, the HTML, the javascript on the front and backends of the site are completely different. The walls and shape of the house are different!
iv. Conclusion
There is a reason there are bug threads and feedback forums for the refactor. You still have time to request that the washroom is a different colour, or the ramp should actually be less steep because the people it's meant for can't actually use it as it was intended. But the ramp, and the accessibility features are here to stay. Don't ask for a toggle or for the site to go back the way it was. It will not be going back to the house built a decade ago. Instead, figure out why the old site worked for you while this one doesn't.
Maybe the ramp was intended for you, but you can't actually use it. Maybe the way the door is positioned now makes it actively harder for you to use the site, in ways other than 'I don't like where it is now and I want it to go back'. Ask for the site to be repainted and improved in ways that would help you.
