New TibiaSecrets has arrived

A new website? Why?

As you may have already noticed, the TibiaSecrets website has changed beyond recognition. Some of you will certainly like this new design, and some may not like it. Taking this into account, you deserve a few words of explanation because the new look and structure of the site have been introduced for a reason.

When founding TibiaSecrets we - Bosst, Mogh and Haishen had plans to open a small fansite focusing on mysteries/secrets in Tibia. We mainly wanted to publish niche articles. During the early days of TibiaSecrets, we chose the WordPress content management system as the script on which our site would run. WordPress has powerful advantages. It is easy to use and it is easy to implement something in it with the help of various plugins, without programming after hours. For a certain period of TibiaSecrets CMS, WordPress worked just fine. Unfortunately, over time, we began to see the drawbacks of this solution. And recently, it was these drawbacks and several other factors that led us to create a completely original solution when it comes to the engine of the site.

The main reason for switching to a proprietary solution is the attacks carried out on TibiaSecrets. WordPress is the most popular platform in its category which also makes it a very popular field for hackers The mentioned attacks have/had various forms. Starting from social engineering attacks, spamming attacks, brute force, SQL injection and xss attacks, backdoors, to massive DDoS attacks. We have listed here only the most serious types of attacks, and believe us there were more. It should be added here that some of the attacks were targeted and prepared specifically for TibiaSecrets. The largest DDoS attack we encountered counted 2 million requests per second. Even the introduction of the Cloudflare service did not completely eliminate the problem. "Smarter" javascript-enabled bots continued to break through the firewalls we had prepared when attacking our infrastructure. The inaccessibility of our site or operating at unacceptable loading speeds prompted us to act quickly.

In the end, we decided to change the site engine to our own proprietary one. Such a solution requires us to be more involved in the process of creating new solutions/functionality. However, it has one powerful advantage. Well, attackers do not know how the engine is constructed from the code side, and carrying out an attack is much more difficult than in the case of open-source solutions such as WordPress. In addition, our engine is optimized for our business so the performance of the site should be much faster. In addition, we have decided to change our hosting provider to one with a better reputation and protection.

I hope this explains to some extent to you, the readers, the reasons for our decision.

We also need to mention that one of the consequences of the problems we encountered was the necessity to cancel the second edition of the League of Explorers competition, which we had planned for the end of this year. At this moment, we do not know when we will resume it. However, we can promise something equally exciting. At the very beginning of next year, we will launch the third edition of Secrets of Tibia. We intend to make the prizes more attractive and simplify the rules a bit. Stay tuned!

New TibiaSecrets  

Well. So much for the reasons for our actions. But what does the new site offer? 

In creating the new TibiaSecrets, we took into account your feedback about our site. Below are some of your tips:

• Think about speeding up the site. It works too slowly 
• Change the compression of images and introduce lazy loading. They are displayed in old types such as PNG or JPEG. This slows down the site terribly
• Didn't you maybe think of changing the template? Why does it consist of two columns? The site would be more readable if the article had more space because now reading an article, especially on a computer is cumbersome
• Not a fan of dark mode. I prefer traditional black text on a white background. Could you guys implement this?
• To the template you are using, there are sub-glued different contents that do not match too much with the template itself which makes the whole design of the site not seem coherent

We think we have made it happen! Anyway, what is there to write much. See for yourself. We hope that now your reading experience will be even better.

Finally, a few more changes are worth mentioning. As you may have noticed by now, the site is missing a forum, comment section, librarian, and a few other things. We don't yet know which of these functionalities we will bring back to life. Nevertheless, what is certain is that our forum has died. All discussions have moved to our Discord, and there was basically nothing happening on the forum for months. Hence the decision to close it. It is worth mentioning here that you will find transcriptions and a tool similar to Librarian on the site of one of our readers - Cony Island. We recommend you to check out his tools because they are great.