Table of contents:
1. A bit about me.
2. How it all began.
3. Always room for improvement?
4. Bumps in the road...
5. EvilSwitch: Version 3.
A bit about me.
Yeah, so I've been running this site for almost 3 years now and nobody really knows a thing about me except that I play RuneScape and run EvilSwitch lol. So I thought I'd use a section of this page to write about myself.
My Name is Josh, I am 20 Years of age (going on 21 in April), and I live in Michigan (I won't disclose much more about my location than that for privacy reasons). I enjoy baseball, swimming, bike riding, playing video games, running my web site(s), traveling, and long walks on the beach (That last one was a joke ;)).
Throughout these 3 years of running this web site, My spelling, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation have all improved greatly because I strive to keep my web site as professional as possible. When I write news articles or anything else for my site, you won't see me taking shortcuts very much, if at all. MSN/AOL/Yahoo Messenger slang belongs on messenger clients... not on web sites.
I have been playing RuneScape since August 13th, 2000 which makes my RuneScape account just over 7 years old. Over my RuneScape career, I have done many things, and seen many great people come and go.
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How it all began.
It all started on March 17th, 2005 out of an idea and some boredom. During my Visual Imaging class [which was also my homeroom right afterwards, so] I had 3 hours to kill because I didn't have anything to do that day, and I knew of a certain downloadable world switcher that I won't name here, but I thought I'd try doing something revolutionary for the way people played RuneScape: which was making a World Switcher in basic HTML that anyone could use without needing to download anything. So EvilSwitch was created. It was originally made with Adobe GoLive (a web development program) and was VERY basic HTML. Just some frames and links on a black background that looked like "[1] [2]", etc., and the only indicator of whether they were free play worlds or members worlds was if they were in bold.
So after I created EvilSwitch and put it online on my clan forums (I tried running a clan back then but it didn't work out very well), I advertised it on a few RuneScape help sites/community forums, where I got good feedback on it and found that I was on to something... and that it also got past school filter programs back then and allowed people to play runescape from school ;)
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Always room for improvement?
So time went on, and EvilSwitch got better and better with each update (bar the few odd ones). Eventually though, I got complaints about EvilSwitch not working on FireFox and other browsers out there because it was hosted on my forums and it would only show the frame page source, so I moved it to a good free host that Chinstar told me about called 50Webs. Over the course of time, my knowledge of HTML and CSS expanded, which allowed for me to do new things with EvilSwitch.
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Bumps in the road...
Over the course of EvilSwitch's lifespan, Jagex LTD. (the company that owns and develops RuneScape) had conflicting emotions about world switchers and other 3rd party software. People would ask if (insert name here)'s world switcher was legal to use on RuneScape, and the Jagex moderators' replies were different every time, Until January 2nd, 2007. On that day of January 2nd, 2007, Jagex announced world switcher clients were illegal to use in RuneScape. This decision by Jagex caused a massive outrage in the community, and many riots in-game against it (I took no part in these however. Many of the people that did get muted.).
Jagex caved in to it's players the very next day and said that 3rd party clients were legal to use again IF they followed certain guidelines such as not blocking the ads on free play worlds, or allow players to get into full worlds.
2 Months later, Jagex decide to go and make world switcher clients illegal once again, and this time they did not go back on their decision. They also updated their 3rd party client guidelines to further include that no 3rd party client shall bypass the normal navigation of runescape.com, which meant no direct linking to the RuneScape worlds.
The new guidelines for 3rd party clients posed a great challenge to EvilSwitch and other world switchers if they were to survive. While the other world switchers conformed, EvilSwitch improvised...
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EvilSwitch: Version 3
So with the new guidelines for 3rd party clients in place, changes were needed. I immediately started work on EvilSwitch Version 3 after Jagex announced the new guidelines. The release of Version 3 was delayed a bit though, because of a problem with the built-in URL bar, but I got it fixed, and EvilSwitch Version 3 was released.
So what made EvilSwitch Version 3 so good if it didn't have the world switching buttons that the old version did? The built-in URL bar. It was the PERFECT loophole in Jagex's guidelines, because the guidelines stated that 3rd party clients could not store links to the runescape worlds within the client itself, but it NEVER SAID that 3rd party clients couldn't rely on USER INPUT to go to the worlds directly, provided that the user knew the URL of the world they wished to go to... Much like a web browser.
And so this was the start of the glorious new era for EvilSwitch...
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If you read all this, I thank you for your time in reading. This article took me many hours of thought, writing, and checking for errors, consistancy, and accuracy. It is truly one of my longer works, but probably not the longest piece I've ever written. ~Evilwithin10~
