Archive Situation At CDROM.COM

Our good friend Ty Halderman, maintainer of the /idgames archive at CDROM.COM, and big sausage at TeamTNT was kind enough to send us along this message explaining the current situation at CDROM.COM.

As many of you may be aware, the master DOOM and Quake community archives at cdrom.com have been inaccessible over the last week or so. This note is an open letter to the communities involved, from the archive maintainers Ty Halderman and Frans de Vries. Where it says "we" below, it is the two of us we refer to. We hope this will at least partially explain what is and has been going on.
As of about the 21st of September, 2001, Digital River (the owners of the cdrom.com server) denied public access to the idgames/ (DOOM-engine games) and idgames2/ (Quake-engine games) archive file trees. This was, according to notes reflected on Doomworld (but not sent to us, the maintainers) a temporary condition due to unusual bandwidth needs. The expectation was that by early the following week, things would be back to normal.
Since then, we have been informed by Bill Dickson, Senior Manager, Download Technologies, Digital River that our maintenance accounts on cdrom.com are locked and will not be restored, and that the future of the archives (if any) will be handled by people who work for Digital River, outside the DOOM/Quake community. Unfortunately, he only told us this after several days of lockout and in response to email queries from us. Until that response, we had absolutely no idea what was going on.
As you might imagine, we started out royally peeved and insulted, after having spent so much time as volunteers to support the community. We have since been dusting off our contingency plans that were formulated some time ago, when Digital River first announced that no one should link to their site directly and that there would only be paying customers from now on.
At that time, however, we were assured that, at least temporarily, we would be able to continue the archives on cdrom.com. We expected that an exit from that situation would be handled with discussions, planning and professionalism on both sides.At least we have been professional on our side.
It may take us a bit of time to completely implement our plan for hosting and mirroring the official archives, but we will inform you of the new situation as soon as everything is in place.
Rest assured that we have now, as we have had for years of volunteer efforts, the best interests of the id Software community in mind. We may ask for some assistance from other members of the community as we finalize our plans, and appreciate your patience in the meantime.

So it is a very precarious situation indeed, as the fate of the long-time archive of Doom and Doom-related addons remains unknown. At this point, it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility for the /idgames archive to be moved elsewhere. At any rate, the Doom community certainly recognizes the value of a single, well organized and maintained archive for people to freely upload their creations, and will do whatever it can to prevent such a service from being lost. We will post new information if and when it becomes available.

I hope its up again soon. I need wadauthor

I have a mirror of the archives in the state as it was directly before the account lock-out. If at any time my services are required (except as a direct public mirror of /idgames) I would be happy to provide any of the files necessary.

Hopefully Doomworld can provide a full mirror, if only our FTP service wasn't so monged up.

Cool, I need it...BAD.

I can't download from 3ddownloads.com either. is it my computer or is it 3ddownloads?

bleh

Yeah,I've had problems this past week downloading from 3d,sometimes I've been getting this weird error message and other times it's been okay.It's okay at the moment as I've just downloaded my bedtime wad for today.
Good luck with the plan Ty gentleman that you are!

Just been to ftp.sunet.se-they've got wadauthor!

A shame that this happened in such an unprofessional way, doesn't make it any easier, that's for sure : Good luck to Ty and Frans.

Its a sad day. No more newstuff chronicles.

Big thanks and respect to Arioch and any others who managed to archive such a massive amount of stuff for the community

ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/pc_games/doom/utils/level_edit/wauthor.zip

Since they do not make profit and since they are not interested in our games... sad, but I am afraid this was it :/

* Matt starts looking up the cost for a T1 line

<font size=1><samp>I'm downloading full Unreal Tournament on a 56k modem... should be done by about 10pm. Only $20 a month...
* Scragadelic laughs at people on high speed connections</samp></font>

Can we have Newstuff chronicles this week? Obviously the /idgames archive isn't going to be available for a few weeks and might even have to be relocated... Doomworld could host the new files in the meantime and send them off to the new archive when it's up...
<font size=1><samp>mm... moo.</samp></font>

bad news...

I'd really like to se it up at another FTP and not the DW one... what a pain to move through all those "choose download location" pages before getting the file Wif ithe download doesn't start in 5 sharp, click here"

UGH!

Some people saw this coming, but certainly not in this absolute and final manner. Peter H. is correct when he points out that Digital River is simply shedding unprofitable aspects of their business. But it still doesn't make it easier for us. Damn!

Fall of Rome, anyone?

Well, this blows, but i can't blaim their owners for not wanting an archive this big and thorougly used as this one, when it's not generating any profits for them.

No files has been lost, plenty of people have snapshots (god bless them), and a new server is on the way :) we'll just have to wait... everything should be back to normal soon.

There's [b]no way] we could stand having to access /idgames through a clumsy interface like 3ddownloads. There are some of us I'm sure who'd be prepared to stump up some funds to help it find a good home if necessary.

I hope Ty can find a good new home for the main archive. Hopefully he can also get the remaining mirrors to continue mirroring from wherever that new home is.

As to a temporary /newstuff, that's a good idea, although not essential as most people have personal web space they can use. The main value of cdrom.com isn't the newstuff tho, it's the archive of oldstuff...

http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/games/PC/idgames/

Its a mirror of cdrom's idgames and it is still accessable. I'd rush there now before they kill the mirror. To bad this locks all uploads until this gets back on track

"Since then, we have been informed by Bill Dickson, Senior Manager, Download Technologies, Digital River that our maintenance accounts on cdrom.com are locked and will not be restored, and that the future of the archives (if any) will be handled by people who work for Digital River"

Bitch.

how hard would it be to move all these files to someplace where people stop messing with them and still allow people like us to have free upload/download access??? this happens every couple of months at cdrom.com, methinks it's about time to ditch those fools.

I will host them.

Well, you can see Digital River's point of view. They are a business, and this service was being provided free. That's not what they are in it for, but they did this in a shoddy way.

They spun a line of what turned out to be bull, locked out the admins who weren't even given the courtesy of being told about it and then just shut down. Very shoddy indeed!

In the very few communications I have had with Ty in the past, he has always struck me as a real gentleman. More power to his elbow in getting an alternative up and running, and a thank you for what's been done over the years.

"Ty ... has always struck me as a real gentleman ... and a thank you for what's been done over the years"

Hear! Hear!

here's your chance for your 15 minutes of fame andy...hehe

I think ID might push in some cash to have the archived restored on a new server... let's face it, this is a serious blow in the face for the Doom community, and if idstuff/ goes a way, so does quite a few doomers. That's a bad idea with D3 on the way at all (not that it won't sell itself)

what about having gameaholic host those files for now? They have been around for a bit too.

Bloody hell.
Damn profit-mongers!