Closing Wad Archive

[WadArchive]

I have decided to shut down Wad Archive as I don't have time to dedicate to it anymore and just not motivated. I don't have an exact date/time yet but it is currently no longer updated.

 

Since I would rather not have the archive go to waste I have uploaded all the WADs, images and database data to the internet archive https://archive.org/details/wadarchive . The entire unpacked archive is around 1TB and is stored in a way that made it easier/faster for the server to use rather than for someone manually browsing the files. I won't be releasing the code for the website itself or the indexing code and I am not interested in allowing someone else to host it, feel free to create your own with the data. All the database files fit in the free tier at https://www.mongodb.com/atlas/database except for lumps.json.

[Arrowhead]

Sad to hear the site is going down - was a great resource for finding obscure WADs. 

 

Thanks for keeping it running for as long as you did.

[Walter confetti]

That's sad indeed, your page is a history of Doom community.

[Biodegradable]

That's a shame, but uploading everything to Archive.org was the best move. Thank you for your service, @WadArchive.

[smeghammer]

Shame that this is going. Completely get the commitment of time etc. can be limiting.

 

I will probably grab that archive and put the wad files on my smeghammer site. Though I did scrape it a while back to grab the WADs then available.

 

Fyi:

https://github.com/smeghammer/wad_downloader

 

 

[ZigfriedYoshimitsu]

That sucks

[Doomkid]

Sucks to see you go, dude. Thanks for years of help.

 

does this mean WadHosting will be going too?

[Ordon]

"You were good son real good, maybe even the best"

[CBM]

Sad news indeed. Atleast the site will be archived

[DuckReconMajor]

Echoing others in that I'm sad to see it go. Pretty sure Wad Archive is the first place i ever downloaded wads. Hope you're doing ok. Thank you for making the data available

[holaareola]

Real shame, it was an excellent site. Especially loved the screenshots feature! Thanks for running it all this time and passing the data on.

[Dusty_Rhodes]

Sad go see you go. Best of luck to you on the future

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Now I'll have to update my two PWAD Sourcing projects to include links to Internet Archive's ISO Contents explorer feature or links to rare PWADs on my Discord server, as many Doom Levels CDs are only available in BIN/CUE format, not that there was any Red Book audio tracks on those discs anyway.

[Ordon]

5 minutes ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Now I'll have to update my two PWAD Sourcing projects to include links to Internet Archive's ISO Contents explorer feature or links to rare PWADs on my Discord server, as many Doom Levels CDs are only available in BIN/CUE format, not that there was any Red Book audio tracks on those discs anyway.

can i get a link to this server?

[user76828904]

Thanks for your service to the Doom community.

[Doomkid]

Just tossing this out there - it would be helpful to have a .txt file with a simple listing of every single wad/pk3/pk7 that was ever on Wad-Archive, even better if paired with a SHA-1 for each. This way, the many files not on /idgames can at least be “confirmed to exist” when someone searches for it. (Wad-Archive seems to have by far the best SEO of all wad sites and could easily bring up any file even with a Google search).
 

A simple list of every site Wad-Archive scraped would be fantastic too. I know it hit most of the big ones, but it also checked a whole bunch of somewhat more obscure ones too which aren’t as well known. Would be awesome and would save so many hours  to have that info!

[Endless]

One of my favorite features of the Wad Archive was the screenshots taken and all map views. It displayed a lot of useful information before playing. Sad to see it go. Hopefully, we'll get some sort of WAD IMDb in the future, near or far.

[smeghammer]

well, the archive is 260 files totalling just shy of 1TB (zipped) and from the OP, it looks to be a bunch of MongoDB documents. I'm familiar with MongoDB already, though not used the Atlas service - so it should be possible to extract that info from the data dump. Once I have found a big enough HDD to drop it all onto...

 

 

:-) maybe not..

 

 

The first one is downloading now, so I can have a look and see what is there. My smeghammer site is backed by github, so no server-side stuff, but it should be straightforward to extract the WAD data and host as flat files fronted by some javascript (like I did for the R667 mirror last year), and probably extract all filenames as a text file too. 

 

Watch this space,

Edited August 4, 2022 by smeghammer

[WadArchive]

25 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

Just tossing this out there - it would be helpful to have a .txt file with a simple listing of every single wad/pk3/pk7 that was ever on Wad-Archive, even better if paired with a SHA-1 for each. This way, the many files not on /idgames can at least be “confirmed to exist” when someone searches for it. (Wad-Archive seems to have by far the best SEO of all wad sites and could easily bring up any file even with a Google search).
 

A simple list of every site Wad-Archive scraped would be fantastic too. I know it hit most of the big ones, but it also checked a whole bunch of somewhat more obscure ones too which aren’t as well known. Would be awesome and would save so many hours  to have that info!

I can generate a list of WADs and upload it when I get home from work. The SEO part was probably due to what my job was at the time, glad it was working haha.

As for the list of sites that are scraped, I could list them here but not sure if I will include it in the internet archive.

 

7 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Sucks to see you go, dude. Thanks for years of help.

 

does this mean WadHosting will be going too?

Most likely

[smeghammer]

It would be very useful if said text file(s) could map the UUID filename to the wad/map name. If that is structured, I can render that programmatically with a bit of AJAX and javascript.

[WadArchive]

I have attached a list of all the sites that are scraped. Some may not longer exist or provide WADs anymore

1 minute ago, smeghammer said:

It would be very useful if said text file(s) could map the UUID filename to the wad/map name. If that is structured, I can render that programmatically with a bit of AJAX and javascript.

If you are wanting a list from ID to map name then just parse wads.json. Being JSON it is easy to handle with javascript.

sites.zip

[smeghammer]

That would be perfect - but where can I find the wads.json file? Thanks,

[smeghammer]

Ah. I see. The lumps.json... Needs some pre-processing I think :-) 18GB probably can't be used in-memory... 

 

Is this a straight mongodump? or have the documents been collected into a single JSON root? I'd like to push this into mongo if possible - it'll be easier to process. I'll see if VSCode opens it tomorrow (notepad++ just crashed...). 

[WadArchive]

Yes it is dump from mongodb, have a look at README.MD. Yea lumps.json is a biggie which is why I uploaded it compressed.

[ProgrammerPower]

Thank you for uploading everything to archive.org instead of letting potentially hundreds of wads become lost to time. You've done a great service to the Doom community.

[Doomkid]

Thanks a ton for the site list. I’m looking forward to the wad list (when and if you get time) but this will be so helpful in making the transition into the post-WadArchive era. 

[WoodPecker]

damn the only place i could safely download h-doom. god bless you for your service sir

[Xymph]

Sharing the sentiments: sorry for the site to shut down, but thanks to WadArchive for years of great community service, and for now helping organize the archival/transition process (instead of disappearing in a puff of smoke).

 

The Doom Wiki has nearly 100 links to wad-archive.com. The normal convention is to change them into Wayback Machine links, and this can be automated via a XymphBot script. But the links need to exist in the archive first, or saved now otherwise. For so many dozens of links, it would be exhausting for me to verify/do this manually. Can someone assist with this process?

[Ralphis]

WadArchive has been a critical and undertouted resource of this community for so long. Thank you for maintaining it as long as you did.

[Xymph]

1 hour ago, Xymph said:

But the links need to exist in the archive first, or saved now otherwise. For so many dozens of links, it would be exhausting for me to verify/do this manually. Can someone assist with this process?

A friend of the wiki took care of this already. Thanks mate.