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Quasar

Disappearing history

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Tompig said:

I'm a lil out the loop, why would anyone refuse to use idgames, just makes sense to put it all into one place dosent it?

Arctangent said:

Well for one, I've heard that it can be frustrating to actually connect to it and be able to put the file onto it, because it can take several attempts. I've never done it myself, though, since I don't have an FTP client installed.

Another reason is that those communities mostly center around making gameplay mods, many of which never (or hardly ever) reach status of completion - they just keep getting updated with new versions once in a while - and for whatever twisted reason, the mod authors would want everybody on the internet to forget and stop using the older versions and always move on to the new ones.

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ETTiNGRiNDER said:

I think "won't use idgames" attitudes are far more common in the ZDoom and Zandronum circles than here, though.

When I was making maps and the like, I just felt it was probably not worth submitting any content I made because it would likely have been subpar (or never completed).

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Also on /idgames they might not accept cool stuff like commercial MP3s, the UDM3 palette, etc. So sometimes you need to seriously butcher the wad before uploading it.

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It also seems like a lot of the time mappers just don't think their stuff is finished or worth the effort (even if others might disagree). Like how to get memfis' stuff you had to go through forum posts until he did end up putting it all up at once. There are guys like gggmork who made a lot of experimental stuff which just never made it to the archives.

With old wads people might be willing to archive the content themselves, but when the authors are still active that's kind of a faux pas, and by the time the authors are gone, few people still have the content or recognize that it might be appropriate to archive it.

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For a Doom level to be complete, it has to satisfy three conditions:

1. have an exit
2. be bug-free
3. the author have no more interest in fixing and expanding it.

The first two are easy to determine, and, on the third one, I guess it can be known when a level is good enough and ready for upload. It's not like software where you can always add new features and thus have perpetual updates.

Arctangent said:

I've never done it myself, though, since I don't have an FTP client installed.

I just use Windows File Explorer to upload to FTP. It has always worked for me and has an intuitive, familiar interface.

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Arctangent said:

I've never done it myself, though, since I don't have an FTP client installed.

All you need is plain CMD, see FAQ point 10.

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In defence of the community record, we skills didn't know 10-18 years ago what website attrition would happen. Weve faired a lot better than most other communities eg the quake one.

The defacto text file standard is a great boon here. Although I think a better modern default would be ones that supported reuse and distribution rights better.

FEATURE REQUEST: the /idgames txt generator. Can you please replace the licence text section of the generator with one that recommends creative commons licences? They would be a much better default from a future archivist POV.

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Memfis said:

Also on /idgames they might not accept cool stuff like commercial MP3s

GEE I WONDER WHY!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, have you even paused to think about it for two seconds?

Also, uh, can you even copyright a palette?

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dew said:

GEE I WONDER WHY!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, have you even paused to think about it for two seconds?

Also, uh, can you even copyright a palette?

It makes sense for commercial MP3s to be rejected not least because of the amount of space they can take up.

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Ofc I know why. :D But, for example, mediafire.com accepts that stuff. So that's one more reason why people choose to use something else instead of /idgames.

dew said:

Also, uh, can you even copyright a palette?

I guess so: ftp://archives.gamers.org/pub/idgames/REJECTS

Wed Sep 30 00:40:25 EDT 2015 Rejected palltpak.zip because: permission is not granted for reuse of udm3 pallette (see udm3.txt)

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Memfis said:

Ofc I know why. :D But, for example, mediafire.com accepts that stuff. So that's one more reason why people choose to use something else instead of /idgames.
I guess so: ftp://archives.gamers.org/pub/idgames/REJECTS

That's the difference between law and courtesy. You can't legally copyright a palette. You can however tell members of the same community that you don't want your resources being reused altogether. The archive has historically chosen the latter interpretation, not the former (that of a lawyer in other words). I'm not calling this a fault either. You should get permission when using anything out of a wad that says permission isn't granted for reuse, IMHO, or we will be treating each other like lawyers and clients in court instead of as community members.

As far as mods that aren't legally eligible to be hosted on the archive, that's a choice you make. There's no compelling reason to have commercial MP3s in your WAD. That isn't allowed anywhere else, and it isn't a choice for the archive - it is an existential threat for it to do anything other than reject that type of material. Break your dependence on Big Media and use free music, if you can't get anybody to write some for you. There's plenty of free music in the world if you bother to look for it. Nobody likely cares about your favorite pet band as much as you think they will while playing your wads.

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Memfis said:

Ofc I know why. :D But, for example, mediafire.com accepts that stuff. So that's one more reason why people choose to use something else instead of /idgames.
I guess so: ftp://archives.gamers.org/pub/idgames/REJECTS


The Idgames maintainers are perfectly within their rights to reject things, however, you cannot copyright a palette.

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Is beating the dead horse regarding idgames copyright policies really the most productive direction to take this thread in? The concerns about ease of uploading or the (in)ability to make progressive updates to a mod seem a lot more worthwhile to pursue, since those are not based on situations where the maintainers' hands are tied whether they like it or not.

I also don't see anything being said regarding my question about what more we can do to make sure informational sources don't vanish on us. We have the archive.org Wayback Machine, yes, but it's unclear (as far as I can tell) how often and how thoroughly they spider things without special prompting, and last I checked anything that lives on only there disappears from any sort of search capability meaning some link to where the site used to be has to exist somewhere.

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ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Is beating the dead horse regarding idgames copyright policies really the most productive direction to take this thread in? The concerns about ease of uploading or the (in)ability to make progressive updates to a mod seem a lot more worthwhile to pursue, since those are not based on situations where the maintainers' hands are tied whether they like it or not.

I also don't see anything being said regarding my question about what more we can do to make sure informational sources don't vanish on us. We have the archive.org Wayback Machine, yes, but it's unclear (as far as I can tell) how often and how thoroughly they spider things without special prompting, and last I checked anything that lives on only there disappears from any sort of search capability meaning some link to where the site used to be has to exist somewhere.

In regards to the Internet Archive, as soon as a domain gets the robots.txt file placed on it, any content which used to be on there can no longer be accessed by it, and thus that data will be lost.

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ETTiNGRiNDER said:

All the more reason we shouldn't be overly reliant on it to make sure stuff is in safekeeping.

On August 18th 2015, I attempted to inquire about the possibility of mirroring the contents of the wadhost.fathax.com depository before it shut down but unfortunately it went offline and I never got a response.

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To address the UDM3 palette thing and explain the decision, it is true that you cannot copyright a palette. However, the rejected WAD in question was a collection of custom palettes, including the UDM3 palette, whose text file had a title, an email address, and literally nothing else. In the absence of any other information, it appeared that the author was trying to claim someone else's work as their own. In the further absence of anything substantiating this, I could only cite UDM3's permissions as the reason for rejection.

Back on topic, regarding /idgames, it is true that an alternate and easier process of uploading to /idgames would be a good idea so that more people are inclined to do so. However, this same process would also have to address the ways trolls could abuse it, such as people uploading stolen WADs using other people's names and email addresses (which is why Ty Halderman started doing upload verification). A new upload process would also have to ensure it cannot be used to trash the server. There is much more you need to address when designing such a system than one would think, and as far as I'm concerned, a system should not be used until all of its potential issues are taken care of.

That said, I strongly wish for more people to upload to /idgames so their work can be preserved for future generations, which is the entire point of an archive to begin with. It is a shame when great works fall into obscurity because they were uploaded only to temporary hosts and their authors refused to upload them to an archive—or, even worse, threw in permissions, short-sighted or not, that prevented uploading to an archive (which is what happened to every Odessa level but Odessa 14 until a few years ago). Would we know of the likes of the Memento Mori series among other old classics if their creators chose to restrict their distribution to BBSes, AOL or CompuServe? I don't think so.

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Quasar said:

As far as mods that aren't legally eligible to be hosted on the archive, that's a choice you make.

While you're specifically referring to commercial MP3s which fall under fairly cut and dry circumstances, the classification of "legally eligible" is not always in the hands of the creator, even if one is more than mindful of the matter. This status has been inconsistently and, at worst, arbitrarily designated in the eyes of the archive. It was not long ago that Switcheroom was rejected for... not breaking any of the rules? Even now, this is still a truly bizarre incident and one representative of the hurdles any WAD author must overcome to meet the requirements of the archives.

ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Is beating the dead horse regarding idgames copyright policies really the most productive direction to take this thread in?

There's certainly enough to distinguish between maintaining Doom's on-line presence and the actual WADs for the game (and perhaps this discussion could be split based on this), but as far as preserving Doom's history in general goes, the archive's stringent copyright policies are a very relevant matter to the discussion. For how many years was Bob Evans' Odessa series effectively lost forever due to no real reason in particular? And, of course, the aforementioned Switcheroom example. There's a point where stubbornness flies in the face of common sense, and that has only served to hurt community preservation in the long run.

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AFAIK, no. It is pretty much the biggest loss since the migration from wikia. I tried asking in IRC about it before but Quas was against providing backups because of technical debt or something?

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GhostlyDeath said:

Are there backups of the Doom Wiki text which are downloadable?

At present I do not believe so however I believe it is possible for an Administrator to create one if they are required.

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The "no levels based on IWAD levels" rule was there purely to prevent the archive being flooded by noobish E1M1 modifications where you have two cyberdemons in the nukage courtyard and a stuck spider demon on the blue carpet. (Admit it: that was your first mod. And you would have uploaded it to the archive if you could have.)

That rule should certainly allow for exceptions when the result isn't noobish. Maybe have the uploader contact an archive manager first, like for files above the size threshold.

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Revenant100 said:

There's certainly enough to distinguish between maintaining Doom's on-line presence and the actual WADs for the game (and perhaps this discussion could be split based on this), but as far as preserving Doom's history in general goes, the archive's stringent copyright policies are a very relevant matter to the discussion. For how many years was Bob Evans' Odessa series effectively lost forever due to no real reason in particular? And, of course, the aforementioned Switcheroom example. There's a point where stubbornness flies in the face of common sense, and that has only served to hurt community preservation in the long run.

With Odessa the issue wasn't just that the archives didn't allow you to upload the content. People had copies of the maps. It's that you weren't allowed to use the #1 place to talk about Doom to talk about where you could get them.

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7hm said:

With Odessa the issue wasn't just that the archives didn't allow you to upload the content. People had copies of the maps. It's that you weren't allowed to use the #1 place to talk about Doom to talk about where you could get them.

Are there any major maps / modifications / tools which need tracking down or are currently assumed to be lost at this present point in time? It could be good to start an effort to track down some of those files?

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GhostlyDeath said:

Are there backups of the Doom Wiki text which are downloadable?

Anyone with Python installed can make an XML dump using dumpgenerator.py.  (No programming knowledge required, trust me. :D

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7hm said:

People had copies of the maps.

Hmm, are you sure? I remember asking a very hardcore collector and even he had only like 3 of these levels. Maybe Grazza had everything since he was a Compuserve guy but I'm not sure about "people".

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Gez said:

The "no levels based on IWAD levels" rule was there purely to prevent the archive being flooded by noobish E1M1 modifications where you have two cyberdemons in the nukage courtyard and a stuck spider demon on the blue carpet. (Admit it: that was your first mod. And you would have uploaded it to the archive if you could have.)

That rule should certainly allow for exceptions when the result isn't noobish. Maybe have the uploader contact an archive manager first, like for files above the size threshold.

I've included lines in PWADs I've uploaded specifying that there are IWAD-inspired/remade maps and they still were uploaded. It's one of those things that seems to be treated case by case, and I'm really glad about that.

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The Doom Wiki is backed up to several physically separated locations so it's fairly safe. However, providing downloadable backup dumps would be great - if we had the technological capability to do it without compromising the site.

We do not currently have that.

On wikia, the backups provided were made from cloned instances of the entire wiki database which then had their user tables cleared of all password hashes and all user emails.

We don't have the resources to do this on MancuNET AFAIK.

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Quasar said:

The Doom Wiki is backed up to several physically separated locations so it's fairly safe. However, providing downloadable backup dumps would be great - if we had the technological capability to do it without compromising the site.

We do not currently have that.

On wikia, the backups provided were made from cloned instances of the entire wiki database which then had their user tables cleared of all password hashes and all user emails.

We don't have the resources to do this on MancuNET AFAIK.

Are off-site backups at least being created by the administrators in the unlikely event anything happens to MancuNET?

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Gentlepoke said:

Are off-site backups at least being created by the administrators in the unlikely event anything happens to MancuNET?

I believe my first sentence answers that question :P

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