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Csonicgo

Disappearing History (2nd thread)

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I'm creating a new thread based off of this one:

 

Despite our efforts to preserve it, especially at the wiki, bits and pieces of Doom history and community culture are vanishing at an increasing rate.

In the past couple of years (mostly this year), the following resources have all disappeared:

  • NewDoom and its forums
  • raven-games.com, including the hosting of a number of Heretic/Hexen series mods (especially some unique things for their sequels)
  • altdeath forums
  • files.drdteam.org
  • rome.ro/johnromero.com, including the backup it had of Lee Killough's classic Doom information page. For a while, this was not even accessible through archive.org due to a redirect present at the domain.
  • soulsphere.org, including several historically interesting files and pages, such as "Free Hissy" (fraggle may care to answer to this one)
  • doom3world.org, previously the heart of Doom 3 modding
  • doom3.filefront.com - while still "up," this site which hosted a ton of Doom 3 mods is now blocking downloads behind privacy-invading ads and surveys, making them effectively inaccessible

If that's not enough of a list to make an impression, we're also currently having trouble locating source or binaries for some historically significant source ports, such as DosDoom v0.2 (from which almost every other port derives), and Boom v2.00 (the first initial release).

Why are we not more proactive in creating permanent archives and why are our best efforts where they exist still insufficient, too slow and too short in reach, to prevent so much information loss? It's troubling to me.

 

A lot of recent "missing" files were hosted on file sharing sites that were not reliable, such as drdteam files, Rapidshare, etc.


I admit a lot of forums are likely lost.

I hope to renew some interest in finding missing files, however. If you know of any content you cannot find now, please list them here. Surely someone has an old dusty HDD somewhere with the files.

 

Here is my list:

  • Yoghurt's Cajunbot source code, DoomWars source code
  • BZDoom source and binaries (RR said they had them, I didn't see them uploaded anywhere)
  • Compuserve Doom archive (Lost?)
  • All Doom Legacy source code releases (v1.28 is missing)
  • WAD files mentioned in the Doom FAQ (FunDuke helped out with this, but I am not sure on the progress of this)

 

Chungy created an archive on github ( https://github.com/Doom-Utils ) made to preserve the old Doom Utilities. As far as I know, there is no such repository for other Doom-related files. I presume copyright issues are why. I am of the opinion of preserving these creations intact, and Hopefully Disney and Viacom won't give a toss about some crappy 8-bit 11025Hz samples someone recorded on a microphone connected to their Sound Blaster in the 90s.

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In the forum switchover thread long ago, I think xttl sort of slyly admitted he archived all of Blogs and Post Hell, at least that's what it sounded like.

 

Did Rachael keep an archive of the drdteam files? That would certainly be helpful, since I remember she was responsible for the system in the first place.

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The Skulltag forums from 2004-2009 come to mind, everything from 2009 onward was recently released but I have to imagine there were some interesting WADs and projects on the forums in the early years that didn't have a thread anywhere else. I've had it in the back of my mind to ask Carnevil about this ever since the 2009 stuff surfaced but never got around to it.. Maybe this thread is the reminder I needed.

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I have a lot of the old ports and a large number of the old utilities, but not all that much in the way of source code. I have Source for A few (12 or so) old random ports and utilities.  More often than not I have just the old ports and utilities and not the source.  Could check my back up drive off my old win 98 box, hard to say what might be on there.  What do we need?  A list would be awesome.  I would be happy to check all my files.

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2 hours ago, Doomkid said:

The Skulltag forums from 2004-2009 come to mind, everything from 2009 onward was recently released but I have to imagine there were some interesting WADs and projects on the forums in the early years that didn't have a thread anywhere else. I've had it in the back of my mind to ask Carnevil about this ever since the 2009 stuff surfaced but never got around to it.. Maybe this thread is the reminder I needed.

Yep. Used to love a Skulltag Heretic mod called ..."Element Storm"? I loved it but lost it a couple hard drives and many years ago. I've been sad about it ever since.

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2 hours ago, Master O said:

TeamTNT's website is gone, too.

Thankfully I think archive.org has a really complete archive of it. Someone should probably download it for extra archival at some point, since while I'm sure the internet archive is better at keeping things archived than some random person on a forum, all it would take is for the current domain owner to slip in a simple robots.txt file to render the site completely inaccessible...

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2 hours ago, Doomkid said:

The Skulltag forums from 2004-2009 come to mind, everything from 2009 onward was recently released but I have to imagine there were some interesting WADs and projects on the forums in the early years that didn't have a thread anywhere else. I've had it in the back of my mind to ask Carnevil about this ever since the 2009 stuff surfaced but never got around to it.. Maybe this thread is the reminder I needed.

Yeah this stuff has special significance to me; I would love to be able to dive back into my post history in its entirety, and get to see again what the community was like those days. I'd love to go through the topic of the failed Skulltag coop community project too. @Mechadon do you still have the maps you made for that project? I remember this really cool gigantic spaceship map you made, and then another one that was called Belphegor's Crucible I think?

 

edit: going through the spacedm5 thread would be swell too 8)

Edited by Tango

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46 minutes ago, Captain Ventris said:

Yep. Used to love a Skulltag Heretic mod called ..."Element Storm"? I loved it but lost it a couple hard drives and many years ago. I've been sad about it ever since.

I can help you out with that. My brother was the one who made the mod, and I'm pretty confident I still have a million different copies of it buried on my old computer. I'll check soon.

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59 minutes ago, Tango said:

Yeah this stuff has special significance to me; I would love to be able to dive back into my post history in its entirety, and get to see again what the community was like those days. I'd love to go through the topic of the failed Skulltag coop community project too. @Mechadon do you still have the maps you made for that project? I remember this really cool gigantic spaceship map you made, and then another one that was called Belphegor's Crucible I think?

 

edit: going through the spacedm5 thread would be swell too 8)

Yup still got 'em!  I don't have them available for download anywhere, but I got a few screenshots here.

 

It would be really nice to be able to read through the old Skulltag forums.  That was a really special place for me when I started mapping.

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1 minute ago, Mechadon said:

Yup still got 'em!  I don't have them available for download anywhere, but I got a few screenshots here.

 

:D awesome, so glad to hear you still have them. any chance of releasing them? :p

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Yea I suppose I should release them sometime.  I had plans years ago to clean them up and release them as a mini-episode thingy, but I came to the conclusion that it was going to take more work than I would like.  Nowadays if I did that, I would end up completely remaking the entire maps...probably defeating the point :P.  So if they get released, they'll probably be released as-is (with bug fixes at least).

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Yeah, I thought it was bad 12-15 years ago, when 80-some percent of the gaming sites that I followed died.  But it is significantly worse now, because the nature of the internet model today.  Regular users have no personal webspace anymore.  Sure, there are blog-type websites where you can twiddle about whatever you like, but you don't get webspace to post actual content.  I bet anyone reading this would be hard-pressed to name more than 30 websites that actually host content.  I know I can't.  In the late 90's the internet was a wonderous place with content lurking around every corner.  There were hundreds of DOOM sites with a map or two here and some awful sound file there.  Literally 100 sites will be linking the latest map or game patch or something similar.... but they are all linking to the single hoster.  Once that single host is gone, the content is gone.  Nothing is permanent on the internet.(well, I mean as far as gaming is concerned :rolls eyes: )

 

But to be more productive, if someone names something I think I might actually have archived, I'll look it up and post it.  I know a bunch of you have large archives of DOOM.  I have about 1Tb(mostly garbage zdoom/zdaemon crap).  I'm pretty light on the "website archiving". 

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I posted on the status updates not too long ago that I was looking for a mirror/dump of server1.thefourwinds.net .  Some of the individual files might well exist elsewhere but an actual full(ish) collection would be ideal for me.

 

On 9/11/2017 at 11:16 PM, InsanityBringer said:

all it would take is for the current domain owner to slip in a simple robots.txt file to render the site completely inaccessible...

This is the number one worst thing about Wayback Machine (followed by the tendency of sites that primarily hosted files only having the skeleton index archived and not the files themselves).  I get not archiving current stuff that's blocked that way, and I suppose the blanket denial of access is prompted as some sort of legal ass-cover to protect archive.org, but it's pretty lame that a squatter can just come along and nuke access to whatever was on the domain before and already archived.

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Doom: Rampage Edition?

 

The lightweight version without the MP3s is relatively easy to find, but the original, heavyweight one is rare, despite valiant efforts to preserve it. But I'm sure even that one is lurking in some cyber rat hold, waiting to be re-discovered..

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On 9/11/2017 at 9:34 PM, Fonze said:

@kb1 do you have any of these backed up in your collection?

You know, I just might. But, I need to know a filename to search for. My files are so scattered, and have been moved, unzipped, renamed, re-zipped, etc., that I'm not even sure I could determine if I had some of these, even if I were looking at them :(. One of my to-dos is to go through my archives and use my file organization tools and skills to organize my files right.

 

I know I have Killough's visplane page, and a bunch of the older ports source code. I'm good at downloading, but terrible at archiving :(

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