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wesleyjohnson

legacywiki

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It appears that legacywiki has been hijacked.
The DoomLegacy team does not maintain it nor are we sure who does.
We are removing our reference to it, at least for now.
It now redirects twice to some site that offers to remove spyware and displays other dubious ads. Please consider it dangerous.

DoomLegacy Team.

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The domain is claimed by Bellnames (registered with DROPWEEK). It appears they are trying to sell the domain name (a typical tactic of a hijacker), but the sell site will not respond with a seller name.
Some of the Bellnames history includes the incident where they registered a variation of the name target.com, where upon Target appealed and got ownership of the variation in the arbitration.

I don't know yet who had the domain name or how it got hijacked.
It points out how important it is to maintain your domain names.
The only value of hijacking a domain name like this is that there are
existing links in the various pages that will feed victims into the hands of these (expletive deleted).

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It is more likely that the previous owner of the domain simply didn't pay their fees and thus the name was released.

Clearly somebody else has since picked it up and is now trying to sell it. I fail to see what is unethical or untoward about that. In my book that is just business.

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Heh, they go in like vultures when reasonably popular domains don't get renewed.

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wesleyjohnson said:

The domain is claimed by Bellnames (registered with DROPWEEK). It appears they are trying to sell the domain name (a typical tactic of a hijacker), but the sell site will not respond with a seller name.

Bellnames (who now call themselves NamePal) owns DropWeek, and that WHOIS result doesn't tell me if they've claimed legacywiki.net or are just providing a parking spot for the current registrant. The 22 January 2014 creation date more or less coincides with the wiki's reported absence, so I'd say its registration expired and someone saw an opportunity to make some money from an established domain name.

$925 strikes me as being slightly expensive, especially when I can register the .com for $10.

Anyone have an offline copy of the wiki? I'm sure we could get it re-hosted somewhere.

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Those WHOIS are confusing, and I am still am not sure. I suspect they prefer to confuse the issue to hide their identity. But they seem to be the claimant of record.

What is important is that anyone with a web site cut their links to that domain name. Do not feed them any more clicks that might make it look valuable to some buyer. The best response we have is to isolate them.
There are many names to use for a legacy wiki site and the only value to any name would be the community links to it.
If it was important enough I could file a complaint to transfer the domain like Target did, but I am not sure who would be the receiver as we are not a company with real property. In the Target complaint they did not even bother to respond. DROPWEEK admitted to the registration and that was all. It even seems that the Target complaint was against Bellnames ... / WHOIS, which seem strange.
Who runs the WHOIS and what do they have to do with Bellnames ?

It is not surprising that they would change their name again. That hides their previous history which is far too obvious.

I am suspicious enough of DROPWEEK in this that I would not use them
for any domain name registration.

I do not even remember what was on the site, or even why it was called a wiki. It could have been some of Jives stuff that got moved, or something associated.

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wesleyjohnson said:

I do not even remember what was on the site, or even why it was called a wiki. It could have been some of Jives stuff that got moved, or something associated.


Still on the wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20130811054550/http://legacywiki.net/index.php/Main_Page

It was a wiki equivalent of all the html docs that come with legacy plus whatever else people contributed that wasn't in the docs.

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If that is just an archive then I think the DoomLegacy home page should not be linking to it.

The DoomLegacy docs have been heavily rewritten. The code has changed considerably and some of the old docs were badly incomplete or generalizations. There are more switches, and more console variables.
Some of the config file got changed. Unless the legacy-wiki gets a site and gets updated, it may be more misleading than helpful.

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I agree with DaniJ. Looks like someone either forgot to pay their registration fees (or decided to let the domain lapse because they didn't want to pay for it any more). There's nothing nefarious here.

Although the wiki is now obviously dead, it would be good to get some archived copies of the site for posterity. Maybe bundle up the pages from archive.org and submit them to the idgames archive. There is a list of all the pages that were on the wiki. That would be a good starting point.

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fraggle said:

Although the wiki is now obviously dead, it would be good to get some archived copies of the site for posterity.

I've made a start on that, though the Wayback Machine appears to be missing copies of about fifty of those pages and insists they're still on the Web, I lost interest in following those links when my antivirus software blocked one as potential malware. Can't access most of the discussion or source tabs either without logging into the wiki, which is probably impossible. This isn't going to be easy.


EDIT - Trawling through a listing of every legacywiki page and file on the Internet Archive has turned up what are probably older versions of some missing pages amongst the Special:Recentchangeslinked/ entries, which will be better than nothing. I'm less than 10% of the way through that listing and have recovered 6 pages, so the outlook mightn't be as gloomy as I previously thought.

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GreyGhost said:

EDIT - Trawling through a listing of every legacywiki page and file on the Internet Archive has turned up what are probably older versions of some missing pages amongst the Special:Recentchangeslinked/ entries, which will be better than nothing. I'm less than 10% of the way through that listing and have recovered 6 pages, so the outlook mightn't be as gloomy as I previously thought.

Even if they're old they're probably fine. I doubt the pages that were on there have changed significantly in years.

It would be nice to have the page source but just having the rendered pages would be good enough. I don't think the discussion pages are particularly important as long as we have the main content.

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I've only found 20 source pages so far, but reconstructing the others shouldn't be difficult. I'm probably crazy enough to do that and they'll come in handy should someone decide to resurrect the wiki.

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Bump?

After an exhausting exhaustive search on the Wayback Machine, I've reduced the missing page count to the following three -

2 player control setup
NTEXTURE
Zombieman

I've also failed to locate revision histories for the following pages -

FS playerammo
FS skincolor
FS testlocation
PSP Port

There's also a bunch of screenshots and a zipped demo wad that don't appear to have been archived - from Showcase (the full sized images), Simple 3D floors (legacy_3ddemo.zip) and Dynamic lights and coronae (Tut_coronae0?.gif). Any assistance in locating those would be appreciated, in the meantime I'll start editing what I have for portability.

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GreyGhost said:

Bump?

After an exhausting exhaustive search on the Wayback Machine, I've reduced the missing page count to the following three -

I've also failed to locate revision histories for the following pages -

There's also a bunch of screenshots and a zipped demo wad that don't appear to have been archived - from Showcase (the full sized images), Simple 3D floors (legacy_3ddemo.zip) and Dynamic lights and coronae (Tut_coronae0?.gif). Any assistance in locating those would be appreciated, in the meantime I'll start editing what I have for portability.


I'll see what I can turn up over the weekend.

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Thanks. I half suspect two missing pages suffered the same fate as Signs You're In An Abusive Relationship and the revision histories are probably just for the sake of completeness, since I don't know how much interest there'll be in them. Any of the other stuff would be a big help.

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It seems I had http://www.teamhellspawn.com/legacy_3ddemo.zip backed up on my webspace already, so that one was nice and easy.

I managed to find most of the screenshots from the showcase page, but missing the three at the bottom, so I've uploaded those: http://www.teamhellspawn.com/legacywikiscreenshots.zip

No luck with the dynlights article, though. I think that may have been someone elses upload.

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That's most of the gaps filled, thanks a lot! Looks like two of the missing Showcase screenshots were uploaded by Planky, so I'll try jogging his memory. The dynamic lights shots are DarkWolfs, from one of his old Doom pages, if it's the slipgate.org pages I might get lucky with the Internet Archive.

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What's the state of this? Are we going to see a semi-complete copy of the Legacy wiki uploaded to idgames at some point soon?

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It's a work in progress. The web archive pages sort of fall to pieces once downloaded, so I'm working (albeit slowly) on a plain html page template I can import the content into. There are also bits of Monobook.css I don't have straight in my mind yet, though admittedly much of that won't be needed for the /idgames version.

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So do engine-related Wikis get imported into idgames when they are finished or at certain milestones? I've started an EDGE/3DGE/DosDoom wiki that pretty much transfers and updates the content at ajapted's EDGE website.

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Chu said:

So do engine-related Wikis get imported into idgames when they are finished or at certain milestones? I've started an EDGE/3DGE/DosDoom wiki that pretty much transfers and updates the content at ajapted's EDGE website.

I'm not aware of any such practice, no. It'd be done in this case only because the parent site is gone and the content won't likely be developed any further.

It'd have been a lot better if somebody had kept a backup dump of the wiki before it went down. Then it could just be loaded into a new instance of MediaWiki and would be live again instantly. As is, even with this kind of archive, you'd need to rebuild it from scratch to get a wiki going. However, you gotta take what you can get in these kinds of situations.

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Do you have the HTMLized versions of all the pages? My SMMU graveyard page links to the Legacy Wiki FraggleScript documentation pages. It would be nice to have copies of those pages that I can include on the site.

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