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Post by Deleted on Jun 1, 2009 4:21:18 GMT -5
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Post by zzz on Jun 1, 2009 4:33:18 GMT -5
So, all things considered, ProBoards is probably gonna be around for a while. Meaning the forums likely ain't going nowhere.
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Post by Atma on Jun 1, 2009 6:43:35 GMT -5
I can understand wanting to save money, but to just dump this on us with not much time to back things up and migrate elsewhere is kind of dickish. End of August doesn't really qualify as "not much time". It isn't much time if you don't have money/people offering space/can't find an alternative that won't kick your ass for uploading any content not a jpg, which is like 99% of free hosting Twitter and LJ are pretty much all I use - everything else I find to be cumbersome and overloaded and/or just plain shitty. Those two work fine for my devices and that's good enough for me. I hate twitter. For the most part, it's the worst of Facebook with none of the good stuff (i.e., photos, networking). While you can get news feeds and stuff, mostly it's people doing a "Tim Rogers" and talking about what color the bolus of feces they just left in the toilet was, and other pointless stuff. That, and Kevin Spacey was using it during an interview on Jay Leno, so you know it's gay (and not in the positive way). I've actually had some pretty interesting conversations with people on there before, like Yuji Himukai, so it's not all bad.
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Post by retrorogue on Jun 1, 2009 22:02:19 GMT -5
I should add to this, as a former Site Admin for ClassicGaming, I have a personal connection to the many hosted sites as well and hate to see this happening. Consequently, I will be archiving any sites that don't find hosting elsewhere and putting them up under a sub site at atarihq.com.
Likewise, AFAIK Classicgaming itself will not be gone, it's not a hosted site. It's a regular planet site.
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Post by jorpho on Jun 2, 2009 1:54:18 GMT -5
as a former Site Admin for ClassicGaming Gee, I haven't been keeping up with things at all. Anyone else here remember the Classicgaming.com of around 2000-2003? The old pool-table-green background? The thrill of the weekly mailbag? The often clever and well-written Game of the Week articles (and I'm not just saying that because I contributed a couple of them) ? I suppose the forums never really took off at all, but we had a good little thing going on there. But those days are as dead as the Dreamcast. HG101 comes kind of close sometimes, though.
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Post by retrorogue on Jun 2, 2009 12:18:58 GMT -5
I guess no one really knows about it because there haven't been any posts on Kotaku about it, but IGN/Gamespy is shutting down all of their public hosting services. For me, I know at the least that means that Classicgaming is going to be gone - I'd imagine that would include Strategyplanet, RPGPlanet, and numerous other genre areas that included hosted fan sites. Just reading through and needed to clarify the above statement, as it's incorrect. IGN Entertainment (which is IGN and Gamespy) is not shutting down the Planet sites. The Planet sites are not hosted sites, they are regular parts of the network - that includes Classicgaming. What is being shut down are all the sites hosted through the Planet sites, or what are referred to as Public Hosted Sites. The public hosted sites are on separate servers from the Planets, and IGN simply didn't feel like including them in the upgrade, hence the shutdown.
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Post by Discoalucard on Jun 2, 2009 16:49:04 GMT -5
Yeah, I clarified that a few posts down. To me, though, the meat and bones of all of these sites have been the fan sites, and stripping those takes away a pretty gigantic part of them.
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Post by retrorogue on Jun 2, 2009 16:53:19 GMT -5
Yeah, I clarified that a few posts down. To me, though, the meat and bones of all of these sites have been the fan sites, and stripping those takes away a pretty gigantic part of them. I certainly agree, I think its an amazing loss and can't believe IGN is shortsighted enough to do this.
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Post by Ike on Jun 2, 2009 17:15:54 GMT -5
nvm
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Post by ReyVGM on Jun 9, 2009 12:25:21 GMT -5
But that eliminates the point of doing a global find and replace. EDIT: HUZZAH I found one that works. Gonna try uploading all of this stuff over to the new server and see how it all goes. What program did you find? I could use something like that too. I can do global renaming with CuteHTML, but I still have to open every sub dir to select the html file. As for a new host, have you tried Dreamhost? That's what VGM uses and it only costs like 10 bucks a month. That should be good for HG101 considering VGM has twice as many screenshots and the site has never been down or maxed out due to bandwidth.
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Post by Scylla on Jun 15, 2009 3:19:16 GMT -5
Glad to hear that this site will find hosting elsewhere, but it's a shame that others might disappear, not to mention the annoyance of moving.
I've been noticing that the art of fan sites has been neglected more and more over the last several years, and it's pretty sad. Considering how my life is basically centered around technology, it's ridiculous how much of a neo-Luddite I am. I turn my nose up to LiveJournal, Myspace, DeviantArt, Twitter, Skype, and all that kind of socializing junk kids are into these days. I do have Facebook, but only because my brother insisted on me signing up to see pictures of my niece from half way around the world. I log into it maybe once every few months, and I've never left a message or put up a picture or anything. If I have a desire do some sort of "blogging", I just post my thoughts on a message board or I open up Notepad, manually type out HTML, and upload an update to my website. I may not get a lot of attention that way and become a popular figure online, but, darn it, that's the way I do things. :) I just wish more people appreciated fan sites. I try to have a decent selection of quality sites on my site's links page, but, man, there's next to nothing left in the realm of tri-Ace related fan sites. I knew of so many around 2000, but now I have to go through my list every few months to delete out all the sites that have disappeared and struggle to find replacements (which usually end up being Japanese since those are the only sites that stick around, it seems).
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Post by loempiavreter on Jun 15, 2009 8:40:40 GMT -5
Someone must save Streets of Rage online
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Post by Shellshock on Jun 15, 2009 9:03:54 GMT -5
Somebody should make a list of exactly what will disappear, and what will be saved in some manner.
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Post by Rambo M on Jun 16, 2009 17:51:51 GMT -5
Someone must save Streets of Rage online Getting to that, I kept forgetting to the last couple times I got on highspeed.
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Post by lordnikon on Jun 16, 2009 20:08:33 GMT -5
Hey All, This is my first post here, but I have been a longtime fan of HG101, and constantly refer people to this website so they can brush up on their educational knowledge of video games. The closure of GameSpy's publically hosted sites is a situation all too familiar to me, as it is something I have been battling for almost 6+ years now. For those of you who do not know me, I run OnlineConsoles.com and have been fighting to rebuild and preserve online multiplayer environments for game consoles like the Dreamcast for many years. In the midst of all of this, the dark nature of the Internet was revealed to me in that pretty much everything online is vulnurable to deletion. Servers Crash, HardDrives die, Technologies change, and more importantly, companies go through transitions that often result in wiping the slate clean. No service is safe. If you do not have control over the service or the hosted data, then the information is all temporary. Sometimes gaining control merely means archiving static web data, and in other cases it means reverse engineering software for an online game (complicated). I would say by 2004 I was becoming more agressive with my archiving, and it has been ramping up year after year. My current archive is quite extensive, containing complete functional websites, totaling hundreds of thousands of files. Unfortunatly I can't archive everything on the Internet so I tend to only archive things that pertain to my research, or things that specifically interest me. For instance I probobly have the only complete archive of Square's Front Mission Online website in existance. Which has long since been removed after the game was terminated last Spring. Also, due to the large network of passionate Japanese players on FMO, I was able to traverse fan community networks to archive over 15GB of video footage and over 5,000 screenshots of the game being played online. For the GameSpy hosted sites I don't think everyone quite realises the scope of the shutdown and what impact it has on the world of video games. So to put things into perspective, let's rewind a bit... While sites like blogger and livejournal existed in 1999, it wasn't until 2003 onwards that "blogging" and web 2.0 Content Management Systems started to become "trendy". Today people can go to any number of social networking sites and carve out an albeit generic cookie cutter home for themselves. Even sites like GameSpot, IGN, and 1UP allow for such features. Back then, if you wanted to do this you had to learn HTML to build your own website. You had no choice. Today people are no longer forced to learn such technologies and game websites have become far less interesting as a result. One drawback from this has been the death of the "fansite". Because people are no longer learning HTML, you rarely see new fantsites sprouting up on the net. Instead users either form a blog network or just sign up for a free message board service at a site like proboards. GameSpy's hosting situation was unique. They pooled together fans of certain games and or genre's at their Planet websites, and then allowed users to splinter off their own websites all hosted at GameSpy. These sites comprise a very large portion of the fansite pie from a historical perspective. Everything from mod homepages for Rocket Arena, to large fan communities dedicated to the Odyssey2 console will be wiped out come August 31st. In my opinion GameSpy and IGN should have done a much better job of ensuring these sites found new homes. I don't think they fully understand they are obliterating over 10 years of video game history from the Internet. With that being said, we are looking at hundreds if not thousands of websites at GameSpy that will be lost forever. Just to give you all an idea, you need to take every single "Planet" website from gamespy and then go to their individual Hosted Network section. There you will find tons of community run projects and fansites. Just a glimpse at the Planet Quake site alone shows over 14 pages of hosted sites. Here are all of the Planet websites on GameSpy's network: www.gamespy.com/network/I have already started the archival process, beginning with Classic Gaming. I intend to archive pretty much everything. One of the biggest problems in making a post like this is that it gives the impression that the archived material would then be available for immediate access after I am done. This isn't as easy as it seems. For starters, I am already involved in countless projects relating to game history, archiving and more specifically my personal site OnlineConsoles. Often times I have multiple projects commanding my attention simultaneously. Simply archiving the material is the first step, but distributing it is an entirely different hurdle. In my queue I am currently processing the fansite "Kirby's Rainbow Resort", which is of course hosted by GameSpy. This site alone is at over 2.17GB (9,857 files) of data and counting. This isn't exactly stuff I can just toss up on the Internet for someone to download in the blink of an eye. Plus, who I pass this content off to and how it eventually gets distributed is something that I take into great consideration. There are preservation organizations out there that are more concerned with adding another feather in their cap to coax more grant money from investers and the government than they are about legitimately archiving video game history. They run at a snail's pace since its all bureaucracy and no follow through. I don't want to pass off some HardDrive full of material to such an institution. Nor do I want to improperly distribute site content to the public when a community still intends to move the site and start it up again on a new host. I think what I will be doing in the immediate time period following the server terminations is offering to pass off any site content to administrators of sites that need their files but were unable to acquire them intime before the shutdown. Admin's could contact me and I could mail off their files on DVD. Yea I know it is hard to screen for imposteurs, but I guess I would hope people are honorable and honest when contacting me for files. Thanks for reading, -Ben PS - On a side note, I just want to say I hope HG101's primary website design never changes. Please leave it as is. I am actually a web designer by profession with 9 years of experience. With all of the bloat on websites these days, HG101's ease of access to information and content layout is suberb. Though the forum's color scheme could use some contrast tweaking.
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