Planetquake being stabbed to death by IGN
Cocot posted about it at func: IGN, the (bastard) mother company of all Planet*-sites, Gamespy et cetera has decided to pull the plug on their free hosting.
After years of quality free hosting for gaming sites, we have decided to discontinue our free hosting services.
-> The Hosting Services will end on 11.59 PM, August 31st, 2009.
-> No backups or snapshots will be maintained after that date (download everything you wish to keep). You will no longer have access to your site or any aspects of it (content, assets, files etc.) after that date and we will remove/delete all such files from our servers.
Files currently hosted at Fileplanet will stay but all the websites will be wiped off the face of the Planets.
Ok, so let’s just mirror all the websites, eh? Well, thanks to the idiotic random-url-gamespy-domain-screw-up this is next to impossible to automate:
http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/ became http://hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/polycount/
http://www.planetquake.com/underworld became http://underworld.planetquake.gamespy.com/
And some sites redirect from http://www.planetquake.com/website/ to http://planetquake.gamespy.com/website/ just to show some generic hosting page.
Oh well, I’ll see what I (and others) can do to preserve those.
Update: Actually http://hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/website seems to work consistently. But all the non-relative links on sites are broken.
Easily install and launch Quake maps with the cross-platform
27.05.2009 09:01
I had already given up on those Planet sites.
They have little or no news, the links are fucked up and the required login for downloads pissed me off too.
Or you used to get a commercial about a completely irrelevant game like Warcraft and had to click to continue reading. No, as long as this site stays up, I’m a happy chappy. And for Unreal there is the Unrealsp site that is also run by someone who actually seems to give a damn.
27.05.2009 09:24
Quaddicted = power
who needs planetquake?
27.05.2009 09:45
Guys, this will mean the death of great sites like
http://underworld.planetquake.gamespy.com/
http://retroquake.planetquake.gamespy.com/
http://hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/worldcraft/
Just to mention 3 out of many.
27.05.2009 10:01
What about extending your hosting activity at Quaddicted then? I’d even be willing to accept some annual donations thing (like $5 each) if that would help.
27.05.2009 10:12
While I would love to, I will not. I have so many things I want to do and I need to focus. Hosting the ~15 people currently is already more trouble than I like. :}
27.05.2009 10:30
ops the old reviews lost isn´t good at all :(
27.05.2009 11:26
I didn’t realize the Worldcraft page was on Planet too. So I spoke too soon (again…) About the reviews, well, we’ve got those on here too. And on 10 4, although that’s rarely updated. But there forum is still active. I agree with Negke though, if you need help, financially or otherwise, I would also be willing to help out.
27.05.2009 14:06
I got the mail about this last night just like everybody else. I’m a contractor on the network, and not apparently “inside” enough to know what’s going on. To tell you the truth, I’m numb right now. I’m going to be spending today trying to get copies of the sites (for a personal archive) so they are not lost. I have NO idea if this is possible or if the network is willing to help me do this.
As for site links, a site that has the URL: http://hostedsitenamehere.planetquake.gamespy.com is a site that was moved into the new systems by the owners, and those ones most likely will get moved again by the owners, I hope!
The sites with a URL like “http://hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/hostedsitenamehere are sites that have not been moved or touched by the owner since the network changed a couple years ago. These are the sites I am VERY worried about since the owners have not touched the sites in years.
27.05.2009 15:43
happy manual downloading and personal copying people :-(
27.05.2009 16:18
And in the future, we should probably avoid this type of situation by using more paid hosting… it’s getting cheaper anyway.
Also, it won’t hurt to just make local copies of any website we deem keepworthy, seeing the low price for harddisks today.
The final eternal mantra is of course, always do backups… of your own stuff and that of others… when Shub-Hub went down, I thought “Damn, if I had only mirrored the fucking thing”. It wouldn’t have been hard to do, just nobody did it.
Lesson: The internet is only temporary storage. Harddisks are more trustworthy :-/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_(computing)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_mirroring_software
28.05.2009 00:33
I’m happy to host any old static sites over at Quaketastic. Many of the mothballed sites are just reference at this point anyway.
Let me know if you need help with this, Spirit.
We could do stuff like http://www.quaketastic.com/worldcraft for example.
28.05.2009 10:52
Whoah whoah, back up a little here. Planetquake is updated 6 days a week along with PlanetDoom and PlanetWolfenstein. I know this for a fact because I check these sites daily and if there is anything relative out there its found and posted.
28.05.2009 15:03
Korozive : See post (8)
Pappy-R : Thanks for posting here. Do you know if PlanetQuake will still exist as a news site? You have done such a great job mirroring Q1 news from all ends of the community in the past years, I would hate to see that go.
28.05.2009 19:40
I should clarify that in my post (12) I was refering to the first posters comment about giving up on the planet sites long ago. Maybe for some but definately not all.
28.05.2009 20:00
Oh, I see… sorry ;)
28.05.2009 22:51
CocoT: PQ will remain as is. The hosted sites were always such a big part of what PQ became that it’s hard to think of it without them, but PQ itself will not change.
Thanks for the kind words.
29.05.2009 19:48
Good :)
30.05.2009 04:58
Is there a way to get a full Quake 1 list of hosted sites?
I see different “lists” people have written up out of memory, but nothing like the 100-200 (300?) grand total sites.
The “popular ones” usually have content that is rather duplicated; I worry about the obscure ones really (kegrip, some of girl quaker sites, weird mods no one played, fan made models/skins/sounds, etc.)
My interest is more the history and less the useful content. I think everyone knows the useful content.
30.05.2009 07:49
Kinda:
http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=16759#16759 (don’t miss the follow up posts)
I compiled those from http://hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/quake1/hosted/ , an older archive.org of that page plus https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fhosted.planetquake.gamespy.com&y=Explore+URL&fr=sfp
Just noticed that I forgot https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fplanetquake.gamespy.com&y=Explore+URL&fr=sfp
03.06.2009 13:57
This is sad news. Back in “the day” – and that means the days of quakeworld in the late 1990s, quakespy (which later became gamespy) helped make the gaming community into what it is today. A major part of that development was the fan sites.
Over the years, it was the free hosting and the fan sites that made the online gaming community what it is today. Its sad to see an icon of the past slip away.
04.06.2009 20:48
[...] bunch of Quakers are actively archiving the soon to be deleted hosted websites from Planetquake. If you want to follow progress or even help out, check out the Inside3D forums: IGN Decides To [...]
06.11.2010 12:32
was always good to have game with freinds now hard to find a good server letalone find gamers you know good fraging