youve had too much DLC for breakfast 

Huge loss of ancient PlanetQuake sites.

No.

Someone with enough hard drive space (10 gig? dunno exactly) can simply mirror the *whole* planetquake.com site on their local harddisk. Brute force, German method.

wget is the tool to do that. It should take a couple hours. Let it run overnight.

wget -h http://www.planetquake.com

or something like that.

We have until August to do this, so it's not an imminent threat. 

Ah, it was wget -m. 

Sad, but IGN has ben doing this type of "Let shot our own foot!" self-defeating strategy for years.

And the death of Fileplanet will be EPIC! 

I would not trust fileplanet, either. Although it looks like this time, it's spared.

It's only a question of time until Fileplanet is fucked, too. Probably a good idea to back that stuff up on local harddisks, too. 

I don't find it that hard to believe that they're migrating to a new platform and only want to bother porting the software/services that are core to their business. It could be something as simple as the architecture being written in ASP, and they're moving to a unix-based server architecture. Sure, these things can be ported, adapted, software can be installed, etc, but they're basically saying that it's more work than just keeping some old machines plugged in to their network, and they are not willing to do that work. Running a service is more than just the cost of a hard drive or bandwidth, you have physical stuff to maintain, and customer service requirements which means spending people's time.

Anyway, I think the most important thing is to spider and archive all of the old sites that are not maintained by anyone actively, so people have access to that stuff. And this requires the even more difficult task of actually creating a list of needed sites -- half of the stuff we're going to lose is probably stuff we completetly forgot about.

Active people also need to move their hosting, but at least they are active and paying attention, and can probably do that. 

looks like Spirit has already got a handle on this, based on his posts on I3D.

http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=1585 

Make sure to hax0r the page list for Ramshackle, the index page broke years ago, but last I checked the reviews were still there... 

New:

You mentioned a list of other alternative hosting options?

While we had hoped to make it easier by offering a list we compiled from Google, we realized that it might not be complete and since we don't know anything about those companies, we could end up setting people down the wrong path. So we would recommend doing an online search via Google for "Free Hosting" and other keywords, to make sure you find a hosting option that suits your needs.

---

Well, that's super helpful...
Anyway, am I the only one to find it very strange that no planet site or forum has yet mentioned anything about this? 

i even checked planet quake for a mention but there was none..on the front page..where i would expect the news to be 

... this looks pretty legit : http://hosting.ign.com/faq.php

If it was some kind of hacking exploit, it would have been removed a while ago, right? 

generally bad news doesn't go on the company's friendly community page, I mean you wouldn't see "McDonalds lays of 10,000 people" on their commumity marketing websites either. 

They're not going to put a bunch of effort into trumpeting how unhappy they're making a lot of people, regardless of motive/necessity/whatever.

It kind of sucks, but I just can't bring myself to be too pissed at them. Hell I've basically had a good run of nine years of free hosting; I can't exactly shake my fist and say "You bastards." for taking away what was basically a free gift in the first place...

I'm just working on a new site (that will eventually be at pjwnex.us--ignore the horrible placeholder shit that's there now, if you bother looking), and trying to look on the bright side.

But yeah, I hope those people who are out of the loop manage to save their stuff, or someone does... 

Anyway, am I the only one to find it very strange that no planet site or forum has yet mentioned anything about this?

I thought it was strange earlier. But the person who's in charge of PlanetDiablo has just posted on PhrozenKeep (major Diablo 2 modding forum hosted on PlanetDiablo) that this is happening. 

Was in "blog comment" mode there. Should've done {q} instead of {i}. 

I'm not buying the idea they're re-vamping the whole system & it's not compatible.
*they just revamped the forums.
*hosting has been updated over the past few years to better & better setups.
*from what I've been told, the planet sites & hosted are all pretty much setup the same
*BUT planet sites not going away

Unless they plan to ditch everything & just keep the "big" sites (gamespy.com, ign.com, fileplanet.com, etc).

I still find it funny that the FAQ even mentioned how a bunch of Quake players started the whole thing. That's like Walmart still promoting that they're a "buy american" company. :/

Over the past few years have been some big changes (ign buy gamespy, fox buy ign, GS headquarters move & they get rid of the Quake "Q"). Looking back this move looks pretty obvious: they stopped accepting new hosted sites a few months ago because they didn't want to bother any more, makes sense they'd just ditch it all.

Why not on planet font page news? I wouldn't say it would help & many planet admins are just as shocked as we are.

At least they gave us ~3 months to get what we want. FileFront gave us a weekend.

Live long & Quake. :) 

That is at least some nice consideration. 

Pappy-R (Planetquake dude) left a comment over at Quaddicted, he was not even informed about it beforehand. http://www.quaddicted.com/quake-nostalgia/planetquake-being-stabbed-to-death-by-ign/#comment-1023

I will backup sites I myself "need". See the Inside3D list. 

but that's probably because they cancelled my email account a couple of weeks ago. The mail server was being "retired". That did upset me a little - don't get me wrong, I appreciated 10 years of free email access, I am not entitled to anything for free, and I always expected it to end someday. However, since I had been using it for so long, I had dozens of places where I've had to change my email address, and doubtless there will be unforeseen complications in the future (people who can't contact me, websites or accounts I can't access anymore, etc). Perhaps more importantly it signals the end of an era, which while inevitable is nevertheless somewhat saddening to witness.

The news reported in this thread however is neither surprising nor terribly disappointing for me, personally. Of course, it is a terrible loss in terms of Quake history if the sites are not archived somehow. For my part though, the only reason I left my website on PQ all this time was so I could hang on to the email account, which was much more valuable to me than the substandard webhosting arrangement and associated fileplanet dickery that that they provide these days (sorry: provided, past tense).

It is vaguely tempting to starting ranting about evil corporate overlords pissing in our pond, but it is hard to feel any real animosity towards the guys calling the shots now. We had a good run. 10 years of free hosting and email which may not have been first class, but was certainly better than the average free hosting arrangements out there. We know that the current owners are not the same people who started it all, they don't have the same goals and ideals, and they were never going to continue hosting us forever. Such is life.

To be completely honest though, naturally there is some disappointment and irritation that we're treated with so little regard at the end of the day. Knowing that PlanetQuake is where it all started... knowing that we were right there from the start helping build it into the empire it would become... and then having some random assclown come along a decade later and tell you to piss off... knowing that he probably has very little idea of the history of it all and definitely doesn't care... sigh. 

of Quake 1 related PlanetQuake sites?

I know some people only care about certain sites, but I'm more interested in lost history than usefulness myself. 

Spirit has what looks to be a list of all PlanetQuake sites. It's a case of filtering through that to find out, really.

Question for everyone: Of all of the stuff that's under threat, how much do you think is on PlanetQuake? I mean in comparison to all of the other sites in the Planet Network that also have hosted sites here.

My best estimates put it at anywhere between 1% and 50%. In otherwords, I don't have a clue... 

I'm sure the other Planet sites have a lot of valuable content that is going to be lost.

I only know much about and care much about Quake 1, but this doesn't mean I don't feel it is very sad for the loss of historical sites for other games I am not familiar with. 

Chip (and others) is doing a good job saving the sites and archiving them. Check http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=1585 for more. I would encourage you to list mappers sites which you would want to see saved there as well! :) 

There's a sub directory I created on Quaketastic called "site_archives" if anyone grabs a site but doesn't have hosting sorted out yet. Use it as a temp storage area for the zipped site or whatever... 

I really do.

Guys like Chip and Willem and the Quakesoldiers dude coming to the rescue when stuff like this goes down is awesome.

I've already bought hosting and am in the process of reworking my site, so I'm fine, but it's nice to know that there are options out there for folks, and that all that stuff isn't going to just be lost.