So, I started putting back the Archive online again and I noticed that a lot of the 2000+ entries there were leading the unwary visitor to the dreary 404 place.

Not good. A lot of Shadowrun knowldege has been lost in the years, with people moving out out colleges, hosting companies shutting down, etc...

So I went and clicked on every single link that was there and kept track of the ones that were still somehow active. It turns out that we still have 150+ live links that - addd to the articles that I was already hosting directly in the Archive - turn out to be a total of 397 valid entries.

150 links pointing to sites that may or may not be around tomorrow. We need to do something.

My idea would be to split these 150 links between a number of Dumpshockers and do the following things:

1. Verify that the link is not a duplicate (I can do this at the database level, so let's skip it for now)
2. Is the site still active?
2.a if not, make a copy of the content
2.b if it is still actively mantained, contact the owner and see if we can create a mirror
3. Notify me with the entry ID, and provide me the content for inclusion in the new Archive

If the owner wants to mantain control over the content, that's fantastic, but this should definitely cut down on dead links and improve the overall usefulness.

So, Dumpshock, what do you think? Are you game?

good plan

brave of you take it on.

how you plan for people to copy the content ??
how do you plan to mirror the content ??

i might take on some, to do my bit.

Alright, I've removed duplicates, so step 1 is done

I don't have a very specific plan for this, so I'm open to suggestions.

Eventually I would like to store all this either in a database or on a set of static pages, maybe a Wordpress site, so people can comment and enrich the contents.

hmmm

well, if you can contact the owners, i guess you could just get them d/l the files and rehost them yourself - each in it's own subdomain, maybe

if they know about that sorta stuff

if not, i'm not sure how you can get the files to get the content

plus, if they are dynamic sites any database related stuff will need to be done too...
...tho i guess they can all live on the same database, with different filenames

One option is to just View Source and copy the content to a local html, one file per page. And then include that html in the database (with the proper author, date, title and description, of course)

In other news, I removed all the dead links from the archive now. Let me know if you find something bad

erm, i've never heard of "The Internet Shadowrun Conservation Project (ISCP)", so care to provide a link ??

copying the source misses out on loads of stuff - php tagged stuff won't even show up there, from what i know about coding [which isn't much]

realistically, i think getting owners to send you the files might be best...
...but maybe one of the more learned, techie people on the forums can offer solutions/advice/help

erm, i've never heard of "The Internet Shadowrun Conservation Project (ISCP)", so care to provide a link ??

copying the source misses out on loads of stuff - php tagged stuff won't even show up there, from what i know about coding [which isn't much]

realistically, i think getting owners to send you the files might be best...
...but maybe one of the more learned, techie people on the forums can offer solutions/advice/help

You are part of it now!

It's doable, it's just a lot of work. But once we have in a consistent format, then we can use it in so so many ways...

I could help a bit. IME the best format is plaintext; it can be coded or pasted into anything.

Wow. The Archive back with the living? That would be great.

Of course, a lot of that content isn't going to be useful any more, what with the new edition and whatnot. I know a lot of my old contributions (bioware, geneware, etc) have been superseded by published material in recent years.

I found something bad, all the nostalgic article headings had followed their linked pages and disappeared . For posterity's sake (not to mention the inspirational value), how about leaving the article headings on the archive with a different colour or italics to indicate the dead link. Perhaps some old poster will see their article and resubmit it.

As for your project, I'll help once you've decided the process.


Not all have gone fourth...

That makes a lot of sense. Let me see what I can do...

Yeah, but there was a lot of 2nd ed material, and I think even a few 1st ed pieces kicking around

Yes, excellent! Needed to be done years ago. THank you thank you !!

We could archive non-canon material in a tiddlywiki and host it on Tiddlyspot.com

I'm a hyperobsessive/hyperorganisational person with a fair amount of time currently on my hands and wouldn't mind helping out with archiving stuff.

Yeah that and a lot of stuff was canonized later in SR3 (like the aforementioned geneware in SOTA63)

You could also check the Internet Archive if those old sites are still there. The internet doesn't forget that fast.

For mirroring existing but dead sites, there are programs like HTTP Weazel that mirror/download whole sites.

Very good guys, that's the idea

I can provide a list of all the active and dead links soon.

WHere is the archive now? Even with dead links id like to see it.

http://marcucci.homeserver.com/archive/

A very work in progress of the new archive can be found at:

http://marcucci.homeserver.com/newarchive/

Lots of things are missing and the layout is not final by any stretch of the imagination, but...

I'm not sure that structuring the archive into a blog format is the best way to go. All the data is old, so it doesn't really matter whether it was posted in 1997 or 1998. It also makes for a rather bland presentation. Wouldn't a more attractive subject-matter design be easier to navigate?

What do you propose?

Frankly, I'd go with something closer to the structure of the original archive. I'm really finding this whole Web 2.0/Blog ENtry format for everything to be pretty lame. Not to mention extremely cookie cutter.

I didn't ask *you*

I agree somehow, but when we have a custom theme (in development) and some decent information architecture in place, Wordpress can look as functional as the old Archive (that didn't have a lot of functionality that I'd like to have now, such as user comments on articles, both IRL and as shadowtalk).

Yeah, I've heard you can do a lot more with Word Press, just... Generally you see that same generic WP design, and it sucks balls.

Plus, it'd be nice if WP could scale for different resolutions better. Like I think I was telling you, I end up with a silly amount of "dead space" because I have a 22" Widescreen monitor.

Bull

Something with nicer graphic design is what I'd recommend. Here's my CthulhuTech placeholder site that I whipped up in an hour: http://www.portalseeker.com/misc/ctech

The Shadowrun Image Archive is simple but funky: http://sria.litbo.org/display.php?entry=07326

Thinkmap has a very nice, simple but aesthetically pleasing design: http://www.thinkmap.com/

I'm not familiar with WordPress so I wouldn't know how to skin it, unfortunately.

Oh I know. The vast majority of the time I spent last week on the archive was to recover old content and clean it up, converting it to xhtml, figuring out unique authors and categories, that sort of stuff. I paid very very little attention to presentation issues.

Itr's not a problem with WP per se, it's just a choice of them developers. I am thinking of what would it take to "unify" the look and feel of all dumpshock sites and clearly there are advantage with both fixed and flexible widths,n we just have to figure out a reasonable compromise.

It looks very cool, but I'm not sure how it would scale to 20+ categories and columns...

It's very easy to both skin and change basic functionality. As I said, I spent a lot of time cleaning up HTML and creationg a decent information architecture, I'll do the design later.

Well, it looks pretty decent now! Some of the NPC stats are a little too big for the width of the main column though.

Question to Paolo, did you find any rules in .txt format for the Doppelganger from 98?

I'd love to help out with this project. Let me know what I can do

Ah, crap. I just realized that my Shadowrun website that had tons of information about the SNES/Genesis/Sega-CD games that was on geocities is now gone from the face off the earth! Dang. I even had a bunch of info and custom stuff (including games I ran with notes and maps) with SR3...

I bet ye olde Shadowrun webring is mostly 404'd.

I've started doing this for Deadlands, which is facing near extinction online. It breaks my heart to think that all of this work, and all of this material for roleplaying games is simply lost because a site decides to go offline.

If I can help, I'd love to. I have a little bit of a background in museum work, which usually ends up at preservation and archiving at some point. Personally, my approach is, after things are collected, to set up several archives. That way, you don't have to worry about one going down and losing the whole deal.

Vegetaman: Try entering the old url, but changing "geocities" to "reocities". A great little achive project I stumbled across while looking for old Deadlands sites. Not everything is there, but you'd be surprised what is.

Now this is a blast from the past, I remember using and abusing the good old archive when iI was playing 3rd ed.

I'm in if you need the hand, I'm a web developer so should be able to give some advice on the technical side if you need it

Looking only at potential longevity online, I would think that something hosted at Wikia would be the best choice.

Winhttrack is a great application that will copy an entire website to a location for you. I have used it in the past for client sites that want to move.

I would keep all of the websites together in 1 place, and have different subfolders for each site. The software does a great job of managing it all for you.

Paolo, if you still have the links that lead to the dreaded 404 from he original post, you *may* be able to recover some of those lost pages via the Internet Way Back machine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php)

I've used it to track down some lost pages in the past. Hopefully, it'll be as useful for you!

EDIT: I was totally scooped by Xerxos. I really should have read all the posts beforehand.

As mentioned earlier in this thread, if you still have the old URLs, you can use the Internet Archive WayBackMachine to retrieve old pages.

http://www.archive.org/index.php

And people are still playing SR3 and SR2. Possibly even SR1. All of that old material is still useful today even if only as inspiration. I hope the ISCP is going well. I have a ton of stuff saved onto hard drives from back in 1996-2000. Paolo, if you're still having problems finding old material that was on the Archive, can you post a list here of missing articles/websites/items?

I'm just reacquainting myself with SR and ran across this project. I'm pretty tech savvy and would like to know if there's some way I can help. This thread doesn't really give a good feel for the current status of the project. I saw the new archive site and noticed there are dead links there. I also noticed that some are cached on the Way Back Machine/Web Archive. Can you give a quick update and outstanding tasks?

Thanks!

i might have some old data lying around in a hard drive that i need to get recovered anyway, that said, (and this stuff might be copied to it also) does anyone have the data on "Tallahassee 2050" that used to be out there, the site is now down and i need the data or at least a portion of it.

http://scorpienne.freeservers.com/tallahassee2050.html

Most excellent! Looks like the Shadowrun webring archived it for me, or else maybe it was reocities. At any rate, I managed to get what I thought was relevant and decent information and moved it to my google site where hopefully it will be more secure for the future. I find that most of the stuff I had on there was... Well, junk, mostly.

Still, this whole project is a great idea and I support it fully -- especially after all the 404 errors I got yesterday while reading into some Shadowrun stuff in my free time on the internet.

if we need "web space", please let me know. I have plenty (within reason) of space both disk space, and network bandwith. The webserver has php/perl/ruby and we can use whatever software we want (as long as it isnt Windows based).

If we want the space, let me know.

Is Paolo's archive still around somewhere? Just doing a quick look I couldn't find it.

Just curious of the current status of this project... It seems to have stalled out about six months ago...

Is this project gone the way of other dead links?

pretty much, it seems.

Until someone initiates a conservancy project for the conservancy project.