With my recent experience in this thread, I have to ask the question I know has come up a few times before. Why doesn't someone come up with a user-submittable obsolete-only driver website?
Obviously we don't want to become the next "driverguide.com" (that would only draw more traffic and problems than any of us would want for a collection project), but just an archive site for drivers that either the main company doesn't distribute anymore or -- in the worse case -- where the company itself doesn't exist anymore and the drivers are hard to find.
In the thread I linked above, and as confirmed by Zoom Telephonics tech support, ftp.bocaresearch.com had fallen into disuse and lack of maintenance -- and it contains files that I have not been able to locate with various FTP mirror sites (likely because it's been non-anonymous for a few years -- which nobody noticed! -- and mirroring services missed it.)
Let's not worry about hosting so much for now. I anticipate that such a collection would be minority traffic since it would only be for collectors like us (to emphasize, **NOT** a new driverguide.com) so the traffic should be manageable for consumer-grade web hosting and so that's not a major issue.
So with a very specific purpose in mind -- knowing full well that it would never be "complete" because that's darn near impossible -- to host drivers which a company no longer makes available -- what are the issues with this idea?
With the idea of desiring search capability by company name, or model, or maybe even FCCID -- does anyone have a suggestion of an EXISTING web technology that could handle this? Preferrably one that could be managed by any of us, so that burden of maintenance is not necessarily limited to the free time of one individual. An example would be a Wiki; though not SPECIFICALLY targeted to this purpose, it "could work" and is an existing tech that allows editing and maintenance can be shared among many.
Some control rules would have to be in place, and I'd probably figure we wouldn't have a public uploader, but instead some kind of submission system, etc.
This is just talk right now, I'm not committing nor expecting commitment from anyone. It just seems like this is a need and would reduce the requirement of going around finding and pestering virtual strangers for driver files... and help to make sure that some of the ones that may disappear completely (like Boca's) are able to put in the hands of as many people as possible. So share your ideas, dreams, concerns.
Obviously we don't want to become the next "driverguide.com" (that would only draw more traffic and problems than any of us would want for a collection project), but just an archive site for drivers that either the main company doesn't distribute anymore or -- in the worse case -- where the company itself doesn't exist anymore and the drivers are hard to find.
In the thread I linked above, and as confirmed by Zoom Telephonics tech support, ftp.bocaresearch.com had fallen into disuse and lack of maintenance -- and it contains files that I have not been able to locate with various FTP mirror sites (likely because it's been non-anonymous for a few years -- which nobody noticed! -- and mirroring services missed it.)
Let's not worry about hosting so much for now. I anticipate that such a collection would be minority traffic since it would only be for collectors like us (to emphasize, **NOT** a new driverguide.com) so the traffic should be manageable for consumer-grade web hosting and so that's not a major issue.
So with a very specific purpose in mind -- knowing full well that it would never be "complete" because that's darn near impossible -- to host drivers which a company no longer makes available -- what are the issues with this idea?
With the idea of desiring search capability by company name, or model, or maybe even FCCID -- does anyone have a suggestion of an EXISTING web technology that could handle this? Preferrably one that could be managed by any of us, so that burden of maintenance is not necessarily limited to the free time of one individual. An example would be a Wiki; though not SPECIFICALLY targeted to this purpose, it "could work" and is an existing tech that allows editing and maintenance can be shared among many.
Some control rules would have to be in place, and I'd probably figure we wouldn't have a public uploader, but instead some kind of submission system, etc.
This is just talk right now, I'm not committing nor expecting commitment from anyone. It just seems like this is a need and would reduce the requirement of going around finding and pestering virtual strangers for driver files... and help to make sure that some of the ones that may disappear completely (like Boca's) are able to put in the hands of as many people as possible. So share your ideas, dreams, concerns.