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What happened to WinWorld?

E

eeguru

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Does anyone know why winworldpc.com went away? Legal challenge? Admin hardship? forgot to pay the bill? Or 'sucks to be you, dude. It's working for me'?
 
Well I am glad they are taking the issue seriously and have banned the staff member in question I am somewhat confused why that translates into the site being down for everyone. Does that mean the staff member in question is the only one who has access and/or control over the domain (the .com) and the servers with all the data? I suppose that could be the case.
 
Yeah, it doesn't seem to pass my smell test. I'm not sure why a (serveral) sexual harassment complaints results in a web server or entire domain being taken off-line. I wonder if that staff member controlled some aspect of the infrastructure (server, domain registration, etc) and they are fearful of retribution. /shrug.

Glad to know it's coming back. One of the better Abandonware sites.

FYI, archive.org was routinely mirroring it. And it appears their content mirrors are still active. I was able to pull some old DOS copies off this weekend using that route.
 
eeguru said:
I wonder if that staff member controlled some aspect of the infrastructure (server, domain registration, etc) and they are fearful of retribution. /shrug.
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Or has retaliated and that's why the domain is down. Let's face it, someone who is prepared to sexually harass people and intimidate others is probably going to be pretty petty when called out on it and would not hesitate to do the maximum damage on their way out the door. Gotta love human drama.
 
If a mod would care to step in, I would prefer if the "whys" are not discussed here.

The important thing is we are now down a main server, DB codebase, and server admin. It had nothing to do with the site itself or content. Probabilities suggest nothing will come back in the immediate future.

I was hoping not to bring this up until more of the dust settled.

I am disappointed because I put much work in to organizing the library, writing descriptions, and making screen shots. And this surly hurts the many others that contributed files. I've seen many people on this forum have found Winworld useful for obtaining software, that is not normally discussed on the VCF forum, to revive old/vintage systems.

If anyone has any HELPFUL ideas or discussion for recovering, I would love to hear them.
 
OMG. Please don't discuss details. That wasn't why I started this post. I was just asking what happened and if it was something I should be concerned with.

SomeGuy, I assume by your response you are affiliated with the site. As I mentioned before, archive.org has been mirroring the generated end result of the content. Perhaps database reconstruction could be aided from their archived HTML in an automated way? (eg. parsing content from specific div names, etc?)

But to those responsible for the site, thank you. It is a useful resource for saving eLives in eTraumaCenters around the world (of basements). I hope it returns soon.
 
SomeGuy said:
If anyone has any HELPFUL ideas or discussion for recovering, I would love to hear them.
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Let's concentrate on this aspect of the discussion. Off the top of my head, here are some options:

  1. Copy the DB/codebase and stand it back up. Pros: Everything, including presentation and organization, back to normal. Cons: Difficult to maintain, cost involved, would require "recruitment" of someone versed in PHP.
  2. Start standardzing on dumping everything to archive.org. Pros: Unmetered storage space. Cons: Lack of organization.
  3. Start up a new site/community using a commonly-available CMS that supports forums and taxonomy features (ie. Drupal). Pros: Easier for mortals to maintain. Cons: A lot of design and stand-up work; still needs maintenance from time to time.
  4. Set up an FTP site with much storage. Pros: Very fast to stand up and maintain; easy to set up and maintain distributed mirrors. Cons: Lack of nice presentation.
I have opinions on which is best, but I would prefer to hear from Duff, the winworld founder. (I don't have an account on the winworld forums and I don't even know if they are up.)
 
Trixter said:
Let's concentrate on this aspect of the discussion. Off the top of my head, here are some options:

  1. Copy the DB/codebase and stand it back up. Pros: Everything, including presentation and organization, back to normal. Cons: Difficult to maintain, cost involved, would require "recruitment" of someone versed in PHP.
  2. Start standardzing on dumping everything to archive.org. Pros: Unmetered storage space. Cons: Lack of organization.
  3. Start up a new site/community using a commonly-available CMS that supports forums and taxonomy features (ie. Drupal). Pros: Easier for mortals to maintain. Cons: A lot of design and stand-up work; still needs maintenance from time to time.
  4. Set up an FTP site with much storage. Pros: Very fast to stand up and maintain; easy to set up and maintain distributed mirrors. Cons: Lack of nice presentation.
I have opinions on which is best, but I would prefer to hear from Duff, the winworld founder. (I don't have an account on the winworld forums and I don't even know if they are up.)
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I can potentially do 3 or 4, as I have a recent-ish mirror of the Operating Systems section, and more on tape. However, my upload speed is only 72Mb/s and I'll probably need another TB or so in HDDs to host the rest.
 
SomeGuy said:
If a mod would care to step in, I would prefer if the "whys" are not discussed here.
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Fair enough, I was merely voicing my curiosity, was not intended to start a witch hunt or anything.

SomeGuy said:
The important thing is we are now down a main server, DB codebase, and server admin.
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I am more than willing to step in and help, I have the skills for some part of this I am sure, specifically the server admin bit. PM me if you are interested and we can discuss this in more detail.
 
Here I was always thinking that it would be the slightly reckless uploading of images of relatively modern operating systems (cue the legal teams), in some cases straight duplicates from other archive sites.
I'm not going to miss it. There were very few instances where I needed something exclusively from them that I could not find elsewhere and in one case the image wasn't even useable. (I mentioned it either here in a thread or on the #VC IRC channel)
No comment on the rest.
 
MikeS said:
No possibility of a reconciliation or accommodation of some kind?
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If it's true that he was actually sexually harassing people (including minors as was alleged) and damaged the reputation of winworld greatly, what would there be to reconcile?

I'm kinda shocked, I thought he was just a laid back guy to have fun talking too, not a creep.
 
eeguru said:
SomeGuy, I assume by your response you are affiliated with the site. As I mentioned before, archive.org has been mirroring the generated end result of the content. Perhaps database reconstruction could be aided from their archived HTML in an automated way? (eg. parsing content from specific div names, etc?)
Click to expand...
Yes, I am/was the library director, the one who processed contributions and added files. Although I am a bit of a database guy, I am unfortunately not much of a server guy or web guy.

Supposedly Duff (the original founder of Winword) has a full backup of everything, and I have table dumps of the product/release descriptions. The problem is finding a new database to put it all IN.
 
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