pouët.net

However, now suddenly people are popping up here and scenecity who DO care.

And that was unexpected and is kinda messing with the "people no longer care, so I can just turn stuff off and finally leave the scene for good" plan.

It's not my intention to penalize anyone. It really is "if it's no longer needed, I can shut it down for good without feeling guilty". My wife fashion tells me that I don't need to feel guilty at all, because I don't owe anyway anything in the scene.

As explained above: If someone or a team manages to do what is needed to make untergrund.net ready to keep running for a couple more decades, there is no need for to shut down anything. As explained, even with me resettling, I will keep running the datacenter in Germany pretty much forever anyway, because it contains stuff my main income depends on.

scamp, indeed you do not owe anyone anything. But please consider that in particular the Untergrund FTP contains an incredible treasure trove, 25+ years of demoscene history that would go poof from one moment to another. The loyal user have been there the whole time, uploading their stuff to the FTP (e.g. my untergrund account is the official backup for all OpenMPT releases and my own music releases in case any of my servers disappear, havoc backs up many demos to his account, Lotek has his Fujilogi archive hosted there, etc.). Many Pouet and Demozoo downloads point to Untergrund. Many people who have an account are probably no longer around, they are not going to read their emails and it's especially the data from those people that will be lost. The demoscene has lost many FTPs in the 2000s and some releases are lost forever because of this.
Please consider this in your plans. You don't owe anyone to continue running the servers, but if you absolutely must stop running them, consider if the data can be handed to a trusted person that can continue running the FTP service.

Making the FTP available as read-only on a new server as FTP+HTTPS is absolutely no problem.

But that only will work for people who used links going to ftp.untergrund.net and download.untergrund.net as it was always written and pushed for in our documentation.

There are people who instead have linked downloads via their own domain. These links are mostly likely impossible to keep intact without a lot of work which I won't do.

Currently the FTP is not independent - it's a dedicated server, but mounted into the main server, and everything requires the system user permissions per account. Main server down = no permissions can be looked up = no downloads possible.

(actually the server holding the user database and permissions is on yet ANOTHER server for security reasons, but that doesn't matter in this context)

@scamp

in first i can understand you 100%. As you know or might know, i´m like you, a SysOp / Server Admin / Slave of my machines... So i know exactly what you mean and what you bear on your shoulders.

1. Scene moved to Discord. It´s easy, it it doesn't need any commands to learn and its available everywhere. So it was decided from some people to went over to discord not pay attention that this can end like YouTube / Facebook with Adverts, Censorship and that all Data belongs to the Companies behind it. It was a low level move, not worth of that, what the scene claims to be, FREE! But, it was decided and now we have to live with it. I use it too since most of the scene uses this but i´m ZERO a fan of this !

Fun Fact : IRC is also available everywhere as Web App / Linux / Android / IOS etc. with the matching messenger software...

2. People can be thankful that you did all this over such a long period. Donated time, money and love within the .underground.net (as an SysOp i never used this opportunity but i adore this). So what can be done to preserve things ?

3. For Wordpress, there are Plugins that can transform a dynamic ordpress installation to static html, means it could dump a whole Webpage. Problem would be, if this side is to outdated, those Plugins might not be able to be installed to it.

4. If you wan´t to preserve a page in general, the "wget" command under linux shell might do this job.



5. I used scenecity and liked the concept and the effort you guys put in. I know that this was/is a lot.

Sometimes, things coming to an end and you can not prevent it. if people are not willing to put their little part to the story by helping to preserve the past, if they are not able or are not willing to do so, then let it go for good.

It´s with some people. Some stay, some go.

You might do that "wget" thing, you might also do that Wordpress Plugin thing. (For orphan Scene Pages, you might even go into the SQL Database and change the Admin Password before you can login there) But everything that goes after that, which will take also some time, should stay undone if no one else feels responsible for that. Keep in mind, if someone goes and did not spend that minimum of love to preserve all the work done before, you should not invest to much time. Hard, but thats how it is.

Sadly i need to withdraw from further offer to help with this. It´s just to much time with to less support with to less respect for that work. Or was there ever a Scene Award for those of us who drive since 25 years and longer servers, pages etc ? no !

Thanks for that what you have done for the scene Scamp.

So, to summarize:

1.) If a team takes over to move untergrund.net sites to a current OS, I will keep hosting it

2.) If that doesn't happen, on Dec 15th untergrund.net will close, but all files on the FTP STORAGE server (not webspace!) aka ftp.untergrund.net/download.untergrund.net will be made available on a new server READ ONLY, but under the same domain name, so all links to it will stay intact.

3.) Some sites that are important to someone will be manually rescued anyway. Personally I have multiple own sites on untergrund.net, and of course the breakpoint one, that I want to keep for myself for nostalgic reasons, even if it means fixing crappy PHP files by hand. Those sites will simply get a manual static DNS configuration as soon as I can turn off the automation currently managing *.untergrund.net.

Thanks Scamp in particular for hosting ADA for all these years! Not only a well curated collection of Amiga scene productions, but also a place where one can post and read about narrow Amiga demo topics and get replies from some of the best. It will be strange not to have that page anymore, but times change. Nothing lasts forever.

ADA is very problematic. It extensively uses PHP and Mysql and has lots of dependencies, at least from what I can see from the outside.

And I was told the admin of it no longer exists, so I don't see how it could be rescued other than trying to create a purely static HTML mirror out of it.

I also wasn't aware it's still actively used. If users there or the admin (don't know who that is/was) are doing the work of porting/adapting the code to a modern platform, it could keep existing.

Just recently I posted about GCC12 on Amiga and I got answers from Jamie/Skarla and Noname/HJB. Very much appreciated.

I haven't heard from Z5, who I believe founded the site, in a while. Not sure if he was doing it all by himself though.

Looking at the forum history the last post from him was in 2014 (whaaaat? I was thinking it was a year or two ago). At some point the new user registration was stopped since after all most new users were more likely to be spam bots than real people. In his own words "'Since 99% of the registrations on this forum were fake, i took some measurements to cure that problem"

Sorry, I was looking at an alternate nickname of z5_ other posts made under z5 were posted in 2022

@scamp,

Whatever your decision, thanks for all for years, I'm still using my untergrund account, that's my home for my (too rare) demoscene work so I will miss it but nothing is eternal!

Thanks again!

i've moved all files on my account that pouet had links to over to scene.org over the summer. demozoo admins will (attempt to) do the same for linkage to my account from their site. when all that is done i'll delete those (no longer necessary) files on untergrund so you'll need 150-200GB less space on that future read-only server.

thanks for the hosting for those years, i hope your new path in life will bring you peace.

Thank you.

It could have reminded you about what I have done for the scene including YOURSELF for the last 30 years, instead of believing some bullshit people claim I have said about you which I didn't, and then constantly try to bash me wherever you could, completely forgetting me haven given, given, and given to everyone for all the time constantly.

The problem is not me finding peace, I have that. The problem is that those who don't have that piece right now due to not being able to bring their own depression and aggression under control make those who helped the scene leave. It's the unhappy people who don't have peace who are left behind and no longer have anyone to pull them up.

Sorry for taking this off-topic subject here. As said: The invitation of speaking privately now, in a year or in 10 years stands.

@all:

There are now people trying to see if they could find someone for the archiving/transplanting untergrund.net.

Let's see if that works out.

In my experience, this goes poorly. People who might be able to technically run the site, people who care enough and people who are charismatic enough to convince the old owner of a site to trust them with the site data are rarely overlapping groups. The site is often given to the most charismatic or well-connected person, who does something bad with it (e.g. stuffing it full of ads).

A public data dump is usually more successful way to deal with a site whose owner doesn't want to keep hosting it. This leads to multiple public mirrors, which is fine, and even if people can run bad mirrors, good mirrors drive them out. But you can't do that for untergrund because the databases may contain private information and isn't read-only anyway.

I think we had FAR more than enough of the "let's demotivate those who run the show for the scene" action here in the last couple of days.

It may work out, it may not, we'll see.

untergrund.net never collected any personal data (real names and such), so the privacy risk is rather low.

Regarding ADA, i'm still around but i was just doing content. Development has been done by various persons during the existence of the site. Both content and development have come to a standstill during the last few years. Iirc, at some point it wasn't possible anymore to access the database with phpadmin and that was not resolved but that wasn't the main issue.

Tbh, i'm thinking that now would be a good time to close the site. I've come to realise that it doesn't make much sense anymore to have a demoscene website when Pouët exists. User input diminished to almost nothing (20 comments in nearly 3 years) and that was the most interesting part of the site for me (as an admin). I have no clue if the site still has any visitors at all (other than Loaderror :)). I sometimes wonder: was it because less new content was added that user input diminished or was less new content added because user input diminished? I tend to believe there's no need/desire for multiple scene websites anymore.

I'm totally fine with it though. Websites come and go and overall it was a very positive experience, especially during the most active years.

Anyhow, this is not the place to discuss ADA :) Many thanks for the hosting, Scamp. These things are often taken for granted while it shouldn't.

untergrund.net may not have, but if people can upload their own scripts, the probability is quite high that someone's database holds their email address and password in plain text and it also happens to be the same as their email password.

z5: I am totally fine for this being the place to discuss ADA.

Focus right now is if anyone wants to take over stuff, or if anyone still needs stuff. What can go, what can't.

But yeah, maybe just use ADA to find out if ADA still wants to exist or be archived :)

See hints above about what's needed to make something ready to be moved to being a permanent static-site archive.

@Scamp u are always welcome in my book! (for what it's worth..) arnt we to old to act on scene drama anyway?

The old server could be dumped into an image and run in a virtual machine on the new server. Let it run in a sandbox.

Obviously we looked at that option.

The kernel is so old it does not run (or even boot) on a current hypervisor without re-compiling it, and that's impossible.

System was based on "the old" pre-RedHat CentOS running on a proprietary HP RAID controller. You know what happened to Centos...

We are talking from a 25 years old system here. You could as well try to run C64 code on KVM :)

There is no other way than either porting websites or making them static. At a certain age going to a doctor is no longer an option, you only can go to a cemetery :)