yoyonation.net is down, not sure how long it’s been. It was such a good resource for old stuff and being able to look through all my old messages.
If whoever set the archive up last time still has a database for it, I wonder if there’s any way to store it with the Internet Archive? Though I could see that being problematic since if the database backup was available, whoever had access would be able to read everyone’s messages with personal information like addresses from BST deals. But I bet workarounds could be thought of, like dropping the messages table from the publicly available backup.
It also has me wondering about the fate of this forum. Nothing lasts forever so I’m hoping there’s some sort of contingency in place to archive this forum if the day comes that it needs to shut down. If anything, this is more important than ever since a lot of the major threads that were available on old yo-yoing sites have been re-posted here and if this place were lost, would be gone for good.
One ad-hoc method I’ve used while filling out the YWET yoyo wiki page is to archive specific posts here using the Wayback Machine so the specifically cited information will at least still be around in case YoYoExpert ever ceases to exist. But that also has me thinking about how we could archive the YoYoWiki in case Fandom ever decides to shut down. Definitely a rabbits hole…
Anyways, I’m starting to ramble but I think this is a good discussion to have while this site is still healthy and active, even if not as active before social media took over.
I’ve got a program on my computer that can download an entire website including all it’s pages, not sure how efficient it’ll be on a forum as I’ve only used it to save the Heaven’s Gate site to my hard drive. Once I get back to my computer I can get the name of it.
You can use wget to do something like that. An ideal backup though would be the database itself instead of full HTML grabs of a page, would be smaller file size to store and since Discourse is open source it’d be able to be restored into a (read-only) archive site. Regardless, while personal archives are a great first step, they’re also a single point of failure which is why I think involving something like the Internet Archive is key.
Thanks! His store is still up which is a good sign so maybe the hosting bill of YYN just lapsed and the data is still out there. I’ll try shooting him an email to see what he says
Ahhhh that makes sense, I did notice a good (but surprisingly not overwhelming) amount of spam when viewing it. I’m not super familiar with the SMF software it used but I wonder if there’s a way to put it into read-only mode when it comes back up to prevent this?
That’s what happened to the old Extreme Spin website. When the store shut down the board admin left it online for some time but basically left it alone. By the time it shut down it was so full of spam - probably the newest 200-300 posts in any category were spam. I don’t know if he made a conscious effort to shut it down or just let the domain registration expire.
Hate to raise this from the dead (actually I don’t) but does anyone close enough to JD know if he still plans in rising yoyonation forums back from the dead for at least the vast amount of yoyoing info it has?
If cost is a factor, there are likely enough of us that could help via a GoFundMe.
I don’t think anyone has heard anything. I don’t think it’s monetary but a time thing since it was taken down for hacking attempts and not anything money related.
I would be more than happy to take over hosting and maintaining a read-only copy for what it’s worth. But I’m not sure how to broach that conversation or if he paid for anything YYN related outside of the domain (yoyonation.net).
I or we should reach out soon, unless he has a backup locally I’m a little worried that his webhost might have deleted what was there by now and it could be lost forever
He is a friend of mine on Facebook and we were chatting a while back on a different matter. Problem is, he doesn’t get on there hardly ever so my message on this subject hasn’t been read yet. Not really sure how to contact him otherwise, but if you can find a way and want to take off with it, that would be awesome.
If you find a way to make it a reality and get it running, I’ll send you an End 2 Finale. Pretty sure their are other folks wanting that nostalgia back that would be willing to show you their gratitude in one way or the other.
I just wish the photos were up on the old YYN when it came back. I understand they were mostly self hosted by members, but that is what really made some of those threads. Like the Freehand thread on YYN was epic!
