For those who visited that site (I did occasionally but was not a member) you can still extract the dead link from Google if you know enough keywords from a specific thread. Once you copy that specific link, you can check if a digital preservation tool captured it before the attack.
God forbid it should happen here. It was bad enough when people complained about “losing” their posts when switching to Armorama 2.0. A whole lot of hand wringing over nothing. You can still find what you want from the old site if you know what you’re looking for.
Of course, with MSW it’s a different story, but as much as it sucks, it’ll give folks a chance to refresh old ideas and start over again.Think about it, how often does someone ask the same question (Dunkelgelb, OD, how to assemble tracks…) over and and over again. Some folks get irritated. I do not. Not everyone was been around for two and a half decades. And revisiting old ideas sometimes creates new dialog and new solutions and techniques.
Is there a way to get all the old photos from Armorama reviews? If so, I can’t find it…
From what I remember, some were not lost, just wrongly linked but still preserved. If you have one of those reviews I can take a look
This is one I recently looked at: Armorama :: Bronco Models 1:35 Bishop SPG Review
Images open a page selling garage doors…
That is because this was hosted on one of the other two Scala Hosting servers that are no longer in use and someone is using that IP now clearly for nefarious purposes. I thought I had killed the DNS info for photos.kitmaker.net but clearly it’s still working somewhere. I will look at it again.
The sad situation was that this company was asking close to $800 annually for basic HTML hosting and that is just not a thing I am willing to do at that price. I think when I started with them it was closer to $350. Eventually the Armorama server will come due and I am not renewing it either. Of course I have all the files on disks at home and at some point I may get the chance to build a new site with ALL of our old content. But I will admit with my current workload that is probably a bit of a pipe-dream.
Cheers,
Jim
How about offering the entire Armorama archive on a thumb drive for purchase?
Say, if 20 people back the project at $100 a copy, it is a go, otherwise it is a no go. Use whatever price point works for you.
That way, people who are really serious about having the archive get it, you are paid for your time, the vampire drain of the hosting service is gone for good, and if someone else wants to buy the archive, it is easy enough to drop another copy on a thumb drive and mail it off.
I would be open to something like that. The files would need to be massaged a bit to support file level viewing as many of the images I know are keyed to the archival photo site URL. Beyond that it should be pretty easy to create a file level browser version of some of the sites.
Sounds like me and my stash …
20 backers at $100 still only raises $2,000. Twenty 256 GB drives cost a bit of money. Let’s throw out $400 as a figure. The remaining $1,600 doesn’t provide an adequate financial incentive for an administrator or developer to dedicate dozens of hours to building, testing, and debugging a customized offline interface. Not me for me, at any rate.
Pulling a snapshot of the last six years onto a thumb drive does not make the web hosting bill vanish. If the live site is taken offline to stop the “vampire drain,” the active community immediately dies. Without a live site to generate new content, traffic, and ad/sponsorship revenue, the platform stops evolving.
You also have the issue of user-generated content. Because this material is bundled and sold as a physical product, there could be potential legal risks by directly profitizing imagery and text owned by individual contributors.
I thought we were talking about the archived Armorama site, the one taken down circa 2020 and only available for viewing, not the current forums.
If the numbers do not work out, they do not work out.
If the original site did not have a clause protecting site use of all uploaded images, I suppose that is that.
If someone insists on getting lawyers involved, I suppose that is that.
If we are then that changes things quite a bit. That’s a lot more data. A reliable, name-brand 1 TB USB 3.2 flash drive (like a SanDisk or Kingston) costs roughly $60 to $90. For 20 backers at $100 ($2,000 total), purchasing 20 of these bad boys would cost roughly $1,500. This leaves about $500 total for your labor budget.
I don’t plan on bringning lawyers into it, but I do know one particular poster who was aroun d back then who had a hissy fit when I reposted a photo that he posted on this very site. Of course he used to repost not model photos, as I did, but photos from my walkarounds that I literally travelled the globe to get.
You gotta figure in guys like that.
There are other issues, but a lot of the heavy lifting was done the last time.
I believe that the old Armorama site was built on legacy forum code (often standard PHP/MySQL setups like vBulletin). The good news is that it’s already been converted to a static HTML layout so it could live on.
If you download those files and put them on a thumb drive, the drive letter on a user’s computer might be E: or D:. Then what?
Legacy sites rely on a live server database to handel user searches (in my case maybe typing “T-72 DDR 1989” into a search bar). On a static thumb drive, the search bar completely breaks that doesn’t work.
I’m not trying to throw a kink into the works, but sometime s the good idea fairie just doesn’t have enough dust to get the job done,
- Browsing a 20-year archive without a search bar means backers can only access content by manually clicking through sub-forums page by page.