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World Of Spectum (about magazines)

Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 7:37 am
by Symoon
Hi there,
I haven't perfectly understood what's going on but it seems the excellent website World Of Spectrum is in trouble, and that it's been lasting for a while now. Its FTP is unreachable, and that's a pity because it did hold loads of magazine scans.

What's the link with Oric?
Well I had begun downloading some magazines (a few Your Computer issues), looking for all the adverts or articles about Oric. I just took a quick look at them, deleting the non-Oric pages. Why? Well to me that was a fast method that, I hoped, could provide some day an index of Oric articles in all magazines...

I didn't have time yet to search for World Of Spectrum backups/mirrors (is hope there are some), but is there a website that holds scans of UK, German, Spanish, or any other country magazine scans ?
In France there's "Abandonware Magazines" (which could be used for the same purpose BTW).
Thanks!

Re: World Of Spectum (about magazines)

Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 9:12 am
by Chema
Hi Symoon.

I've also heard about the trouble with WOS. There is a huge controversy around this issue; while the new person (people in charge) state they are making a huge work for upgrading the site and installing new technologies and it is taking time to put everything back online and tweak all the links, other people say they are simply letting it die due to their lack of experience to run such a big site. Or something like that.

In any case I also heard there are several backups of all the contents that could be obtained through torrents, but I am unaware of where to get them. They must be HUGE.

About the magazines I only know the abandonware repository at https://archive.org/details/computermagazines, which I am sure you already know about.

One of the most well-known magazines back then in Spain was Micromanía, which occasionally talked about the Oric (https://archive.org/details/MicromaniaP ... ishIssue03), but not too much.

There was a Spanish version of Oric Magazine, but I think there was just one issue, and I did now own it back then :( Check the picture of the cover here http://burrosoft.eresmas.com/Espanol/Or ... Literatura. I don't know if Silicebit (who owns that site) has a copy.

There are also some scans of ads (some in Spanish) about the Oric in different mags here http://www.museo8bits.com/anuncios/index.php?op=Oric

Great idea, Symoon!

Re: World Of Spectum (about magazines)

Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 8:14 pm
by Dbug
Generally speaking, that shows one of the issues with these non professional sites - including Defence Force: How to ensure the posterity.

If I was to die tomorrow, I'm not quite sure how things would work: My ISP would stop receiving my monthly payment, then the domain names would not be renewed, hardware would die, etc... if somewhat I managed to get all that transferred to somebody else, we have no guarantee of how the stuff would be maintained, because sadly it's not just working all magically by itself.

Re: World Of Spectum (about magazines)

Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 8:40 pm
by Symoon
Thanks for the replies! And for the links Chema.
It's an idea but as usual, it takes time - especially since there are soooo many magazines to check.

Dbug: you're totally right... With old small websites only based on hyperlinks, a backup on disk was easy but nowadays? The idea being that, if the maintainer is not there anymore, at least an offline backup would be something...

EDIT: by the way, a mirror of the WoS FTP can be found there, but it's not made (nor designed) for download: https://wos.meulie.net/pub/sinclair/magazines/

Re: World Of Spectum (about magazines)

Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 11:43 pm
by jede
Dbug wrote: Wed Mar 08, 2017 8:14 pm Generally speaking, that shows one of the issues with these non professional sites - including Defence Force: How to ensure the posterity.

If I was to die tomorrow, I'm not quite sure how things would work: My ISP would stop receiving my monthly payment, then the domain names would not be renewed, hardware would die, etc... if somewhat I managed to get all that transferred to somebody else, we have no guarantee of how the stuff would be maintained, because sadly it's not just working all magically by itself.
Hello,

About oric.org, some people of the CEO have login/password of the Oric.org hosting. I did it in 2013, when Twilighte died. It was clear for me to share theses passwords, because nobody is invicible.

And that is why i put all my code on github now.

Re: World Of Spectum (about magazines)

Posted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 9:02 am
by Chema
What Dbug has brought to our attention is something quite interesting, really. Maybe you know there is the so called 'digital testament' or 'will'. This could be a formal or informal way of passing all your digital identities to someone in the case it is needed. This serves the purpose of having someone being able to access your accounts, your email, delete your profiles or manage (or at least backup!) your work or data in the cloud.

While this may work for social network accounts, blogs, and access to the sites you are maintaining, what Dbug says about non-profesional sites still holds. If DF were hosted in a public server, sharing access rights could be enough for, at least, make a backup. This won't ensure that the site will continue being updated (e.g. WOS), but at least it gives it a chance.

But DF runs in a private computer with its own software, configuration, etc. So not only you need to find someone to pay for the hosting and maintain things, but also someone who is willing to make the transition to another server.

Basically, Dbug, please, please make sure you at least have a way to handle the backups to somebody who could, in turn, share them to us. Just in case you decide, one day, to pack and start a new living in the Amazon jungle or the South Pole, far from an Internet connection :)

Or you, and your computers are abducted by aliens :lol:

Re: World Of Spectum (about magazines)

Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2017 10:06 am
by ibisum
Internet Permanent File System: http://ipfs.io/

If we could get the files in a clean format, we could share them on IPFS ..

Re: World Of Spectum (about magazines)

Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2017 7:47 pm
by Dbug
ibisum wrote: Fri Mar 10, 2017 10:06 am Internet Permanent File System: http://ipfs.io/
If we could get the files in a clean format, we could share them on IPFS ..
Interesting, but the problem is that this handles only the static part of the system.
I could give you an entire snapshot of defence-force, but that would not help with the phpbb database or the svn history.

There are ways to make backups and distribute them, it's mostly a question of practicality and trust:
- The entire system takes some gigabytes of storage, which makes long distance synchronization not that easy to handle
- There's things like the phpbb database that contains email addresses and passwords - definitely not something you can just share publically
- There's the subdomains and domain name management

I could probably make it so the entire system can be handled without sub-domains (ie: have "osdk.org" also work as "osdk.defence-force.org") so it could be "easily" added say to "oric.org", and maybe I could have a password protected folder for the phpbb backups to get some trusted third parties to get a regular snapshot of the database.

Practical suggestions are welcome :)

Re: World Of Spectum (about magazines)

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2017 10:43 pm
by jede
Long time ago (2000 to 2003), Oric.org was hosted on my own server at home.

There is some problem with that, because, it needs more work to run websites, and if something is wrong and i am on holidays, nobody can fix the problem.

That is why i hosted oric.org on OVH.com. It costs 60 euros for a year. It's the simplest solution, i think.

Re: World Of Spectum (about magazines)

Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2017 8:48 am
by Dbug
jede wrote: Mon Mar 13, 2017 10:43 pm Long time ago (2000 to 2003), Oric.org was hosted on my own server at home.

There is some problem with that, because, it needs more work to run websites, and if something is wrong and i am on holidays, nobody can fix the problem.

That is why i hosted oric.org on OVH.com. It costs 60 euros for a year. It's the simplest solution, i think.
Do you have full access to the server, or is it another of these automated-restricted hosting?

My experience is the opposite: From 1997 to about 2009 Defence-Force was hosted on some professional hosting, and it has been a never ending pain: I could not install what I wanted, the versions of php were not decided by me, I did not have a direct access to the file system, the case of files was automatically forced to lower case, etc... the performance was randomly sucking as well, and I could not have something like my SVN server because it was not in the list of supported services. Backups also were horrendous because you never really knew when they happened, and once I tried to restore some and that did not work well. Also there was huge restriction on the number of sub-domains and email redirects.

That's the original reasons why I did bring it home. But other benefits included the ability to directly map a network drive to the server to edit and fix my webpages or upload files directly on the local network.

What about if:
- I add a new folder on the SVN depot that contains the actual Defence-Force content
- I make a script to export and sanitize (ie: delete email addresses, passwords and private message) the phpbb database also to the SVN depot

That would add a number of gigabytes to the depot, so people would definitely have to exclude this folder, but on the other hand that makes it easy to share, and everybody who wants can get a copy of the stuff, and it's definitely easy to script SVN on a cron job or something similar.