Content from entire DeveloperShed network gone

[jmurrayhead]

Maybe some of you developer types have come across content from the DeveloperShed network at some point in your lives, before Stack Exchange network became a big thing. For those who don't know, DeveloperShed was a network of technical helps sites such as ASP Free, DevShed, SEOChat, and many more. I first joined ASP Free back in 2004 as I was looking for a good help site for programming. I eventually became a moderator on that forum and as it began to die, ran my own programming forum for 8 years. DeveloperShed eventually did a merger with Ziff Davis and then was eventually sold to Internet Marketing Ninjas where it was left to rot (they didn't even update the SSL certificates on most of the sites). Every now and then I would check in at look at some old posts for nostalgia purposes. I met quite a few amazing people on those forums.

Anyway, I recently checked in to find that the site was no longer there and was redirecting to a sub forum at Webmaster World. I kept checking other DeveloperShed sites and found they were doing the same. Reading up on threads at Webmaster World I found that the new owner of the content had tried for months to convert the old VB databases (I'm thinking it was version 3.0.x of vBulletin) but was unable to get the data moved over, stating that most of the data was corrupted and because they had maintained and customized vBulletin so heavily that there was nothing else that could be done.

So there you have it, decades of user-generated content, knowledge, and friendships all lost. Very similar to what's going on with Yahoo Groups, it seems. What long-running sites have you all lost?

 

[Paul B]

Seems ironic considering it was a site related to developing.

If the sites and databases were viable then it should have been possible for an experienced developer to get them into a state for importing.

My site started life on a free host and after weeks of asking I finally managed to get a dump of the database and with the help of the phpbb developers managed to get it suitable for import.

 

[jmurrayhead]

Seems ironic considering it was a site related to developing.

From what I understand, they are running a custom forum script at WW that was built by the owner.

If the sites and databases were viable then it should have been possible for an experienced developer to get them into a state for importing.

My site started life on a free host and after weeks of asking I finally managed to get a dump of the database and with the help of the phpbb developers managed to get it suitable for import.

Here's what he had to say about it:

I worked on it a long time trying to get it to convert to a newer version of VBB - and even got VBB themselves to look at it. The main problem was the code being run had several hooks to old game systems that ran between Devshed and Seochat. There was a chunk of php running out of the mysql db (Yikes!) I am not sure where that code came from and Ninja's were none the wiser either.

and

That said, the user db and msg db (let allow the avatars..etc), just wouldn't migrate. The closest I cam was using an exporter for PHBB to export out of Vbb (but the db came out partially corrupted and I could figure out what was real or corrupted). I really wanted to user names and msgs, but it became pretty clear that a majority(!) of the user names were automated junk. I even started to hand filter out user names with direct msql statements to pull out the users. It was a mess of messes and I grew increasingly frustrated. I worked on this for easily two months last year before being consumed by angst and frustration over the situation.

 

[Paul B]

Sounds like a real mess.

It's always a shame when a chunk of the internet dies.

 

[jmurrayhead]

Sounds like a real mess.

It's always a shame when a chunk of the internet dies.

Indeed.

I was actually going down a rabbit hole of reading up on some wikis of old hosting sites like Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod. Honestly, if those didn't exist I might not ever have gotten into software development at all. It's crazy how the web has evolved -- and I'm not sure I even like how it's evolved.

 

[RandallC]

Indeed.

I was actually going down a rabbit hole of reading up on some wikis of old hosting sites like Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod. Honestly, if those didn't exist I might not ever have gotten into software development at all. It's crazy how the web has evolved -- and I'm not sure I even like how it's evolved.

Oh man, you just brought back some memories. Geocities, angelfire and the old hosters just brought back some old memories.

 

[Static-Xbox]

So there you have it, decades of user-generated content, knowledge, and friendships all lost. Very similar to what's going on with Yahoo Groups, it seems.

I hate when things like that happen, massive tomes of peoples' internet history just wiped out in an instant. Whether it's by corrupted databases, server crashes or owners losing interest in or the monetary capability to run their sites. It only ever hurts the end users, and it leaves a gap for that community of users to try and fill.

What long-running sites have you all lost?

I didn't own but did operate the community side of GameWinners.com (http://gamewinners.com) after having joined the site in 1998 and the community in 2001. It served as the online home for a decent sized community that kept in touch until the very end of the site. We were given a short warning before the site was shut down by the owner (lack of interest in continuing to run the site, and the revenue from ads was insufficient to keep the site going without his direct input), but we lost 17 years of community history in one fell swoop. I operate the holding page at that url, and I asked to make a backup of the community database to leave an archive (the site was pruned a few times over the years to keep the database small enough for the servers that powered it, so we lost a good 6 million posts, but 2 million were still there and searchable) for our community members to look through, but that was turned down. Now those of us that keep in touch do so solely through a subreddit (/r/Gamewinners) and a facebook group. There's a discord server, too, but most of us don't enjoy that sort of interaction, so it's fairly dead. It's not the same, and it's driven a lot of our remaining members into the woodworks again, sadly, but it has reminded us of just how important a good community is, and how much you miss it when it's gone.