Site Maintenance

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Sorry, looks like something in the site stopped working when the server's PHP subsystem was upgraded from version 4 to version 5. All the pages are safely stored, but the system is failing to display them properly. I'm working on fixing it.

Story:

There will be a short period of down-time on September 3rd when pinkstuff, the computer which hosts this site and various others, is driven from London down the M4 to Maidenhead.

There may, separately and later, be some more disruption when we switch to a cheaper hosting package, as this will probably involve a change of IP address on the server. Old DNS entries may remain cached for several days: when the server moves, www2.worldofsam.org will point to the new location in case you have temporary difficulty reaching the usual address.

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This site is not about piracy.

If a file is not approved for download, that’s because we don’t have permission from the appropriate copyright holders yet. If you want to help, the right way is to go and search out their contact details, and ask for permision.

Putting the files on your own webspace and adding a download link from this page? That is the wrong way to help.

Now what you put on your own site is your own business. But what goes on worldofsam is my business, and if pages appear to promote piracy then it puts the whole thing at risk. I have removed the links - please do not do that again.

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I’ve just noticed that the entries I put in the other day are not searchable or appear in ‘Related Items’ since the pinkstuff server rebuild.

Also it may (or may not) be a good time to ask about the possibility of the ‘Related Items’ search doing a ‘firstword AND secondword’ type search rather than a ‘firstword OR secondword’?

/me ducks

Story:

Apologies for the downtime.

The computer which hosts worldofsam.org suffered a hardware failure (the CD drive suddenly went bananas, and was spreading enough rubbish on the IDE bus to disrupt communication with the hard disk. As a result the boot filesystem was corrupted beyond feasible recovery, and we installed a new replacement Ubuntu, containing new versions of all the software - meaning that every service has had to be checked in turn to ensure the configuration is compatible with the update).

There was no damage to the database files nor the images archive. All parts of worldofsam should now be working normally, so please email me if you find something which isn’t.

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Due to an outbreak of comment spam, I have implemented a simple CAPTCHA process for unregistered users. Anonymous comments are still allowed, but before comments can be posted you must prove you’re not an automaton by typing the requested word into the box provided.

This change does not affect logged-in registered users.

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I’ll be performing some updates to the software which drives worldofsam on Saturday afternoon or evening. Don’t be surprised or worried if worldofsam is temporarily unavailable.

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Some thoughts I’ve had:

1. A field of ‘More Info Required’ that can be listed in a similar way to ‘Missing in Action’ to show which entries are a bit light on content or where the author is unsure of the info?

2. A related people list like related products?

3. Can the related products do a less-fuzzy match so that it treats the freelinked text as whole rather that as space delimited so that ‘Andy Monk’ doesn’t match any other ‘Andy’s?

4. Removing anonymous comments or adding anonymous editing with registered users able too roll-back to pervious versions.

/braindump

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Can we have a quick link to ‘Hardware’ as there is probably enough content to justify it?

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Is it possible to add the type e.g. game/utility to the listing on the ‘Products’ list?

Reason being is that for items that are created just as ‘Software’ (the default) it’s hard to check if they have been correctly allocted to a catagory.