Its overFhttps://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?t=27281
>>962071>Can't archive it with Archive or Wayback because the owner is preventing anyone from viewing threads unless they have an accountCocksucker is holding the forum and it's information hostage for some GoFundMe parachute.
>>962092>how to shoot yourself in the foothow does this clown think this will get him any pity?
>>962099He's not
>>962092Yeah seriously wtf is this. It's like "pay me $5k or all these random attachments get it". He knows he can archive everything easily but he's intentionally making it hard.
reshax is archiving it all and tVGR already has a backup of everything
>>962649Yeah but all the post from obscure games are gone now
That seriously sucks. 15 years worth of searchable knowledge on obscure/proprietary file formats now inaccessible.
>Discord killed another forumI can't wait for war.
>>962092>>962404Just pay 5k, download all informations, and the call the bank that it's a scam or something, and get your money back just to fuck with that faggot.
>>963920A sound plan on paper, but it would only work if the data was already uploaded and ready for download to begin with. And at the time of the fundraiser and website being shut down early, the information was only being considered for preservation, not actually being preserved.
>>962071I fucking knew that holding onto that one version of Noesis i got there that can do Splatterhouse models wasn't just me being a hoarding retard.
>>962071Is this some mentally ill internet marxist drivel or what?>we won't produce an excess because labor is more valuable than productivityThis is going to implode so fucking fast.
Good news for Zenhacks
...and bad news for Spriters' Resource.
>>964552>Zenhacksnevermind, they are gone, too.
Considering the current state of affairs, how many gaming research sites are still active these days? I know that facepunch, zenhax, and now xentax are gone. Is there anywhere else to go?
>>964773Loverslab
>>964800I see it once again falls to the porn industry to save the gaming community from its self-destructive behavior tendencies.
>>962071It's unironically over.
>>964895Adding to this, I'm glad I hoarded the shit out of everything I ever got off of there.I basically downloaded scripts constantly for games I'd never ever touch. Always knew it was gonna end to discord faggotry
Death to Discord and all Discord users
>>964926I feel this so much
I recently did a project that relied on xenhax a lot and I was able to save SOME interesting posts.Before the shutdown was announced the owner wanted to sell the forum. Initially claiming that he was lacking funds.Later on (and I sadly do not have a screenshot of this post) during an argument in another thread RIGHT before he locked the forums, the owner admits that funding was no longer an issue and that he wanted a new "webmaster" to manage and moderate the site.
Here are some replies I saved from that thread, mostly relating to discord, wish I saved more because it seems like most users knew that it was community poison.Discord is harmful not only because it fractures communities but also because it takes no effort to join a discord "server" thus taking your discord userbase and fracturing that into people who are constantly online and only look at that one "server" or people who just joined the "server" to chat or do discord culture (aids) here is an article that goes into detail about the cancer that is discord: shystudios.us/blog/discord/discord.html
And here is the final message left by the owner. IMO what really happened was a cabal of discord freaks "FELT" as if their work wasn't being appreciated enough? and that the forums let people, like myself, who otherwise would have NO IDEA how to work with some of these obscure game file formats find information and use it without "giving back" or something?Maybe I am wrong about the interpretation, let me know what you think.This final message also talks about FURTHER fracturing their own discord "server" so people who join it can't access certain info unless they have a "ROLE"sadly this is their own obituary, no one will ever find the xentax discord so it will exist only as a tiny group of upset guys who think their work shouldn't be publicly shared because someone might use it and not UPVOTE them or something? Eventually the members will slowly die irl or just leave/ stop interacting with that group. And no one will ever know. xentax will NOT be remembered now because these people got so full of themselves.btw even reshax (the new forum for normal people) already has a discord server, so who knows how long that is gonna last. The funny thing is I would have NEVER known about xentax if it didn't show up when I was searching for information about a file format on google. I was also planning on sharing my entire process on xentax before it was shutdown. Even with all the tools that I saved (some from zenhax which shutdown without warning shortly before xentax) I had to do a LOT of manual research and experimentation to get things working correctly. There were multiple posts from people asking questions that I NOW had the answers to but they deleted my bugmenot account I had been using and closed registration on the day I had finally finished compiling all my findings.
>>965045xentax should just be some anonymous imageboard that auto deletes threads after they hit a bump limit so somebody else can archive them.
>>965045Honestly based.Useless bandwidth eaters will mald and seethe.Total Freeloader Death.
>>965088so do you pay for youtube or disable ad block?
>>965109do you watch donutman and midwit video essays?
>>965111uh ohh the discord user got caught being retarded and now is making up a character in HIS head!
>>965112mald and seethe poopresh.
>>965113buzz and word cope guzzler
I hate the modern Internet era so much, Flash Kit did something similar (all their sounds and loops deleted) yet their forum remains but not for too long I bet.
>>965139People made fun of me for archiving everything I liked but I saw this all coming over 10 years ago as people slowly went down a path of complacency
>>965145There's a lack of YouTube archivers for one, we have web page archiving tools but videos seem too large to save, you can find a lot of deleted videos in playlists, Google could've terminated inactive YouTube accounts if people weren't against it (Gmail accounts are being deleted next month). Let's not also forget about sounds, we don't even have a proper search engine for sounds but text and images. It doesn't even feel enough to archive the things itself but the browsing sessions themselves since stuff that's being presented always changes. Wondering why there's no website where you could just reupload files of any format publicly and could be easily searched.
>>965147searched by anyone is what I mean, not like Dropbox or MEGA where you need to provide a link.
100gb dl. I want to play it so badly but don't have hd space!!!
>>962071conventional forums just aren't worth the hassle to maintain. it's an inevitability.even your favorite website 4chan doesn't bother archiving anything at all.
RIP. I used that site a lot over the years.
>>965224????
facepunch 2.0
>>965256What exactly on a forum needs to be maintained besides paying for hosting and the domain?>>965513at least facepunch kinda sorta got archived, and new facepunch does have some of the old threads but it is nothing like it use to be. SAD!
>>965045>We'll be disallowing insults or ego-based assertions of superior skill/ability between developersDisallowing NGMI-posting? What a concept. Unfortunately Discord is hunting grounds for people far more insidious than the annoying ones you may encounter on public forums.If you're on Discord, do yourself a favor and get out while you still can.
>>966617>What exactly on a forum needs to be maintained besides paying for hosting and the domain?moderation, legal issues, and some rare cases like zero day patching. not that complicated, but still far too much effort to put in if you do it for too many decades. there's a reason why it's so common for forum owners to abandon their websites after a while.
>>966621if you lock posting none of those are issues
>>966820You say that as though a rational mind is in a position of power. Unfortunately, the owner is quite narrow minded and only thinks of the immediate solution that works for him at the current moment. And because of that mindset, everybody else pays the price for his short sighted mistake.
schizo /g/ and /t/ bros win again - never trust anything on the internet and always make offline backups.
TL/DR: white people are absolute shit at producing, sharing and maintaining valuable information and are very good at obscuring and bottlenecking it. If you haven't been asleep for last 20 years, there's literally nothing new and you should've prepared for this.
>>969101Do you have to turn everything into racebait?
>>969102It turns heads so he is onto something.
QRD on Xentax?
>>969112Before it became a reclusive club on Discord it XeNTaX was a forum website that started up around 2003. Over time it became very disorganized, but was still the best place to find tools for games that were both popular and obscure. As time went on longtime users who knew how to program became jaded, and had little to no interest in teaching new users how to follow in their footsteps beyond telling them to use the (very broken) forum search engine to retrace their footsteps from a decade prior.But he did not answer if it was to continue the site or if it was only to determine when the website would shut down. The owner had to meet criteria that required very high standards that could not be obtained within the timespan he had set. They needed to have experience in running forums, a good reputation within the XeNTaX community, be a long time user, and have the funds to run the website that they buy from him. A few stepped forward to take charge, but none of them were accepted by Mr. Mouse.In early October of 2023, Mr. Mouse announced that the website would shut down at the end of 2023. This ended up galvanizing people into wanting to archive the website for future generations, which caused Mr. Mouse to get upset and bump the shut down date from the end of 2023 to December 1st of 2023. This back and forth race between people who archive the tools and website and Mr. Mouse moving the date up resulted in an arms race throughout the month of October as user registration for XeNTaX was disabled to prevent new users from joining, eventually coming to a head at the end of October with the final day being set to November 3rd. The website was then shut down on November 2nd, and Mr. Mouse has been working quite hard to try and scrub all archival efforts of XeNTaX from the internet.Which brings us to now, where the internet is now 20 years poorer in terms of information, and countless communities have been sent back ages in terms of understanding their games.
>>969129Thanks anonand wow, what a faggot
From what I can tell, most of the information regarding the shut down have been swept under the rug. Although, I remember seeing some talk about the tool that Mr. Mouse made called "MultiEx Commander", which apparently was pretty good at getting some game formats open.At the very least, it was good enough to have its own page on Wikipedia and even list his name as "Mike Zuurman". Which is strange considering that the Xentax Foundation that hosted the program doesn't have a page for itself.
>>969129Nobody bothered doing a serious archiving effort even before he mentioned shutting the site down? Sounds hard to believe.
>>969711Don't know how relevant this stuff still is, but I did find some links to a few archives here and there.https://archive.org/details/xentax.7zhttps://github.com/XeNTaXToolsThey may not be the most organized of things, but its better than nothing.
>>971133>archive is only 1gbif that is the case mouse is the biggest faggot on earth
>>971498absolutely. Discord is going to memory hole an entire generation.
>>9652564chan not archiving only inconveniences people who shouldn't be here.
>>965045The most ironic thing about their whole temper tantrum is that most of the people they claim would "take advantage" of them were arguably some of the best ways to bring obscure game formats into the limelight.Although, xentax will be probably remembered for a long time to come. Not for the wealth of information it once held, since that's long gone. But because it was a forum that had so many resources archived by what the major users of the forum would call "digital pirates". Most of whom never bothered documenting the original creators of the tools largely because there was no time to do so it seems. And the xentax discord server itself may one day be seen as a poor man's imitation of a digital archive.
>>966617>What exactly on a forum needs to be maintained besides paying for hosting and the domain?The hosting itself is dirt cheap. A legible domain name is max 20$/year if you don't use a meme TLD or one of the scammy "promo" domains. The VPS itself can be very cheap as long as it got decent I/O. €5/month should be plenty as long as the forum software itself isn't garbage.To keep it secure, just keep off as much bloat off the server as you can, have a crontab entry to keep the TLS cert up to date and it'll be good for pretty much forever without needing to touch it. Best to subscribe to the security mailing list of whatever distro you use just in case you really need to update.Biggest issue is spam. Especially pizza spam.Pizza spam is so persistent and obviously unprofitable it's almost certainly something trying to take down smaller websites.And god forbid if you leave up pizza spam just a little too long.t. selfhost website, mailserver and occasionally something else. My website used to have a comment system but it only ever got spam, thankfully no pizza spam but I know other admins struggle with it.
>>979709>€5/month should be plenty as long as the forum software itself isn't garbage.I'm generalizing too much here.If you host a lot of images, let alone videos, then storage costs will go up a lot obviously.
>>979710https://web.archive.org/web/20231018210758/https://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?t=26759&start=15According to this archived page from the forum, money wasn't the issue. It was time. Because, as Mr.Mouse put it "The biggest problem is the cost of time. Time costs a lot of money and energy. That cost is not reimbursed.". Granted, saying that and then shutting down the forums comes across as pretty hypocritical considering that action, alongside stopping archival efforts of the website, wasted the time of everyone who ever took part in the forums, regardless of their intentions.
