I hadn't looked at vidiotmaps for a while. Was it shut down?
Beefcake, the owner/admin(?) of the sites badge-whore, badge-hunter, and vidiotmaps, had issues with the domain host, and then the shutdown came upon us, so he just kinda had to go do other things, last I heard. Currently the domains are all expired and/or squatted, in the case of badge-hunter, by something that looks sketchy.
Dang shame, really. But yeah, they're no more.
The static vidiotmaps are all stored on ParagonWiki, though the interactive ones are lost ;-;
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Category:VidiotMaps
Quote from: Aggelakis on July 04, 2013, 03:24:23 AM
the interactive ones are lost
Unless, by some miracle, Blondeshell happens to have them.
I've got the coordinates for all the entities, but, alas, the actual programming was handled by people other than myself.
Quote from: houtex on July 04, 2013, 03:17:26 AM
Dang shame, really. But yeah, they're no more.
That is a dang shame. Vidiotmaps was kind of the inspiration for me to try my hand at running a site. When Mapmaster decided to leave and wanted to sell the sites, I tried desperately to get them. Not to take over their administration, I would have left the people who were running them at the time in charge of them. I just mainly wanted to make sure that the domain names didn't get sold off or otherwise transferred to anyone outside the community, that if Beefcake, Sapph or, who was the other guy? Ewokspy or something like that? Anyway, if they left, that the sites would still be maintained.
At the time, a pretty heavy-duty campaign was mounted against me. I was basically accused of being an outsider, and donations from their members were actually solicited specifically for the purpose of keeping me from getting the domain names, even though I basically posted my site hosting résumé and, like I said, told them I didn't want to make any changes to the people running the sites. I'd maintain the domain names, maintain the server, and stay as hands-off as they wanted otherwise. In the end, I went to bed one night during an auction and when I woke up the next morning, Mapmaster had announced that the auction was over without warning or giving me a chance to bid higher on the names, and that as they say was that. I thought it was a pretty decent proposal: I'd pay for the domain names and the hosting and act as a technical resource as needed, they'd get to run the sites. Eventually, my hope was to integrate some functionality between the Paragon Wiki, Badge-Hunter, and Vidiotmaps to create a Titan-like "supersite". (Which, eventually, I did with Maverick X, SuckerPunch, and Voltaic Shock.) Personal opinion o' Tony is that I think that CIT kind of clobbered Badge-Hunter competitively, especially when Sentinel was released, but I still wish our communities had been integrated and we never did really have a functional equivalent of Vidiotmaps, which spurred me on to begin with.
Truth is, after all of that went down, I was really angry at them. Eventually, the sting wore off, but I'd be lying if I said that I'm not still kind of sore about it. The site was compromised at least once that I remember, and I think they even forgot to register the domain name at one point, causing the site to go dark. Those are moderate SNAFUs (our sites got compromised once back in October 2011), but now this, this is exactly the worst-case scenario I was hoping would never happen,
the reason I tried so hard to get the domain names. I wish that Beefcake had let us know that he was planning on just letting the sites go dark. :(
Dang shame indeed.
Very interesting, Tony.
Definitely a shame.
If it makes you feel any better, I never used vidiotmaps!
Hehe, nah, pretty much everyone else I knew did use it. I never bothered though.
Still, maybe someone, somewhere, will get hold of the programs that are missing.
Those files are probably sitting somewhere on someone's hard drive. If so, and they happen to read this, I hope they do the right thing and get in touch with Tony. Don't let years of hard work go to waste, and don't punish the entire community over some misunderstanding about Tony's motives or reliability that happened ages ago. There's no way that a game like City of Heroes is gone forever. Eventually those maps will be very desirable again.
You can get the overlay pack (i23) from their source forge page still: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vidiotmaps/ but sigh, it would be nicer to have the web pages up still.
This is not something the Wayback Machine could provide? (Genuine question, as I am ignorant of the technological implications).
Quote from: Sailboat on July 11, 2013, 05:14:47 PMThis is not something the Wayback Machine could provide? (Genuine question, as I am ignorant of the technological implications).
I'm pretty sure that the Wayback Machine won't collect active pages, because it's a robot -- it trawls the Net collecting web pages. But what it collects are the web pages that you'd see in your browser, not the CGI code on the server that
created them. So you'd get a snapshot of the interactive maps, but there wouldn't be anything that
made them interactive.
I've actually done quite a bit of searching through the Web archive to see what I could recover, without any significant luck. It seems that the bots never got much past the first pages of the site or the forums. Thus, the only things you get when you dig deeper are the live links that say the domain is up for sale.
Which is a shame, really, because there was a lot of good discussion about badges and maps in the older posts on the forums. I also had notes there about how to recreate the map pack installable file in case Beef Cake wasn't around for the next updates.