TSGK is down!

[Q-Nova]

In case nobody has noticed already, The Shy Guy Kingdom (one of MFGG's affiliates) appears to be down:

http://tsgk.captainn.net

Does anyone know who's hosting this site? What about a backup? I remember seeing some talk about preserving TSGK here on MFGG. As far as I know, someone in TSGK team died, but I don't know if that person was the only host. If that's the case, is there another host? It'd be nice if it can be brought back and isn't gone for good!

[VinnyVideo]

Hmm. TSGK is giving a 500 error, although the "captainn.net" domain still seems to be active.

According to the MFGG Wiki, the person who used to run TSGK passed away well over a decade ago, and the site has been inactive for a while.

You could reach out to whoever runs captainn.net and see if they can provide a status. TSGK is a pretty significant site that likely has resources that aren't hosted anywhere else.

Course clear! You got a card.

[Q-Nova]

I found two e-mail addresses in captainn.net. I just sent an e-mail asking for the status of TSGK to both addresses. One bounced back but the other didn't. Hopefully a response will come!

Quillax Ship - Where you can download all of my cool, keen mods and super-marvelous fangames!

[HylianDev]

spriters resource hosts it

ive looked into rescuing this site a time or two:

https://phpbb.mfgg.net/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=20797

https://forums.mfgg.net/thread-234-post-...l#pid23263

but when i discovered that tSR / tVGR was hosting it i realized it was in much better hands than i could ever give it

and this still holds true! it was a custom coded php site that was around when i STARTED. it must be well over 15 years old. im beyond shocked it still worked recently. tcsms does not work on any version of php7

the solution to this is not simple. spin up a server that runs like php 5.4 lmfao. its such a shame to see it disappear

Hylian's day job, little did we know, was saying controversial things on the internet.

you fool!!!! you fixed it wrong!!!!

Bibby Team

[Mario]

Honestly it probably broke due to a server software upgrade. The blog post on the site talked about how the code was unmaintainable so it'd be no surprise if it just can't work on the modern web anymore. It's a shame no one was actively taking care of it because they could at least sound the alarm and move the content elsewhere if they could see that happening.

What issues have you found for running tcsms on php7? I know it still uses the old mysql functions which were removed but those are pretty easy to update if you're just worried about compatibility. Guessing the problems are bit deeper than that though since you said php 5.4 and not 5.6.

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- John F. Kennedy"
- gothgirlgangblastermaster

[HylianDev]

I was exaggerating when i said 5.4 lmao. also i was talking about tsgk

it might just be mysql? i havent messed with tcsms in a while but i dont think i ended up getting it working. i dont remember if it was a total 500 error or if it was just not showing any page content other than the header

also i made a topic on the tvgr forums about it:

https://www.vg-resource.com/thread-37801.html

Hylian's day job, little did we know, was saying controversial things on the internet.

you fool!!!! you fixed it wrong!!!!

Bibby Team

[Mario]

A 500 error always produces logs though

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""We choose to go to the [Suggestions board] not because it's easy, but because it's hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
- John F. Kennedy"
- gothgirlgangblastermaster

[GeneralGuy]

While we're on the subject of websites being down, can someone fix the log-in issues on the old MFGG Invision forums?

[Q-Nova]

I'd like to point out that The Shy Guy Kingdom is still accessible via The Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/201910221759...t/?p=index

It seems very functional. There's the occasional broken image, but most sprite sheets are still available.

Quillax Ship - Where you can download all of my cool, keen mods and super-marvelous fangames!

[Mario]

I was exaggerating when i said 5.4 lmao. also i was talking about tsgk

it might just be mysql? i havent messed with tcsms in a while but i dont think i ended up getting it working. i dont remember if it was a total 500 error or if it was just not showing any page content other than the header

also i made a topic on the tvgr forums about it:

https://www.vg-resource.com/thread-37801.html

Good idea but I'm not sure what value there'd be in open sourcing the backend for the site. A static copy of the site should be good enough for what it does and give us something that would last forever or at least until HTML dies out LOL. I don't remember anything on that site that really required a backend

While we're on the subject of websites being down, can someone fix the log-in issues on the old MFGG Invision forums?

yeah someone could

I'd like to point out that The Shy Guy Kingdom is still accessible via The Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/201910221759...t/?p=index

It seems very functional. There's the occasional broken image, but most sprite sheets are still available.

if that's the case it'd be a good idea to get what you can. Maybe a static backup of the entire site would be useful

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Interested in web development? Check out Super Mario Web Development. Wahoo!

 

""We choose to go to the [Suggestions board] not because it's easy, but because it's hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
- John F. Kennedy"
- gothgirlgangblastermaster

[Petie]

Hey, Petie from tSR / VGR here. We do not host TSGK though if anyone does manage to get in touch with them and wants to send them my way, I would not be against getting them set up on our server.

[GeneralGuy]

Hey, Petie from tSR / VGR here. We do not host TSGK though if anyone does manage to get in touch with them and wants to send them my way, I would not be against getting them set up on our server.

That would be awesome! Thank you for your kind offer.

[Petie]

I think I understand the confusion about us being involved after reading the last home page update on TSGK. That was slightly before my time but I believe the plan was to upload all of the content from TSGK to tSR. I'm not sure if that was actually done or not but if it was, at the very least, the sheets themselves are safe. I still wouldn't mind getting a static copy of the site and uploading it, perhaps under its own domain name or possibly just pointing the existing name to a new IP, to preserve the rest of the history contained there.

[HylianDev]

i found an email for the person that seems to be hosting TSGK now, but when I sent something to it, I got a "Message Blocked" response idk what to do about that.

Hylian's day job, little did we know, was saying controversial things on the internet.

you fool!!!! you fixed it wrong!!!!

Bibby Team

[Mario]

I wouldn't be surprised if there's some captain n n-fan community on discord these days, that's probably where I'd go look. Maybe a facebook group or something as well. They do seem to have forums but nothing recent on them.

Doing some researching on backing up wayback machine archives if we can't get a hold of the original source, I came across this answer: https://superuser.com/a/957298

which lead me to this page: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Restoring

which lead me to discovering this project https://archive.org/details/archiveteam - tsgk is unfortunately not there but if anyone's interested in web preservation that seems like the team to communicate with to or volunteer for to get more websites preserved like they're doing- really cool project!

as for more stuff we can do:
https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader tool was linked and recommended in the answer I linked and also on that wiki page

I've installed it via the instructions on the page and it's going through the 29686 items it can download right now. I'm not sure if this will work completely as I found that the tool has some updates that aren't in its gem bundle yet but I don't know how those affect anything; I'll see if I can update the tool and do a new download when this one finishes. It doesn't generate something that's usable out of the box due to the weird structure of the tsgk site but it's something we could clean up and get in a working form for sure.

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""We choose to go to the [Suggestions board] not because it's easy, but because it's hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
- John F. Kennedy"
- gothgirlgangblastermaster

[Murphmario]

In the event that the site doesn't go back up, wonder if it'd be a good idea to reupload anything that's not on here or on TSR onto those sites. That way they're at least accessible without Wayback Machine.

[Mario]

In the event that the site doesn't go back up, wonder if it'd be a good idea to reupload anything that's not on here or on TSR onto those sites. That way they're at least accessible without Wayback Machine.

The issue becomes one of content ownership. It may not be the right thing to do to upload others rips without their permission (and possibly without credit depending on how much information we have). But if you aren't really concerned with proper credit towards ancient sprite rips then there are also some original sprites on there that we may need permission for.

Though from the last news post on the site I assume TSR does have permission to integrate them into their site.

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""We choose to go to the [Suggestions board] not because it's easy, but because it's hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
- John F. Kennedy"
- gothgirlgangblastermaster

[Mario]

Good news, I was able to download the archive.org archive of the site and created a ~80mb archive from its contents. It's not something you can just put on a web server and it'll work as a static site but all the information we'd need is there, we'd just need to reformat it to be more presentable and link to the right places. It's a lot of work that we don't necessarily need to do if we can get in contact with the people behind TSGK these days but it's a solid backup plan that's definitely possible. I sent this over to HylianDev as well so I'm not the only one with a copy. Let me know if anyone else is interested in it.

Proud member of the Shadow █████████████

Interested in web development? Check out Super Mario Web Development. Wahoo!

 

""We choose to go to the [Suggestions board] not because it's easy, but because it's hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
- John F. Kennedy"
- gothgirlgangblastermaster

[Mario]

Have there been any updates on this front? Was anyone able to get in contact with anyone?

Proud member of the Shadow █████████████

Interested in web development? Check out Super Mario Web Development. Wahoo!

 

""We choose to go to the [Suggestions board] not because it's easy, but because it's hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
- John F. Kennedy"
- gothgirlgangblastermaster

[SailorLuigi]

i found this looking for Harvest Moon sprites on an old thread elsewhere and noticed the TSGK link died

i dunno about contacting ppl but if ur looking for somewhere to plop that backup archive you made; if it's HTML-based like in a .zip or something, Neocities gives free members 1GB of space and no ads. (not to sound like an ad lol but i personally find it very useful)

also any emails actually using the TSGK url/related urls that might be hosted there are probably gonna....bounce. it seems so "oh, well duh" in retrospect but i actually went thru something similar when another big site seemingly vanished; all the help/contact/etc emails i could find were directly using that site's domain so everything bounced back and things went nowhere, it's still deader than ever.

(i had no actual contact with anyone until i went thru a domain-buying site etc etc etc and have no clue if the response i got was even a real admin or not or just a "realtor" kinda person somehow. they wanted like $100k lololololol)

Spoiler

THIS is the funniest default icon i've ever seen