pouët.net

Sometimes things obviously need to be removed, yes. I was tipped off a while back about a rather obscure demo in the archive that contained what legit looked like child porn; getting rid of that obviously trumped archival value.

absence: Are you sure the NOISE releases were ever on scene.org? I remember many links pointing to their own FTP back in the old Nectarine days (pre-2008), and that FTP disappeared eventually.

Yes, you can see that it was one of their official mirrors on the archived traces of their web site.

Want to mention IPFS here. In theory, it could provide static hash links to files hosted in distributed system, and anybody can facilitate in backup. Require some collective work though.

Library genesis has an IPFS mirror for books working in similar manner.

abscense: noise was never hosted at scene.org, they never applied, that's why it's missing afaik. TDR did request to remove some of the older releases due to copyright situations afaicr wanting to re-release etc. but their old mod archive should still be there under /old/ or something.

btw: for those interested in netlabel preservation there is this site https://netlabelarchive.org/ working on it. would be nice if it would get more mirrors (at scene.org for example), they already base their archiving on archive.org

interesting, didn't remember that. but my memory is known to be crap. i'm guessing they asked to remove them at some point because of some of their artists trying to get a comercial release out and they always meant to have their catalogue temporarily available and not permanent (which is sad imho, but was in their right to control)

@xeron yeah, I'm on borrowed time.

Thank you for reaching out to me about this on Discord, I'm super happy that you now have the additional missing torrent, and a future way to obtain more updates while the guy usually responsible for hosting the torrents is taking a questionably long time to add the previous years.

I am also preparing a way to also share the thousands of comments and reviews, the soul of the site to be archive-able, via the torrent system as well.

@nikhotmsg: IPFS is dead on arrival. Sorry. It doesn't solve a problem anyone really has, and creates a host of new ones.

There's nothing in their licence that suggests it's temporary, so I would assume the music is still distributable under those terms. On the other hand, while it may not be their legal right to revoke the licence, I'm certainly not willing to fight anyone in court over it. :D

m0d: I don't know what to say after reading about your health situation... I pray for you! Stay strong brother!

Thanks to everyone coming forward with their responses and information - I feel like scene history, at least on the files and releases side, is well handled, and I've gone ahead and mirrored a few terabytes of RSYNC mirrors to add to the textfiles.com machine, just to feel it was handled.

There's a lot to be impressed by. I'm glad there's still efforts to improve more and more, and I'm glad that only a vanishingly small number are either slipped through the cracks, or were never actual releases in the first place.

I'm going through and adding console demos, but then I'll turn again to other stuff. Always great to check in.

It would be really nice to have a patch to play console demos directly in the Pouët window =) I guess that for some platforms, it would be possible to do so without any manual work per-prod?

It introduces a huge nightmare for maintenance, but it's possible for them to have it such that if it's at the archive, and it's emulated, and it works, then a link appears.

The main problems are the tension between emulator accuracy and demo tricks - the MAME emulator works well with many items but not all, and I get how people might not want it to be the default experience. I suspect the youtube playing of demos had similar debates.

But I can say with authority on the archive.org side, I'm totally up for it.

Well, yes, there is a subset of demosceners that hate emulators with a passion, and I guess that if you only support MAME, you would have an OK emulator for lots of platforms but not the best for any of them.

As for videos, I don't think you can ever make everybody happy either. The most common complaint is about YouTube's compression, but almost no matter how good your capture and encode is, someone will complain (if nothing else because “it's meant to be watched realtime, not on a video”).

I guess to sidestep (most of) the flamewars, one could make it a browser extension that just Did It without any changes to Pouët itself, but it would be harder and not have nearly the same reach.

yeah, from the maintenance side it sounds like a horrible sea of pitfalls that is bound to lead to many complaints and so on, so i'd refuse to be responsible for maintaining such a nightmare. just click the youtube, vimeo or online version links if you want to see a substandard quality rendition of <whatever demo you're tempted to look at, not just on consoles>. that linkage is overseeable in terms of maintenance at least :)

I know Gargaj had something to download and auto-launch Windows demos a while back, but I don't know what came of it. (I never used it myself, since I don't have a Windows PC and most demos, unlike games, don't seem to work all that well in WINE.)

you probably mean https://github.com/Gargaj/Conduit

i never used it myself either because i'm not so interested in watching pc demos

Yes indeed, thanks for the link :-)