Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Blurg - MP3s are gone

When all of us Classicgaming folk were kicked off Gamespy/IGN's hosting service, we were told that we would still have access to all of the Fileplanet stuff. For the sake of HG101, as well as The Castlevania Dungeon and The Contra HQ, 98% of that is the MP3s. Everything was working OK up until about two months ago, when the upload server mysteriously disappeared. After tracking down one of the guys on his personal e-mail, since they disabled the standard e-mails, he advised me that the upload utility was no more and to use the public utility, which is web-based. Fair enough - until a few days ago, when I got an e-mail that said, yeah, we'll be deleting all of your stuff today, have fun. To be fair, they've supplied us with backups of everything - quite nice, because some of the files from The Castlevania Dungeon are about ten years old and I'm not sure if I have them still lying around. But having the rug pulled out from underneath us is really not cool. It makes sense - I'm not sure why they didn't completely sever ties with us earlier, but some kind of solid notification would be nice.

The bigger problem is that all three sites have something like thousands of broken links on them, which right now is giving me a massive headache. A couple of the more recent blog posts here have stuff uploaded via the public Fileplanet upload so they should still be available, but everything else is gone. I'm not sure if I'm even going to put them back up - where would they go? Everything altogether totals about 12 GB for now, which isn't a huge deal in this day and age, but I'd prefer not to suck down Kontek's bandwidth with all of that. All of the other file hosting services are either sketchy or unstable, and I'd rather not have to comb through Megaupload links on hundreds of pages on a yearly basis to see if they're still valid.

Anyway, I apologize for this, but for now the MP3s will no longer be a part of the sites. I'll see if I can work out something more permanent - judging by the number of downloads, not too many people ever grabbed them, but I always liked them there. Part of HG101's goal was to be a multimedia site, providing both pictures and sound along with the text, and it sucks to lose out on a part of that.

6 comments:

  1. Just a suggestion, how about putting the Mp3s linked to files uploaded to a specific MediaFire account? MediaFire will load the file URL for download immediately and when the file downloads, the URL link will change to a "Downloading File" status. Also found it easier to manage files that way... each file uplaoded will have its own unique URL for people to click, so downloading and mangement should be easy.

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  2. Losing all the MP3s is a bummer. I second the mediafire idea above. It has fast downloads, and the accounts are easily manageable.

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  3. I third the Mediafire suggestion. I use Mediafire for all my uploads and I find it to be far more reliable (not to mention cheaper) than Rapidshare and Megaupload.

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  4. I usually just browse through the links and then search for the music on youtube, anyway. Not a huge loss.

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  5. I've said it before, I'll say it again - time to get your own hosting. It's really not that expensive. And if you keep the files in the same structure with the same names, you can just get a relatively advanced text editor like Programmer's Notepad and fix all your links with "find in files."

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