Saving Sierra Fan Sites

[Brandon,Klassen]

Hey everyone,

It’s been a while since I was active here, most of you know me – I’m always around but in terms of being active in different parts of the community, I tend to come and go, as we all do 🙂  I’m currently working on various Sierra archival activities, and today I wanted to bring one of these activities to everyone’s attention.

Sierra fan sites are disappearing.  To me, this is a sad thing.  Some
of these sites have had great content, such as interviews, that is now
simply lost.  Here’s just a few sites from an old list of links I had
that now seem to be gone: LarryLives.com, Dimwood.net, The Roberta Williams
Fan Club, Mosely – Neglected Hero of Gabriel Knight, as well as many
Sierra fan sites that may not have been saved from Geocities at the new
Reocities URLs.

If you have a Sierra fan site – or
perhaps you had a site that is actually no longer online, but you still have a saved
copy of it – I would love to have a full zipped copy of your website for backup and safekeeping.  You might think your website will stay around forever, but
one day you might decide to take it down, and then it will probably simply just disappear.  The Internet Archive Wayback Machine does not provide good results for fully crawling sites.  Hard drives die, disks and discs degrade, and it’s always possible that you might lose your own copy of the site.

I will simply keep safe the saved backup copy of your site.  If you should ever decide to take down your site, or if anything ever happens to it, I’ll make sure it gets back online (hosting it myself, if need be), so that it can still be enjoyed by Sierra fans.  If you don’t know me personally, you can ask around, and you’ll find that I’m a trusted member of the Sierra community.

If you have any Sierra-related website, please contact me about this preservation and backup effort.  You can reach me at klassen at hotmail dot com.

Thanks!

Brandon Klassen
Sierra Archivist

[Collector,]

Hi, Brandon. It is good to see you around again. There are the sites connected via the Sierra Community Gateway that was created after the closure of the official Sierra boards. Its intention was to link the most prominent Sierra boards and a couple of new ones to fill the gap. Terra-Arcanum (Arcanum) and Unity Headquarters (NOLF) aren’t really traditional Sierra boards, but the rest are. Traffic for most of these boards has been low to nonexistent. The GK, QfMG and SQ boards remain active, even if slow.

My own site, The Sierra Help Pages, is probably the most active, with 18,893 unique visitors last month. The SHP forums are where most of the members of the old official boards ended up after the official ones closed. The site minus the forums is well over 5 GB in size and growing. It is in active development. At some point it might good to have it archived else where, but not until I have reached a certain point with it.

You may wish to bring this up on the SHP forums as several of the owners of the other Sierra community sites post there on a regular basis.

[Brandon,Klassen]

Hey Collector, thanks for the reply!

Oh yeah, I remember SierraForums. Definitely a cool idea. Although it’s somewhat a different concept, I like it better than the traditional webring – I think the comparison is still valid.

It would definitely be awesome to have a backup archive of the SHP site, but what you allude to was my thinking as well: I’ll be looking first to the sites that aren’t being currently updated. (By the way, I’m not considering forum content in my search to acquire fan site backups right now – just the non-forum portions of fan sites.)

I’ll definitely head over to the SHP forums and post a note there – thanks again!

[Collector,]

I only mention the Gateway Communities because each has a main site, such as the GK4 campaign and SpaceQuest.net sites,  two of the more content rich of the community sites that are not currently being updated. Franz, the owner of SpaceQuest.net, only occasionally surfaces. MusicallyInspired has FTP access to the forums of SpaceQuest.net and may have access to the rest of the site.
Almirena, the owner of the GK4 campaign site has been away for around a year. There were plans to transform the site into a general GK site and the domain of gabrielknight.net was purchased for it. Currently the domain just redirects to the campaign site. I have ACP access to the message board, but not FTP access. Santi had FTP access to at least the board and I think the main site.

Again, several of the owners of these Sierra sites are regulars on SHP and can be contacted there.

[Author]

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