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Digital Press gone?


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I make it a routine practice of downloading useful content (e.g. scanned magazines, game manuals, e-books, images, etc.) as soon as I find it. Thus if/when the original disappears, I still have a personal copy that will remain forever accessible.

Yes, I do that too -- and when I grabbed these and uploaded them to my dropbox, I noticed that I had already snagged most of them about 2 years ago. Heh.

 

I'm finding it's useful to screenshot statements on social media and stuff made by controversial public figures. The Coleco Chameleon clusterbug was pretty well documented by other people doing the same.

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I should probably copy DigitPress's links page, but I've not had a chance to do so yet.

There is a mention on their forum that a few other parts of the site are backed up, and that they may bring that stuff over to the new site.

Awhile back I discovered that VGF was still online. Does anyone remember that site? Their main page redirects to their forum, but I found a link to the rest of their content on smbhq: http://www.vgf.com/404.htm Yeah, that's a 404 error page, but it still has links to other, abandoned-but-working parts of the site.

Digital Press had been up for a long time; if the copyright notice on their forum is correct (1991-2017) they were probably one of the 1st gaming sites on the web. So it's sad to see it go, even if they hadn't had any major updates in a long time they were still interesting from a historical perspective, and they still had good content archived. Same thing with GameZeroMagazine, StompTokyo, VGF, AtariHQ, SMBHQ, SoST, TheMushroomKingdom.net, Videogames.org, BadMovies.org and many, many other sites.

Edited by pacman000
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Digital Press had been up for a long time; if the copyright notice on their forum is correct (1991-2017) they were probably one of the 1st gaming sites on the web. So it's sad to see it go, even if they hadn't had any major updates in a long time they were still interesting from a historical perspective, and they still had good content archived. Same thing with GameZeroMagazine, StompTokyo, VGF, AtariHQ, SMBHQ, SoST, TheMushroomKingdom.net, Videogames.org, BadMovies.org and many, many other sites.

 

1991 was the year the fanzine started. They didn't get on the Web until 1997 (and really there wasn't much of a Web to get on until maybe 1995).

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DP died when Joe sold it off, it just didn't know it and shambled on until last week.

 

I agree. That site is what really got me in to proper "collecting" when I joined back in '04. Up until then, I was just buying old games that I wanted to play again on eBay. I didn't really realize that there were other people buying up lots of old games until I found DP.

 

The DP-AA rivalry back then was also pretty hilarious.

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Sheesh. More like petty and stupid. I can't believe how dumb we all were. Oh well, 15 years of growing up will put things into perspective I suppose.

 

 

Well, when I say "hilarious", I mean in a ridiculous kind of way. It all seemed so important and serious back then. I would barely even come over here because of the perceived hostility between the forums. In reality, it was of course just a few vocal people on each side who just enjoyed the confrontational nature of it all.

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Yeah, there was a lot of nonsense going on at the time. I have actually been a member of the DP forums well before 7/2002 (I think I joined in 98) but they went through some kind of forum update at the time as far as I recall and my join date was changed ;) I remember a few people saying that the people in the AA forums are stuck up and this and that, but I came here and joined in 2001 (as zektor...the username is still in the database here). I guess I didn't stick around as I only have 10 posts under that name here, but I recall years later coming back and I couldn't log into that account anymore. I think I no longer had the email address associated with it and couldn't retrieve the password, so I became "eightbit" ;) That said, Al, if you are viewing this you can delete the user "zektor" from the database...sorry about that ;)

 

At the end of the day I found AA to be a much more pleasant experience as the years went by. DP became more "crowded" and I couldn't keep up. AA has a LOT more users than it did when I first arrived in 2001, but it still maintains its family "feel" ;)

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I remember loving DP back in the day. In the early 2000s I would visit both AA and DP daily. I even won one of their early eBay contests and received a copy of Ms. Space Fury for coming in first place.

I didn't ever really post as much there as I did on AA and haven't in years. My last time actually posting was 2012, but even than it was the only post I made in 2012. Seeing that they might have been shut down made me sad, although i'm not sure why. Nostalgia I guess.

 

Found a thread discussing new owners back in 2014.

 

https://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?171261-digitpress-com-New-Owners

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Here's a breakdown of what happened, from their forum:

 

 

Executive summary
Everything is now back to normal. All of the site's sections are available and accessible. This includes the forum and the other sections of the site. Joe, the store, and the museum are good too.

Timeline breakdown

  • Aug - Oct: Joe, the site's owner, accidentally doesn't pay the bill for this site's hosting to its Web host, DreamHost.
  • Oct 10: Everything hosted by DreamHost "disappears" due to non-payment. The forum is hosted at DigitalOcean so it continues. (Everything DP can't be stored at DigitalOcean due to file size concerns with the hosting plan.)
  • Oct 12: I, the site's admin, notice the missing parts of the site and write an e-mail to Joe. I also write about what's happening on the forum.
  • Oct 13: Still not having heard from Joe, I call his phone number. The number is disconnected. I call the museum. I talk to John Hardie. I explain. He takes a note to convey to Joe. I ask for Joe's phone number. I am given a dummy phone number meant for solicitors, yet I don't know that's what it is at the time. I call the dummy number and it endless rings with no answer. Meanwhile, Joe gets the message from John about the site's situation. At this time, I am talking with one of the store's employees who says she will also convey my memo to Joe. Joe attempts to send a text message to my phone number - however, it is a number that doesn't have text messaging service as it is a "regular phone number," so the message silently disappears into the void. Joe pays a DreamHost bill that is for another Web site of his (not the digitpress.com group) and presumes that the situation is resolved as he doesn't hear from me afterward.
  • Oct 15: Still not having heard from Joe, I call the dummy number 2 - 3 times throughout the day. Concerned, I make a post about the situation here at the forum.
  • Oct 19: The store's employee(s), having a meeting with Joe (over the phone I guess), mention the "sites are missing" situation.
  • Oct 19/20: Joe, having spoken with PapaStu (a longtime mod here), delves back into his records, and realizes that there is another DreamHost account to pay (the digitpress.com one). He pays the bill. The non-forum site sections are restored to the Internet.
  • Oct 20: Joe writes an e-mail to me in the morning, explaining some things from his side. He gives a current cell phone number in the message. I call and we discuss things further. Everything is smoothed.

What now?
For now, things go back to normal. Though I have some backup copies, I am going to make additional, more recent copies and of everything both recent and old. I have a slow Internet connection, so I'll first make an off-site backup of these servers to my server, then copy that to my local computer. Later, I'll still research migrating an offline copy of this forum from vBulletin to phpBB... you know, Just-in-Case.
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  • 1 month later...

Sorry for the late bump but I just read this topic for the first time and wanted to say that it would be awesome if a group of us or whoever could get together and bring the rarity database back up to date again and start doing regular updates to it again. That was heaven for me when that was still updated!

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