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★ ☆ Surfing in Davy Jones' Locker: An Archive Project ★ ☆

NyosimNyosim Posts: 816 Member
edited January 2020 in The Sims (2000)
★ ☆

Many years ago, a group of Simmers had launched a website called “The Sims Surfer”. Its main purpose was to be a fan site directory; far from an easy feat to accomplish when considering the near-innumerable amount of The Sims fan sites that had been available for viewing at the time. Yet its staff not only managed to maintain one frequently updated list of active websites, but a second one existed alongside it. The main directory was supplemented by another section of the site named “Davy Jones’ Locker”, which was dedicated to archiving the content of any fan sites that had long since ceased operation.

As of 2020, The Sims Surfer has now been relocated to a Locker of its own: the Wayback Machine. Or at least, the site as it appeared to users between 2002 and 2010. The final time that the Machine archived the site was on January 9th, 2010 — at this point in time, the site had claimed to have a collection of five thousand Sims fansite linked on its main directory alone. (The final count for Davy Jones’ Locker is unknown.) Unfortunately, the final tally of 5,000 has been forever changed since Yahoo decided to mess around with its Groups system. There’s no doubt that on December 14, 2019th, countless gigabytes of Sims custom content was deleted from the servers with no way of recovery — content that was uploaded onto Yahoo for archival purposes in the first place! It’s become more important than ever to archive any content that can be recovered.

So to celebrate the new decade and the 20th anniversary of this series, I thought it might be fun and/or painful to excavate the remains of the fan sites (fully or partially) dedicated to the original game. Afterward, I can compile all the archived sites together and upload their content to the Sims Archive Project. The sites that are listed in either directory will be sorted into two categories: the Lost Sites and the Found Sites. These two categories will have a post dedicated to each list (otherwise this post will end up being a novel). Then, the sites will be sorted by whether they were listed in The Sims Surfer's main page or Davy Jones’ Locker.

I'll try to post about any progess I've made when I can . . . hopefully at least once a week! Major update posts will be linked to here for quicker browsing!

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Post edited by Nyosim on

Comments

  • NyosimNyosim Posts: 816 Member
    edited January 2020
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    Offline sites that have been lost to time. If somebody, such as a webmaster, original creator or even an interested Simmer can recover a site's content from old hard drives or discs for upload, the site will be moved to the Found section.

    SIMS 1
    • 001 Sims
    Post edited by Nyosim on
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  • NyosimNyosim Posts: 816 Member
    edited January 2020
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    Offline sites that have content archived by the Wayback Machine. Be warned that there’s no guarantee that all of the custom content hosted on the site will have had their download links archived as well, though.

    SIMS 1
    • 2 4 U (a.k.a. Famous Sims)
    • 2-for-U.de
    Post edited by Nyosim on
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  • NyosimNyosim Posts: 816 Member
    edited February 2021
    Major update:

    - I'm an admin for Billie's Sims Archive Project now!

    If you have any old TS1 CC to donate, please PM me a sharable link!

    - Currently browsing throught the website 001 Sims as quickly as possible. Since it contains donor objects 100% completion might not be possible, or if at all.
    - Gave fancy titles to the Lost and Found posts!
    Post edited by Nyosim on
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  • NyosimNyosim Posts: 816 Member
    edited January 2020
    - Turns out Yahoo Group files aren't completely lost.

    I've spent the last week trawling as many as possible with the SAP and joined about 560 groups overall in order to retrieve their info with the GMD request tool. If you have a Yahoo account (either an email address with them, or by signing up with another email provider) you can join groupd and reuqest their data until January 31st, 2020!!!

    - Obviously this put my project on hold for a bit, but I managed to grab all I could for the following websites:
    • 2 4 U (a.k.a. Famous Sims)
    • 2-for-U.de
    - Currently archiving 2 Sim Sisters.
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  • NyosimNyosim Posts: 816 Member
    Minor updates: I'm currently helping Billie go through links on Simfinder 2000, so any sites I find there will be added to the lists with the footnote "(via SF2000)" to avoid confusion.
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  • NyosimNyosim Posts: 816 Member
    Hey people, just wanted to let you know I'm still on this, am just very busy!
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  • Okto84Okto84 Posts: 198 Member
    This brings back some memories. I was a big cc downloader (still am!) and I still have my old computer from the early 2000s somewhere around here. If the HDD is still good it will have cc on it. I doubt I have any complete sites though, more likely bits from here and there. I'll let you know what I find!
  • Okto84Okto84 Posts: 198 Member
    Quick update - the computer is still working and I've found about 125 mb of cc files. Some files have site names, but others I don't know where they came from.

    I'll upload them to onedrive and send you a link at the weekend.
  • KathykinsKathykins Posts: 1,883 Member
    If you are looking for complete sites, I'm afraid I don't have any except my own. Been working on getting the site up again, with what I have, which is most of it haha Though it is taking me some time, since I couldn't install and run TS1 for a year and a half. Got it running again, so hopefully things will move along now. There are still a lot of files to sort, and images to be redone.

    I do have zipped files from 40-50 sites, around 550-600MB worth. Also including around 30mb of programs such as SimCamera, Transmogrifier and HomeCrafter.
  • NyosimNyosim Posts: 816 Member
    Welp that March 2020 post...talk about moments before disaster. Lol. Regardless I will still take any donations into account!
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