Digitpress.com Gone.

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pacman000
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Digitpress.com Gone.

Postby pacman000 » October 17th, 2017, 3:42 pm

The forum's still up, but the admin's planning on moving it to another domain: https://forum.digitpress.com/forum/show ... navailable

This is making me very sad.

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VideoGameCritic
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Re: Digitpress.com Gone.

Postby VideoGameCritic » October 17th, 2017, 5:05 pm

I hope it survives in some form. It seems like all the organic, grassroots sites on the internet have been subsumed by Facebook, Twitter, etc. Don't you sometimes get that feeling?

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pacman000
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Re: Digitpress.com Gone.

Postby pacman000 » October 17th, 2017, 6:02 pm

Yes.

When the web was new, there was this idea, that all the barriers of traditional publishing would be eradicated. Somehow that hasn't happened. Could say more, but I'm don't have time now.

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Atarifever
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Re: Digitpress.com Gone.

Postby Atarifever » October 17th, 2017, 8:25 pm

pacman000 wrote:
When the web was new, there was this idea, that all the barriers of traditional publishing would be eradicated.


A dream that will always be impossible. It's not my dream of course (I think gatekeepers ensure content doesn't suck in creative media, but not in all other fields), but one a lot of people had. It will remain impossible because money will always win, and money will always have strings attached. It has happened to every other medium or delivery method (books, newspapers, radio, records, TV, etc.), so of course it is where internet will go. Look at Facebook and Twitter and a handful of sites. Look at Google and Apple. Look at Windows and iOS. Look at Steam and gog.com. Look at Netflix and Hulu. Looks at Amazon and eBay. A small handful of sites and companies own the vast, vast, vast majority of internet traffic and eyeballs. It's already over. On to the next "most amazing new thing young people will claim will rewrite the world." From wooden sailing ships and shipping lines to railway lines, to broadband internet lines, someone will end up owning it, because someone has to pay to build it.

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Atariboy
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Re: Digitpress.com Gone.

Postby Atariboy » October 17th, 2017, 8:47 pm

It was time for Digital Press to die.

The owner abandoned it years ago when he started his store and was dreaming about founding a national videogame museum, claiming that the current administrator owned it. And said administrator claimed he didn't own it and that the founder still held the keys. And that administrator disappeared for a half a year or more when he felt insulted on the forum a couple of years ago, which is when I decided to leave since he was the one paying the bills and maintaining the site (And he took his ball and went home not long after implementing the need to be approved to join the forum, which meant you couldn't even join for a long time).

When you can't even get the owner to admit ownership, you know a site isn't long for this world. And perhaps worst of all, the rarity guide ceased to receive much updating by around 2003/2004, which was the "hook" that usually drew visitors into the community during the days when the site was booming in the late 1990's and early 2000's. And multi-week shutdowns were almost routine and oftentimes the site was unreliable even when it was online (With them seemingly never able to build in any reliability like other sites like AtariAge enjoyed, until traffic slowed to a trickle over the past 5 years).

Then there was that foolish one-sided feud with AtariAge, with many DP users hating the other site for reasons I've yet to ever see explained (Despite many of their acquaintances at DP also being AA members). And the forum populace was decimated long ago, while the small group that keeps it barely alive included several of the problem children that drove away many of the long-term members while discouraging newcomers at the same time.

I just regret I didn't save some of the scans in the library section like I had intended to. I wonder if that's cached by Google?

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pacman000
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Re: Digitpress.com Gone.

Postby pacman000 » October 17th, 2017, 10:33 pm

You're probably right, Atarifever, as usual.

I mostly used DP as a directory; they had a large list of sites about classic game systems, some of which they hosted. I know BalleyAlley agreed to mirror an Arcadia 2001 site they hosted, but I don't know what will happen to the other hosted sites, or if I'll be able to find the non-hosted sites again.

More to say, but I don't know how to word it right now.

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scotland
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Re: Digitpress.com Gone.

Postby scotland » October 17th, 2017, 11:18 pm

This is sad news for their forum community. Even if they move the forum, without a hook to bring in new members, it seems like its just putting off the inevitable.

There does seem to be a natural force for consolidation. Atariage, for instance, is a lot more than just Atari related discussions. Yet there are advantages to smaller groups, like this one or a reasonably active subreddit or something similar.

I agree that curation is a positive, but it can be a trap too. From suspect reviews of sites that advertise the games they review, to all the issues with crowdsourcing and aggregating reviews, to allowing reviews to be impacted by social media outrage, etc. Now there are sophisticated curation methods, such as what Netflix or Amazon uses to recommend what to watch or read. Those are great, but they are also intended to keep you inside whatever walled garden you are in. Netflix never recommends something not on Netflix.

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Atariboy
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Re: Digitpress.com Gone.

Postby Atariboy » October 18th, 2017, 5:06 am

The scans of classic books from the golden age of arcade gaming are cached here.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170606141 ... ary/books/

While I've downloaded what I wanted to keep, it would be nice for the community as a whole to see a classic gaming site download those and continue to make them available.

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scotland
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Re: Digitpress.com Gone.

Postby scotland » October 18th, 2017, 8:42 am

Never even heard of that Dreamcast book that is there. Based on a masters thesis. Interesting. Also, I can finally learn how to get a million in Pac Man.

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pacman000
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Re: Digitpress.com Gone.

Postby pacman000 » October 18th, 2017, 12:39 pm

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

Thinking it over, I'm not sure the folks with the money always win. Yahoo and Excite had more money than Google, but look what happened there. Same thing with MySpace vs. Facebook.

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.


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