Old CJs NOT lost to time!

[zahrul3 472]

Has anyone ever compiled a list of prominent CJs (and other forum threads) where the pictures have NOT been lost to time?

Most if not all old CJs (and pictures on other forum posts too!) before 2013 (and some past that even) host their images on third parties, many of which became a paid service (after that, most moved on to Imgur). Some hosted it on their website and they were teenagers back then, now they're adults and that same webpage is used for their personal projects unrelated to SC4. So we now have a lot of content, if not the majority of content on this site that has been lost to time and probably even forever - at least PhotoBucket to my knowledge, has opened up its pictures again but with a watermark now.

Some image hosting domains may still be running even more obscure ones like fotki, and some more well known ones like blogspots' hosting service and Flickr. Is it even possible to restore images from, lets say, photobucket?

Thing is, a lot of these CJs, threads, and such have (or may have!) some historical value. Perhaps as a monument to the 00s too! Some even have plotlines and such which rely on the images to provide context, without the context they're nothing!. I enjoyed reading those threads as a kid back then and want to read them again but unfortunately the images are now gone and the only thing I have remaining are images semi-burnt into my brain and the lucid-dream world I live in (while fully asleep of course!).

Thanks!

[rsc204 21,859]

It's a problem and frankly until recently hosting/bandwidth costs meant everyone having to find 3rd party sites to show images. The problem is that if we don't have links or a way to match up an image in one place to the one used in a post, practically there isn't a way to restore such content.

Outside of that, I moved everything once from Photobucket to Flickr, but it was a lot of work at the time and I am surely not the most prolific user of images either.

I don't think compiling a list of what still works is the way to go, rather it would be better to archive everything that no longer had working images. That way the stuff that still did would be more prominent as a result. That said, I also fear that would work out at more not working than those that are. 

[Propfam 2,295]

I made an effort to save @Haljackey's CJ back around 2019, iirc. I did this supposedly to save his photos from the oblivion, until I moved from computers to computers and I lost the files. I'm glad he probably has all of his photos intact in his computer. So yeah, my effort is pretty much useless, I think.

And as an Indonesian, you're 100% right. The pictures in SimCity 4 Kaskus is mostly gone, making almost the entire (old) threads unrecognizable and even straight up unreadable. This again, thanks to Photobucket, etc, which outright claimed the photos and put them into a paywall. And afaik, there are 2 prominent members that have significant presences in other platforms: @roe99 (which also has his own site, roe99.weebly.com) and @Forsma7 (aka @976). The likes of adjiebrotot, etc have been lost to the time. I can't even understand his tutorials anymore thanks to lack of images. Combined this with the decline of SC4 in Indonesia, no one seems to care about content preservation anymore (and no, I don't have that much time to save contents, tho I wish I have).

So yeah, further exploration will be needed.

[Haljackey 17,380]

2 hours ago, Jidan said:

I made an effort to save @Haljackey's CJ back around 2019, iirc. I did this supposedly to save his photos from the oblivion, until I moved from computers to computers and I lost the files. I'm glad he probably has all of his photos intact in his computer. So yeah, my effort is pretty much useless, I think.

 

I have 12 thousand high res screenshots on flickr before they capped the limit. 2018 pics and older can be found there.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/haljackey/

For post 2018-there is no central repository for my stuff but you can look at my imgur, reddit pics and posts here. I also have tens of thousands of pics on my computer that are frequently backed up on multiple hard drives along with my region and plugins should anything happen to my primary drive.

[kschmidt 6,199]

Since my move from Photobucket to Imgur I'm very happy specially the Simtropolis staff support keep the site operators aware of our special cause, not ordianary users. CJ, pdf mappers can make backup pdf of them. Eventually a photo service may die, some CJ are so special a gathered pdf google drive archive would be awesome !