Simtropolis Returns!

[Brody Jones 13]

Glad to see Simtropolis is back online! I highly agree that the previous host is really really terrible at handling this situation (I mean, why would you delete a client's data instantly, lest not back it up to a separate place first?), but nevertheless, that's pretty much the past now. Let's hope this website goes on even smoother than before, I give my regards to Cori, Dirk, and all the staff that poured the effort to recovery.

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

10 minutes ago, Brody Jones said:

I give my regards to Cori, Dirk, and all the staff that poured the effort to recovery.

Add CB! He did a lot of the work.  

[TheTimvh1 873]

12 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Thanks everyone for the warm words! It means a lot to us.

It is truly wonderful to see the life returned to the community we call home, as a website is an empty shell without the people. ST is a haven and our special place on the internet (which are rare to find nowadays). A place where we can share a creative common interest of city building.

For the old host to do what they did was a repulsive and selfish act, born out of cold corporate greed. They treated us like an ID number out of thousands, showing no remorse or grace. Crucially though, they forgot that a community is built on its people, not its hosting provider!

But enough about them, as this is about us now. As a community we will prevail and recover from this. It's great to see all the restored STEX files already from a range of authors. Additionally, a few members have shared local backups of downloads with us, which will help immensely as part of the rebuilding efforts. More info will be posted soon in a new topic. Also I'm hoping to develop a dedicated "Restoration Tracker" page, where we can all view what's been recovered, and what still needs to be.

As an aside, I'm pleased to report the defective hardware has been replaced, and Dirk reports:
"Site’s been running for ~7 hours and none of the prior issues that would have appeared by now have appeared."

So it's now safe to say...
Simtropolis Is Back!

I still think a lawsuit is in order.

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

32 minutes ago, TheTimvh1 said:

I still think a lawsuit is in order.

There's the part where they seem to be technically in the right based on saying it's our responsibility to keep backups (which we did everyday), but they were on the same server that got wiped.

Then there's a strong urge to name and shame them, but from a legal perspective we'd prolly wind up liable for libel.  

So yeah, the urge is still strong. Dirk has been fuming for weeks, but we collectively agreed it wouldn't do any good to make a public issue of it other than how we described the situation in my first post.

[The Cloudseeder 41]

Thank you so much for the hard work to bring back Simtropolis back to life again! I admit I was getting afraid this would be the end especially as modding communities for such old classic games are getting more and more niche over the years and sadly sometimes suddenly disappears without warning. ;o;

About web hosting services messing with their customers I was in a similar situation with my personal art site where the host deleted the files and domain name due to being myself late of just only few days for payment (was away for health reason at that time), domain name which was immediately bought by an anonymous company which the latter now using my artist's name URL as a scam online casino. Hopefully I will be able to get back my URL name as I saw on the ICANN lookup site that their registry expiration is ending later this year...

Wish you good luck for your efforts!! 💛

[TheTimvh1 873]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

There's the part where they seem to be technically in the right based on saying it's our responsibility to keep backups (which we did everyday), but they were on the same server that got wiped.

Then there's a strong urge to name and shame them, but from a legal perspective we'd prolly wind up liable for libel.

So yeah, the urge is still strong. Dirk has been fuming for weeks, but we collectively agreed it wouldn't do any good to make a public issue of it other than how we described the situation in my first post.

Yeah.  Besides that, there's also the cost that comes with such litigation, especially the cost of obtaining a lawyer.

[simmering 2,607]

I have a question about the placeholder images. I have a larger number with a generic name and I am not confident that I can restore those. My list of attachments shows the placeholder images with different file sizes. Do they really take up these large and varying storage spaces as the originals did? Should I leave them or delete them if I definitely cannot restore the original?

 

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

3 minutes ago, simmering said:

Should I leave them or delete them if I definitely cannot restore the original?

I would leave them. And especially for right now as CB has some code running for the past 20-some hours which is restoring images from the Wayback Machine.

[Cyclone Boom 16,852]

24 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

... CB has some code running for the past 20-some hours which is restoring images from the Wayback Machine.

Speaking of that, there are quite a few image.png being restored, so it's possible yours @simmering might be part of what the Wayback has. Thankfully they allow checking for any files saved within a directory path, so we can iterate through the monthly subfolders.

Sneak peek from the terminal:

I have to set it slowly to go easy on the Wayback's servers, so it's quite a long process. Getting there though...

[jabezscratch 159]

Thanks to everyone involved in restoring Simtropolis. I've been visiting Simtropolis since the beginning and still do and don't know what I'd do if it weren't around. Thanks again to everyone who put what I'm sure was a lot of hard work into this.

[TogaMasterJohn 701]

14 hours ago, Wiimeiser said:

Sadly it seems that they last visited ST on March 6, and not again until April 30...

That's true. I recall seeing that when I looked back at the March 6 snapshot in either late April or early May. I didn't dig deep into it at the time because the Wayback Machine was incredibly slow that day (even slower than the Internet Archive's normal speed). There might be some things that could be salvageable between February 28 and March 6, though, such as topics and replies. I emphasize "might" because a brief look at the March 6 snapshot a moment ago suggests that it may be a long shot.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,045]

Hello.

It's good to be back. Too bad my latest CJ entry was lost... 

[Terring 6,473]

We're back, babe! 

[11241036 5,096]

I'm glad to see that Simtropolis is back. Thank you for all the efforts in restoring lost content. Fortunately, my losses are minimal, except I'll need to recover many of the pictures in my CJ. It's a shame how this has happened, a poor way to treat a customer.

[SK5 6]

It's great to see the site up and running again! I'm new here, but I can see how big of a community there is here

[Kel9509 1,357]

19 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I believe the best method will be to zip up all missing versions per file and have those ready to upload to us when CB is ready. (There will be a few of the DLLs that I have every version for, but only like 3 or 4 or 5 or such.) I suspect we might even create a dedicated thread for this sort of repair since it'll be different from what anyone except CB can do.

I was wondering about prior versions.  Not that many would care to download an older version of something, but for certain types of files it might make sense.  And certainly I want my complete file history restored including the older versions entirely.

[Kel9509 1,357]

8 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Then there's a strong urge to name and shame them, but from a legal perspective we'd prolly wind up liable for libel.

Meh.  You'te not saying anything untruthful.  Truth is an absolute defense.  In fact, you don't need to characterize anything at all - just say "X was our old host."

But the fear is also real.

[Wiimeiser 436]

I had a thought last night to check my browsing history for ST before it gets deleted, and it did indeed turn up all or at least most of my April 1 visit. I was even able to match the number-filenames zips I downloaded from the "Japanese Sites" club pages based on that information, the order they appeared in when sorted by "date modified", and the contents of the zips.

 

I suggest anyone do the same, check your browsing history for ST page titles. It might be a small, but still useful resource for the outright missing pages.

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

2 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

And certainly I want my complete file history restored including the older versions entirely.

That is absolutely doable.  

CB is an expert at reading the database in raw form. Basically it has a field for each piece of info like File ID, the various Dates, the Description Text, and for each version it'll have the Display / Download Name (Cori's Widget.dat) and then an Internal Name (/objects/files/file/monthly_2024_10/cori%39%s%20%widget.dat-iq78gwsfy8rhklsgiyg893whgklygr.dat), File Size, and so on and on.

Once we have the interim files they will then each get renamed to the internal name and uploaded thru the backend into the proper folder and magically the database will see them again and they are re-attached so to speak.

As I mentioned somewhere, this'll likely be handled in its own thread because it's a different workflow. Also, it's not as high of a priority as getting the most current version restored. You can plan ahead tho keeping track of the STEX URL for each file and have a copy of each version of the file.

[TheTimvh1 873]

Speaking of losses, I noticed a couple of 20huskies' BATs are missing even tho the page still exists.  I think I have both.  If need be (assuming I have them both, I could forward them to one of the admins.  I'll need to dig around for them first.

[CaptCity 4,695]

2 hours ago, TheTimvh1 said:

Speaking of losses, I noticed a couple of 20huskies' BATs are missing even tho the page still exists.  I think I have both.  If need be (assuming I have them both, I could forward them to one of the admins.  I'll need to dig around for them first.

They've been restored. Thanks for pointing them out.

[Ernestmaxis 214]

I'm glad the website is back up and running; it was definitely a real loss not being able to scroll through all the wonderful content that's been created. I can certainly understand the frustration, as it was an insane way to handle things. But let's look ahead and work together to make things right.

[Silur 3,302]

These days dragged on endlessly.

It was like a shipwreck. Thank you to everyone who leads us to a safe harbor !

 

Fate will punish those who are guilty of this. 

[Tyberius06 12,184]

@CorinaMarie and @Cyclone Boom 
I think the former old STEX links to new STEX links automatic conversion is failing. I have this link, and it leads to a 404 error: https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/files/file/26079-peg-spam-super-resource-pack/

[Cyclone Boom 16,852]

@Tyberius06

Fixed it, thanks! That specific rule was missed in the config, even though we ported over the other ones (hopefully).

If any other old URLs still aren't redirecting properly, let us know.

By the way, I'm going to open up a new subforum where other site issues can be reported in one place.

[AndisArt 2,066]

I'm confused that my files didn't survive despite me not having uploaded anything since 2020 or so.

It says they were updated in 2025 by Ulisse Wolf? What does that mean? 

I assume this means former file uploads were not kept? 

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

5 minutes ago, AndisArt said:

It says they were updated in 2025 by Ulisse Wolf? What does that mean?

@Ulisse Wolf can address it better, but many files were updated so they would be compatible with sc4pac. Your original work wasn't altered, but I believe it was simply the structure of how it was packaged.

[AndisArt 2,066]

3 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

@Ulisse Wolf can address it better, but many files were updated to so they would be compatible with sc4pac. Your original work wasn't altered, but I believe it was simply the structure of how it was packaged.

Thanks, it looks like more extensive changes were made: CAM versions added, STEX file replaced with "SC4E Version" (not sure what that means and why it was done), dependencies added without explanation (I pride myself in uploading my files without dependencies), file version numbers changed. 

I'm surprised about the amount of changes that were done without consulting me. Was that a side-wide thing that I missed or something? 

[Propfam 2,286]

33 minutes ago, AndisArt said:

Was that a side-wide thing that I missed or something? 

Yup exactly. That's Ulisse and @Tyberius06 work over the past 2-3 years or so. We have been witnessing the biggest restoration project in history, since before that, we're arguing about "is restoring ethical and legal?" Now, it's time to leave that discussion and restoring all files as much as possible.

Addendum: because you're wondering, well it so happens that the restoration efforts comes with folder restructuring and coincidentally sc4pac couple years later. Earlier files, more specifically their zip files, got restructured and when sc4pac came about a year ago, it got restructured again to be more compatible with sc4pac. Afaik, they're all part of the same movement, Project Zip or Modpacc (depending who you ask). That's why I included all of them in the context of restoration.

[AndisArt 2,066]

1 minute ago, Propfam said:

Yup exactly. That's Ulisse and @Tyberius06 work over the past 2-3 years or so. We have been witnessing the biggest restoration project in history, since before that, we're arguing about "is restoring ethical and legal?" Now, it's time to leave that discussion and restoring all files as much as possible.

Only my files were not lost, so there was nothing to restore.