Unlike the previous MacGarden, moderators are still able to delete postings and comments...

There is always room for (more) Mac abandonware sites on the web. I'm surprised there are not more, honestly, especially from other countries. It seems only France is the other country/language represented.

How would you "base" an AbWare site, ie; you keep the stuff elsewhere, RS,MS,DF or whatever, but the main site? Should/could you use Blogger or something like that; premade, some security, rather painless maintainance[sp?]. Or should you build from scratch in PHP, ASP, whatever? Pros and cons please…

I don't know but Winblows users seem to manage alright; there are scores of various sites out there for DOS/Windows abandonware. Frankly I'd like to see more sites run by benevolent dictators rather than this wiki approach. Wikis are great for some things and lousy for others. I suppose it could be as simple as using a free hosting service and a Google Group or something like that, as long as there's one owner to upload files.

In any case it sure would be better if there were more sites available, since the internet is so ephemeral and these things are likely to disappear from time to time.

Take the creation process of this site:

He contacted us, Daxeria and me, because on the old page we placed a help call for a new admin, knowing only Miss Underdogs (benevolent dictator of HOTU - nice title at all)
is able to change the access to the site (Who not responded to our help call[s]).

He contacted us a few days before the hoster of the old site went down, but called us,
he could start to develop the site three months later from now on (what he did as you can see here).

Now we are independent of HOTU, which is a bit of advantage at all.

So I simply vote for: he is just a bit busy yet, but will return some day (hoping soon, still).

…check the recently uploaded games here…

But seriously; Atilla; you dislike the wiki/blog approach? How about running a messageboard? No fancy graphics but a butt-load of admin stuff to keep up with. Those places tend to get trolled/spammed a lot, if you want to keep an open community. I´m asking for opinions and advice.

I like the wiki approach as it is here, as it is very flexible and doesn't need a benevolent dictator ( what an euphemism ) ) to keep track of everything every day. I also think there is no need for another site, never found much advantage in the fragmented fan scenes of the internet and would rather love to see everyone working on one BIG site instead of dozens of small ones.

And I agree with IIGS User that Maedi is simply a bit busy right now (we all know these times in our lives) and will probably return soon. Like I suggested before, those who have his phone number / ICQ / Skype details may contact him to ask what's going on and then let us now what the situation is. That way we'd know what the deal is and could react to that. Everything else is wild speculation and to a certain degree unfair towards Maedi who invested his free time & money to rebuild the Mac Garden.

This Wiki approach is great and efficient as long as there's someone keeping an eye
on the site,
there are actually not many users who post comments here everyday,
so it's really easy to have control over everything, including trolls,

On a personal opinion, I wouldn't like MacGarden to be too open or too big,
this is like my little personal corner on the Internet where one can talk about
something I really like (The Macintosh/Apple computers) without being bugged
too much by trolls or other people who are not really into this,

So I hope this site be kept as small as it is.

I just don't think we all have to sit back and expect there to be only one site for everything. I love the Mac Garden, but it's a conflicted kind of love. I've found out about lots of things I didn't know about before, but then it's so easy for someone to come along and crap all over the contributions you've made. All I'm saying is, I wish there were more alternatives so that we don't have all our eggs in one basket. The pickings out there right now are very slim.

As long as the Mac Garden exists it will always be my top bookmark.

Attila's thoughts are good. Remember when the old MG slowly desintegrated by neglactance, spam and trolls? The alternatives were scarse and often old w bad links etc. Some stuff were on HL/Kdx. For a while. When the time or/and resources ran out for the maintainers there were no alternatives.

A couple of sites running in parallell w MG is no problem. They could carry a special selcetion, be personal or genre; like 'Layout Apps', 'Adventures' or… The duplicates or smaller selection of titles is no problem in my view. As long as there´s a copy available from a site on a linklist carried by the different sites the whole would work as a sort of back-up.

It´s a lot places to keep up to but it would mean a lot more to choose from. And w MG as the natural centre. How about those thoughts?

I'm still here and will update all soon.

I think a 2nd mac abandonware site is a good idea, i mean, what were to happen if this site's server shut down tonight.

I remember the old server shut down with no warning what so ever, and i was left with no way to get my beloved old games.

If there was to be a 2nd site, they would all link back to Mac Garden, and Mac Garden would link to them.

Ok, this might sound a bit farfetched but how about a hotline server as an alternative (second) archive (kind of like the old retromac 68k.) Obviously, someone has to supply the machine and the bandwidth but they are relatively easy to set up with no hosting costs. Doesn't have to be 24/7 either; could be up when problems occur with the main site or by request. Oh and i'm not volunteering either; i have only 1 big hard drive and it's almost full now..sorry

IIRC there was a Win client of HL?

yes, i believe for win, mac and linux. carracho was/is mac only

I think HL/Carracho/KDX is fine with smaller files as they can´t be shared in download, like b!tt0rrent. The download is coming from one source every time. But then we have CD-images which takes a bit to get down. A server running this applications must have a very good connection. And as people tend to lose patience quick when behind the keyboard the server should have good accessibility, ie ~24/7.
Retromac68k is/was mostly smaller files but even then it took a fair time to get something up/down compared with dedicated file servers. Even if we´re talking RS.

why not upload the most downloaded files to media fire and then link to them (here)?

I'm around; really busy though. After mid-May I should be around more, but I don't know for how long. I'll probably spend a lot of time coding an improved site (if I can't find any help it will take a lot longer.) The improved site would have many current flaws taken care of; moving data again would be a pain though, but the current site just isn't cutting it (it's difficult to moderate, even).

if any of you have issues, don't forget email!!! arm3...@gmail.com gets to me within hours.

--Balrog