World of Spectrum....

[PeterJ]

Hmmm...that would be an ecumenical matter!

I love that Father Ted episode!

[Mike Davies]

As for the forums - the search works as well as it can with 1m comments and the size of the database makes it very difficult to host anywhere but a dedicated service. It uses Sphinx as the search service which is about as good as it gets. Without Sphinx it takes 30-60 seconds to do a full search of the forums - with it, it takes less than a second.

The WoS forum posts amount to just over 1.1Gb uncompressed (distributed over 54,471 threads). That's well within the feature-set of a VPS.

Also, Google has a successful track record of making things findable and searchable. So allowing Google to crawl and index the forums is the first step towards making the forum searchable without needing a self-hosted search service (VPS or dedicated).

[EdwardCatflap]

Let’s tackle the elephant in the room..

Lee, I think it’s best for WOS and the Spectrum Community on a whole is if you give up WOS (or close it) and just leave the ‘scene’.

You have no credibility left, your part in the ZX Vega debacle and dubious attempts to get out of it and your ‘if you disagree with something I say I will ban you’ sulks has left your reputation in tatters. WOS is a mess since you took over. Broken links everywhere and the forums are dead.

Not forgetting your deliberate trolling of Zx Vega backers by taking a dog eared and beaten up Zx Vega to Spectrum 35.

Do the decent thing, just give it (WOS) up to someone who cares deeply for the Community or close it and let this site take over and get the scene back to what it was, nice friendly community chat about the ZX Spectrum and all things Sinclair related.

[R-Tape]

What do you really expect to achieve with that post? You've probably already said this to him/about him all over social media. If you think Lee should be held to account then do it over at WoS.

Any more attacks and you make SC look bad. Please stop it.

[Sokurah]

Lee, I think it’s best for WOS and the Spectrum Community on a whole is if you give up WOS (or close it) and just leave the ‘scene’.

You have no credibility left, your part in the ZX Vega debacle and dubious attempts to get out of it and your ‘if you disagree with something I say I will ban you’ sulks has left your reputation in tatters. WOS is a mess since you took over. Broken links everywhere and the forums are dead.

A lot of people aren't happy with the way WoS is being handled, but to call the forums dead is a bit of an exaggeration.
The search engine certainly is broken, but on the whole the forum does work. And that is something he has fixed.

To ask for him to close WoS is making yourself look like a moron though. By all means - nuke the Chit Chat section - that's worthless anyway ... but there's a lot of useful information on that forum, that it would be a damn shame to not have access to anymore.

[Ralf]

By all means - nuke the Chit Chat section - that's worthless anyway ...

If you close Chit-Chat, traffic on WOS will drop by about 80%

That's some bigger problem that many WOS users simply don't care about updates, about preservation of software, about working database and generally about Zx Spectrum. They just want to babble in Chit-Chat about their food, listened music, celebrity deaths, some jokes from Internet and so on.

These guys actually never complain on Lee as they have all they need.

One of problems for WOS is bad management but the other one would be these apathetic users who no longer show enthusiasm for Spectrum news.

I really hope that Chit-Chat section here won't be the most active section And that this place will be different, maybe smaller but with more valuable content.

[R-Tape]

I really hope that Chit-Chat section here won't be the most active section And that this place will be different, maybe smaller but with more valuable content.

That's my hope for the place too, and if in a few weeks our most active thread is still the World of Spectrum then we have a problem.

[Ast A. Moore]

Hmmm...that would be an ecumenical matter!

I love that Father Ted episode!

[Rorthron]

If in a few weeks our most active thread is still the World of Spectrum then we have a problem.

I'm not worried about that. This thread had been dead for a while before it got dredged up.

The vast majority of the posts here are interesting and Spectrum-related.

[balford]

Just in case things are hotting up. While I'm flabbergasted by some of his posts can we be sure we don't resort to insults. Don't give anyone a reason to hit the report post button.

I’d like to apologise for the tone of my earlier posts. You are completely right and there is indeed no need to stoop to that level.

[Mike Davies]

Lee, I think it’s best for WOS and the Spectrum Community on a whole is if you give up WOS (or close it) and just leave the ‘scene’.

That's not correct. Lee can keep WoS as his own personal fiefdom. The problem is having such a person, who has lost/thrown away the respect and credibility of large chunks of the Spectrum community as the sole gatekeeper of Spectrum content archives, where he can keep using his control to cut out people in the community he dislikes. That's now a solved problem - he doesn't control ZXDB.

The Spectrum Computing site, and ZXDB underneath have succeeded in creating a means of contributing that isn't impaired or controlled by this one gatekeeper. I'd urge you, instead of demanding that Lee leave, double down and contribute to Spectrum Computing and ZXDB, support those avenues as best you can. There is nothing Lee can do to interfere with the ZXDB dataset. His main ambition seems to be to duplicate a large chunk of work that's already available for free in ZXDB -- that's his choice. As Napolean once said, "Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake".

Do the decent thing, just give it (WOS) up to someone who cares deeply for the Community or close it and let this site take over and get the scene back to what it was, nice friendly community chat about the ZX Spectrum and all things Sinclair related.

This site -- and ZXDB -- doesn't need Lee's permission to be the community website for the ZX Spectrum. This site has to earn that level of respect from the Spectrum community, one person at a time. That's what Martijn had to do when he built the World of Spectrum.

If Lee (or his "team") was interested in collaboration, and avoiding duplicate effort, and taking advantage of titles that don't exist in WoS currently, he/they could collaborate as equals, and feed in corrections and updates back into ZXDB. Lee doesn't control ZXDB. ZXDB is open, and available for anyone to use, and so far I've not seen a single example of it's creator and curator saying to any site that they can't use ZXDB -- much the opposite, to Einar's credit.

[Mike Davies]

That's my hope for the place too, and if in a few weeks our most active thread is still the World of Spectrum then we have a problem.

If the thread continues to surface concerns about what the community loses if WoS disappears (e.g. the decade old and useful content hidden away deep inside the forum), that gives us time to mitigate these concerns. Community-wise that is a good thing.

The community has achieved much since August last year in safeguarding the archive from a possible WoS demise, to the point that we are no longer beholden to whomever hold the reigns. That is progress.

[Morkin]

By all means - nuke the Chit Chat section - that's worthless anyway ... but there's a lot of useful information on that forum, that it would be a damn shame to not have access to anymore.

Oi..! There's a lot of valuable culinary information in that forum that needs preserving... In the future who knows when someone might want to make a study on the unhealthy diets of middle age Spectrum owners...

[Juan F. Ramirez]

By all means - nuke the Chit Chat section - that's worthless anyway ... but there's a lot of useful information on that forum, that it would be a damn shame to not have access to anymore.

Oi..! There's a lot of valuable culinary information in that forum that needs preserving... In the future who knows when someone might want to make a study on the unhealthy diets of middle age Spectrum owners...

Absolutely agree man!

[Nomad]

By all means - nuke the Chit Chat section - that's worthless anyway ... but there's a lot of useful information on that forum, that it would be a damn shame to not have access to anymore.

Oi..! There's a lot of valuable culinary information in that forum that needs preserving... In the future who knows when someone might want to make a study on the unhealthy diets of middle age Spectrum owners...

That is the thing, people today can't know what the interests of the future fellows are in the past. With the preservation stuff I was always surprised things I didn't even think about at the time (tape inlays), promo stuff. Sure I think everyone knew to hang on to the games but the utilities? That is becoming a centre for study (in Atari personal computers, they have a whole podcast dedicated to productivity tools )

With storage space being cheap now (and getting cheaper) probably just best to gobble as much as possible and leave it to the future to decide what they want or don't want to look at lol.

[EdwardCatflap]

What do you really expect to achieve with that post? You've probably already said this to him/about him all over social media. If you think Lee should be held to account then do it over at WoS.

Any more attacks and you make SC look bad. Please stop it.

Attacks? Ok, apart from LOL, I’m just saying what a majority of the Spectrum scene think. Have you been following the Vega debacle? The personal attacks? The legal threats? The ‘Ive seen the Zx Vega in production claims’

Heck, the fact that 5 people have liked this compared to 2 that have liked your reply suggests that at least in this thread I’m not alone.

It does not make SC look bad at all, in fact it’s nice to hopefully have the ability to post an opinion rather than it being deleted and being banned (which would happen on WOS by Lee ‘I am always right’ Fogarty)

Anyone remember the Your Sinclair Rock and Roll years by the way?

Maybe the Zx Shed?

Have a look at the zxvega tag on twitter. It’s very interesting.

Oh, and this speaks volumes...

[R-Tape]

I am aware of the stuff you mention and I’m not necessarily saying that I disagree with you. Please consider this from our point of view, we're not saying WoS can't be discussed but we can’t have a thread with people falling over themselves to take pot shots at someone from another site (who is probably sat back laughing his cock off that SC is having to deal with it). The only thing it achieves is giving the mods here more reported posts to deal with.

You’ve got your bee sting in (did it make him stand down?), now I hope you’ll leave it at that.

[Einar Saukas]

My apologies for the late replies. I'm currently on vacation without regular Internet access these days, so it will take me a while to answer all posts targeted at me in this thread...

That's exactly what we are all working to prevent!

Funny, I thought your objective was simply to maintain a database.

Correct. ZXDB is "simply" a database created with the objective of preserving WoS archive data. It started at the time Lee decided to quit and there was no replacement plan.

Likewise, SC and ZXInfo are "simply" archive front-ends. Archive.org is "simply" a repository, that stores the WoS archive mirror. SC forum is "simply" a forum.

Those are separate initiatives by different people that independently work to achieve a common goal: to preserve the valuable information that WoS provided.

First off, it's rare that Archive.org captures all publicity available data. Second, it's even less likely to capture non-publicly available data, or get pages/data if there are broken links. So when did Archive.org crawl WoS? When WoS was not being maintained by Martijn or more recently?

It doesn't really matter since WoS archive content hasn't changed in the last 5 years. I just know these files were certainly copied before December 2016 because they don't have this problem.

Please also note that Archive.org is just as venerable to server or hard drive failure as any other site. Earlier this year, I could not access a site archived on Archive.org due to a system failure. I don't know if this was a temporary failure or something else.

Earlier last month (Nov 9th) I could not access parts of WoS either, due to a system failure. Are you trying to argue that Archive.org is less reliable than WoS?

SpectrumComputing only has a fraction of copyright holders permissions compared to WoS.

Obviously. All permissions for titles currently distributed by WoS were obtained on 2 decades of work under Martijn management.

However notice that, since Martijn left, WoS has been loosing permissions (such as System 3) and SC has been acquiring permissions (such as Zenobi).

If everyone really values the online archive and Sinclair computer internet presence, then you should support all web sites that are about the Sinclair computers (ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum etc) including WoS.

I'm glad we agree on something!

For exactly this reason, ZXDB has maintained and updated all site integrations from the original WoS Infoseek (Tipshop, Spectrum 2.0, CrashOnline, Lemon64, etc) and added new ones (RZX Archive, ZX-Art, Speccy Screenshot Maps, ZX81Stuff, CASA, Mobygames, etc). Most of these sites now provide links to corresponding pages at SC/ZXInfo and vice-versa. Moreover every game webpage at SC gives a link to both ZXInfo and WoS, and every game webpage at ZXInfo gives a link to both SC and WoS.

We are all following Martijn's philosophy on supporting all other sites. It's unfortunate that WoS doesn't believe on this idea anymore.

The infighting that has happened in recent times helps no one. So let's see some community spirit and goodwill for the New Year

Within the spirit of New Year goodwill, I would like to reiterate my offer to help new WoS on converting, fixing and organizing the entire content of old WoS archive. Although that's work already done in ZXDB, I volunteer to import all this content into new WoS, into whatever format or database schema is needed.

And there are a number of other Sinclair computers web sites that would love more support

If you can suggest any other Sinclair computers web site that ZXDB doesn't support yet, please let me know. I would like to support them all!

[Einar Saukas]

There's videos, loads of additional files for publishers, people, etc., the denied titles, books, denied magazines, hi-res inlays & numerous other documents.

These are files that Martijn decided to keep out of WoS archive. Either to save bandwidth (like hi-res inlays) or because distribution was denied.

The non-denied part of this material could be added to ZXDB now.

[EdwardCatflap]

I am aware of the stuff you mention and I’m not necessarily saying that I disagree with you. Please consider this from our point of view, we're not saying WoS can't be discussed but we can’t have a thread with people falling over themselves to take pot shots at someone from another site (who is probably sat back laughing his cock off that SC is having to deal with it). The only thing it achieves is giving the mods here more reported posts to deal with.

You’ve got your bee sting in (did it make him stand down?), now I hope you’ll leave it at that.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to give him any more attention than he always appears to seek. I’ve said what I wanted to say and feel it needed to be said. I personally feel there is too much ‘walking on eggshells’ when it comes to him and WOS, hence my post.

I also fully appreciate the fact I can post such a comment here.

Of course he won’t stand down, mores the pity.

[hitm4n]

Lee, I think it’s best for WOS and the Spectrum Community on a whole is if you give up WOS (or close it) and just leave the ‘scene’.

That's not correct. Lee can keep WoS as his own personal fiefdom. The problem is having such a person, who has lost/thrown away the respect and credibility of large chunks of the Spectrum community as the sole gatekeeper of Spectrum content archives, where he can keep using his control to cut out people in the community he dislikes. That's now a solved problem - he doesn't control ZXDB.

The Spectrum Computing site, and ZXDB underneath have succeeded in creating a means of contributing that isn't impaired or controlled by this one gatekeeper. I'd urge you, instead of demanding that Lee leave, double down and contribute to Spectrum Computing and ZXDB, support those avenues as best you can. There is nothing Lee can do to interfere with the ZXDB dataset. His main ambition seems to be to duplicate a large chunk of work that's already available for free in ZXDB -- that's his choice. As Napolean once said, "Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake".

Do the decent thing, just give it (WOS) up to someone who cares deeply for the Community or close it and let this site take over and get the scene back to what it was, nice friendly community chat about the ZX Spectrum and all things Sinclair related.

This site -- and ZXDB -- doesn't need Lee's permission to be the community website for the ZX Spectrum. This site has to earn that level of respect from the Spectrum community, one person at a time. That's what Martijn had to do when he built the World of Spectrum.

If Lee (or his "team") was interested in collaboration, and avoiding duplicate effort, and taking advantage of titles that don't exist in WoS currently, he/they could collaborate as equals, and feed in corrections and updates back into ZXDB. Lee doesn't control ZXDB. ZXDB is open, and available for anyone to use, and so far I've not seen a single example of it's creator and curator saying to any site that they can't use ZXDB -- much the opposite, to Einar's credit.

This is spot on. Well said Mark. Support this forum, this site and ZXDB. I hope Einar will continue to update ZXDB for a long time to come and i hope this site can become all it wants to be.

[Mike Davies]

I think Einar, again, has nailed it perfectly when it comes to genuine inclusivity. ZXDB contains links to ZX Spectrum Reviews (currently offline, hopefully temporary), the TipShop, CASA (for adventure solutions). That's bringing together various community resources. I hope this is just the low-hanging-fruit, and it goes further, that ZXDB references any useful/informative online resource that relates to a particular entry: catalogue title, publisher, developer, label.

Like the entry for Avalon linking to Steve Turner's blog post talking about how he developed it as an event tree (http://graftgold.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07 ... ntrol.html), and Steve Wetherill on how he achieved the fast scrolling on Sidewize (http://stevewetherill.com/2015/02/24/th ... enanigans/); Graeme Mason's interview with Giovanni Zanetti about the making of Pippo (http://www.wizwords.net/the-making-ofpippo/).

Or, more technical things, like notes by people who have disassembled/reverse engineered games, like this one about The Great Escape (http://dpt.github.io/The-Great-Escape/) -- that was mentioned in another thread here.

Why should the only references for titles be 30-year old magazine articles? We're at the point where journalists, writers and fans are doing wonderful work in finding out about the games we grew up with. We are in a time where there's a growing interest and fascination about Spectrum games, developers and publishers. And ZXDB is in a great place to bring this knowledge together around the catalogue of titles (new and old). This will be a boon to people using ZXDB-powered sites to find out more about a game they are interested in.

[PeterJ]

Hi [mention]Mike Davies[/mention] I see no reasons why these hyperlinks can't be added. We already have hyperlinks for authors and publishers. I suggest you send a PM to [mention]Einar Saukas[/mention] . We could extend the project you are working on to accept these as people find useful hyperlinks.

[Einar Saukas]

A number of inappropriate allegations involving myself were posted in this thread, about the time I was leaving on vacation, so I couldn't address them properly. Now that I have somewhat sorted out most accumulated work during my absence, it's finally time for me to address these points.

My apologies for resurrecting this discussion, but I couldn't leave false claims unanswered...

[Einar Saukas]

But for further clarity, I also offered to write the javascript needed to access the WoS magazines API and display the thumbnails correctly, and ultimately by default have access to the hi-res pages without needing any additional work. Strangely that offer was ignored by the team here with no explanation.

Interesting.

You never really supported Spectrum Computing. Although you stated that Spectrum Computing and ZXDB were both censored at WoS forum without your knowledge (November 2017), 3 months later you are still keeping the Spectrum Computing thread blocked without an explanation.

The only time you really "offered support" to Spectrum Computing, it was actually an attempt to undermine and replace ZXDB. A week before Christmas, you contacted Spectrum Computing administrators without my knowledge, trying to convince them to adopt your new WoS API instead of ZXDB for magazines (initially), and expressing your desire for them to also do the same in other areas later.

Curiously, if Spectrum Computing had accepted your "offer", it would have less information about magazines, instead of more. At the time you made your offer, Spectrum Computing already provided MAGAZINE REFERENCES from pages about games and companies, for example. Just clicking on any of those links will open the magazine page. Or check all games referenced by a specific magazine issue, for instance. All this information is obtained from ZXDB database. In comparison, even nowadays your new WoS API can only provide magazines without any information about games, authors, and publishers related to them.

is it really surprising that Spectrum Computing wasn't interested in your "offer"?