Pix's Origin Adventures Is Offline!
Akalaupdate: It looks like the site has been restored to working order. WordPress.com evidently just goofed up.
Original Post:Oh, now that is unfortunate.
Pix may be known to some of you more for his rather excellent patching utility, but his primary claim to fame was — until now, at any rate — his excellent blog at WordPress.com, Pix’s Origin Adventures.
Which, as noticed today by Manuel Masias, appears to be no more.
This is actually quite a significant loss for a number of reasons, above and beyond the loss of Pix’s always insightful and informative commentaries on pretty much every game ever produced by Origin Systems. His blog also played host to scanned copies of numerous documents, manuals, ads, articles, and books pertaining to the Ultima games, the Wing Commander games, and various other Origin titles. You could even find PDF copies of The Official Book of Ultima there, and the occasional game demo as well. For sheer comprehensiveness and historical value, his site easily exceeded my own in value.
Update: And, to be fair, (as Dungy points out in the comments) those are still going to be available through Pix’s other website, at which he hosted all the downloads linked from his WordPress blog. I’m not sure he has download links anywhere on said other website, however.
Now, to be fair, that might have been what got him in trouble; most of the documents were copyrighted, and it may have been the case that some were still jealously guarded by their publisher(s). I’m trying to find out more information.
At any rate, this is a quite upsetting start to 2012.
As a note, all of the copyright documents he hosted are still available for download. It is only the wordpress site that has been taken down.
Good point. That warrants a correction.
First off, thanks for the generous write-up.
I’ve not got much information to give on this. I’ve had no contact from WordPress whatsover and only found out myself when going on the site. I think a complaint from a copyright holder is unlikely. According to the WordPress terms they are supposed to ask for the content to be removed in those circumstances, which I would have done of course had I been asked. More likely, someone at WordPress glanced at the lengthy downloads list and classified it as a warez site.
On the basis of no information, I can only speculate. If it was a complaint from a copyright holder, removing everything except the offending content would be particularly ineffectual.
The obvious solution for now is to host the site myself. I’ve registered http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk and should hopefully get it up and running fairly soon. To play it safe, I’m backing up the contents of my webserver before I do anything else which could take a while.
Thanks for the update, Pix.
Let me know if you need anything in the way of site support or hosting space, though I am assuming you have generous reserves of the latter and quite reasonable skill with the former.
It’s all up and running. I’m planning on making some improvements now I have my own site but it’s more or less as it was for now.
Slightly too late WordPress have got back to me and reopened the original blog. I was told that their system spontaneously closed my site for no reason. I wish I’d left it longer now before moving everything over, I’m just too proactive for my own good it seems. At least it means I’ve no concerns for the moment over the actual content.