IMHO, we should first try to contact Hans and see if he's willing or not to allow the re-hosting of his website somewhere. But so far it looks like nobody had any feedback from him since the shut-down anouncement?
I'm currently downloading the whole msx.hansotten.com site from archive.org, using a download script, that does some neat stuff with parsing the URL's that archive.org changes. It tells me it's downloading 3284 files, and it's the archive.org snapshot of january 9th. It's extremely slow but it seems to work fine. As I'm typing it's working on the upload-dir, and I'm getting lots of PDF, pictures, ZIPs and stuff. So I guess most of it will be there when it's done. It should even recreate a static html to navigate it as is was, I'm curious if that's actually working.
The question is, what will I do with it when it's finished? I could host it on one of my webservers, but I don't think that's a good idea for now. Yet all this info should not get lost either.
What's happened is very bad news and I think we should all consider if hosting all the knowledge we currently have in personal websites is a good for the system in the long place.
I’ve seen several things disappear from github as well unfortunately. Free hosting does not prevent the author from removing the repository. Nevertheless, the MAP is also on Bitbucket.
A reliable and convenient way seems to me to upload service manuals and such to archive.org, and link to them from the machine articles here on the msx.org wiki.
I'd also be possible to create an organization (msxorg?) and maintain the documentation efforts by a group of people.
That is actually what the MRC foundation is/was about: preservation of MSX information, to prevent valuable content getting lost forever when one-man-shows or communities like Geocities go down. As Indiana Jones would say: "it belongs in a museum".
I’ve seen several things disappear from github as well unfortunately. Free hosting does not prevent the author from removing the repository. Nevertheless, the MAP is also on Bitbucket.
That's why I suggested to create an organization managed by several people.
I didn't know MAP was in Bitbucket! When Hans' website disappeared the first think I thought was how terrible would be if it happened the same with MAP... I'm more relieved now :)
Also to combat linkrot, if I link to something not hosted by my server (such as “Programming the Z80” by Zaks) I always save a copy locally in case the original site goes down.
p.s. Admin, maybe adjust the thread title to reflect the contents?
My download from archive.org is finished. 3446 files, 2.3GB, from january 9th 2019, so pretty recent. It seems all content is there, but the html generated mostly link files / jpg and such to the actual website. However, as the content is just there with some replace-commands that seems to be an easy fix. If anyone is interested, let me know.
