Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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20 years of game hacking knowledge about to disappear. Site admin taking down backups, including Internet Archive (alien.top)

submitted 2 years ago by Doubloon00@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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XeNTaX was a website with a 20-year history dedicated to reverse engineering video games. The site's forum included a lot of technical discussion, speculation, etc that can't be found anywhere else. The reverse engineering community already lost a similar forum, Zenhax, earlier this year.

There is a fundraiser to archive the site's modding tools & wiki, but the forum itself will be lost once the site shutters in less than 2 weeks (in fact, it's already privated).

Anyway, the site's owner has been openly opposed to archival efforts. I've seen full, functional backups of the forum go offline after he's requested they be taken down. He's also floating the idea of requesting that the Internet Archive delete their copies of the site's webpages.

This is all completely within his rights to do, and he has valid reasons for it, but still, the information contained within this forum is invaluable.

That being said, I suggest that anyone interested in video game reverse engineering try to save their own backups (from the Internet Archive) for personal use, before those are gone too.

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[–] Xeronolej@alien.top 1 points 2 years ago

Use a Large Language Model to ingest the entire forum. Then you could ask it anything and get an answer devoid of personal information. I can't recommend any particular tool, however. And, of course, this approach does not deliver anything like the same experience as browsing an anonymized forum. For some purposes it would be better, for some worse. Some responses would be wrong or just garbage.