Trivia / Sprite Wars

• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Being a site that has been around since 2004, Sprite wars has developed it's fair share of gaps when it comes to site history. Unfortunate coincidences have made this semi-ignorable problem far more serious.
  • The main site used by most Sprite wars members was majhost. "Was" because at the start of 2015, the site inexplicably went down. It's not too hard to guess what has happened to almost all the site's threads as a result of this. Of course, the pre-crash situation was no idyllic paradise either. Many links were dead years before majhost's latest crash, the victims of users who chose to wipe their accounts of content. In addition, Majhost was never really a stable site in recent years. It would have "Down for maintenance" periods every once in a while, and sometimes take the images in people's accounts with it during these periods.
  • The Internet archive could've been a good place to go to find many of these long lost images... if it weren't for the fact that Sprite wars-related majhost URLs were seemingly never archived by their automated crawlers, and no-one on Sprite wars itself did so either.
    • Despite this, there was one user who did make a half-hearted attempt to save the still substantial amount of Sprite wars images on majhost on the Internet archive... in 2014. And many of those saved pages are useless thumbnails, and a few "page not found" URLs.
  • And that's just majhost! Imageshack was another site that many Sprite wars users posted their works on. Then around 2012, the instituted limits on how many images users could have on their accounts for free, and just like that, a huge chunk of sprite wars history is thrown into the void, including many threads posted in the "Sprite comics" section that only the original makers presumably still have the comics for. This merciless deletion of an uncounted number of images, which Sprite wars is only one small part of earned imageshack the moniker "Imageshit".
  • There is a bright side to all this. Nobody on the site is ignorant of this massive problem. There's a Sprite wars drop box page made for posting sprites and comics, and will likely remain in use even if majhost comes back. However, it consists primarily of sprites and comics from the current campaigns, and only those with permission from Commander Evil may use it.
  • A few older tidbits are there. The first 500 Sprite wars comics can be downloaded here and here.
  • Recently, Shiki (who has long been concerned about the site's inadequately archived history), started the "Sprite wars archive project" to finally get as many campaigns as possible archived and available for public consumption again with the aid of anyone in the community who might be able to help. Which would be great, except users haven't exactly been galvanized into helping remedy the problem. Not helping matters is the large amount of members who could be able to help that have seemingly vanished off the face of the earth. As such, slim pickings await anyone who wants to delve into the grand history of Sprite wars without bothering the veterans.
  • As of this writing, said pickings include:
    • Almost all the Color Coated Campaign comics.
    • Global Campaign 2 comics from before and after Majhost kicked the bucket.
    • A decent amount of comics from the Biohazard campaign.
    • Before the Archive Project was announced, Commander Evil had already set up a dropbox folder dedicated to comics from the Grand Campaign, wherein he reposted all his old comics (A major contribution, since they were deleted years before majhost's crash by the aforementioned imageshack updates ). Though they can be interesting (and occasionally funny) to read through, users unfamiliar with the GC will find some aspects confusing. Spartan 117 also posted his comics, but so far only a few from select story lines, which will prove far more confusing to members without relatively good knowledge of several different plots and races from that era than CE's comics.
    • Criticisms of the wayback machine aside, patient users will still be able to read through the majority of the Global campaign comics posted there. Some comics from other campaigns have been saved, but in smaller quantities, and only the ones that were viewable right up until majhost went down.
    • Let's put it this way: if there's a dead link on Sprite wars that was un-viewable at any point before Majhost went down on January 1st of 2015, it's been a source of confusion.
    • Some other members also may or may not be in possession of complete .zip archives of various campaigns, but are unable to post them.

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