Quake Expo 2001

Talk about the Quake Expo and Quake Speed events.
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FrikaC
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Quake Expo 2001

Post by FrikaC »

It lives:

http://qexpo2001.quakedev.com

Here's a short history of Quake Expo 2001, where it was an where it went...

Quake Expo (2001) was initiated by CocoT, Horn and Jared "JBallou" Ballou worked on the PHP and the site design was created by nane, formerly NaNe, formerly iNaNe. The site was mostly hosted on Horn's domain, condemned.com.

Half of the site (all the downloadable (zip, etc) files) were stuffed on Horn's second account which he got in response to my desire to create a website called "Quake Portal" which would be a mix of the old MDQNet (basically everyone with an account in good standing could post news, links and so forth) with nice forums and things. nane made the design for Quake Portal, Horn bought the hosting and ze0 paid for the domain name.

Prior to the domain name activation, the site needed to be referred to by ip address, so, people who participated in Quake Expo may remember the ip that all your files went to. For QuakePortal, I believe SantaClaws was on board as the PHP coder, somewhere in the course of events, the site never really got off the ground. ze0 refused to renew the domain name, and the domain was quickly snatched up by cyber squatters.

A year later, we decided to hold a second expo (Quake Expo 2003), and since I still had complete access to the quakeportal space and Horn was still contactable, I bought the domain name qexpo.com through Ender of quakesrc.org and it was set up to point to the quakeportal space. This qexpo.com was hosting most of the files from Quake Expo 2001.

SantaClaws set up the site for Quake Expo 2003, but refused to use the MySQL server the hosting company provided because, and I quote "It's too slow". Instead, he used a mysql server at his work, which was fine during the expo, but shortly thereafter it would no longer accept connections from qexpo.com and repeatedly blocked the requests, resulting in the site to cease function often. I sent main emails to SantaClaws during the two hiatus until Quake Expo 2005, trying to get the site back up.

I believe in 2004 or 2005 Horn popped into the Inside3D forums to say he was going to stop paying for condemned and qexpo.com's hosting because "why pay for a site I don't use". Both expos went down immediately, but not before I made a complete backup of qexpo.com.

A few months later, I tried to once again renew the qexpo.com domain name when I got notice it was about to expire. I sent emails to Ender, but his only response, via IRC, was "I should get on that". He was never heard from again and the domain name soon expired and was promptly cyber squatted.

So here we are today. I managed, through much effort, to recreate the Quake Expo 2001 site from what little of it existed on the qexpo.com hosting. The upside is there was a complete copy of the web design, some of the php files and all of the downloadable files. The rest, everything on qexpo.condemned.com: the booth images and html and database were not accessible by me. I reconstructed them from the Wayback Machine, and while I got the html code of every booth no problem, many uploaded images (when you uploaded files to the original expo, images went to qexp.condemned.com and everything else went to qexpo.com) were unretrievable or not archived.

If SantaClaws or Horn shows up I can upload & fix Qexpo 2003 and 2001 respectively. I hold little hope for Horn re-appearing, so I went through all that trobule remaking the site from the Wayback machine.
CocoT
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Post by CocoT »

Oh my God, Frik, this is awesome.
This must have been so much work for you.
This is a great contribution to the community. I thought I'd never see that site again :)
Muchos Kudos :)
Sajt
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Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 3:39 am

Post by Sajt »

Masterful! Commendable! Woo
F. A. Špork, an enlightened nobleman and a great patron of art, had a stately Baroque spa complex built on the banks of the River Labe.
Spirit
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Post by Spirit »

This is so awesome. Thank you VERY much, FrikaC. Wow. :shock:
Sajt
Posts: 1215
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 3:39 am

Post by Sajt »

Spirit, I'm away for the weekend, when I get back I'll try to get those stupid files downloaded. If it doesn't work I'll get Echon to give you the FTP password because you're probably better at it than I am.
F. A. Špork, an enlightened nobleman and a great patron of art, had a stately Baroque spa complex built on the banks of the River Labe.
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