File Wikis

I did say I would add a few twists to my file hosting to set it apart didn’t I?! Well I’m not sure how unique this is, not that it matters, but I have solved a problem faced by spring for years.

People like smoth have spent hours uploading mini maps, countless pictures, fields to fill in, requests for authors to modify things. Then, horrifically, it all gets washed away when someone makes a typo or the site goes down and needs to eb restored. Well now there’s an open way of adding and updating content descriptions, adding sub pages, sub categories, links, howtos, all in wiki form. That’s right, each and every file has its own dokuwiki category to play with that anyone registered can modify or amend.

What happens about backup and storage? Dokuwiki and the entire file hosting site is flat file and nice and simple. The entire system can be packed up and shipped somewhere else for storage at a moments notice. The only thing server specific is a handful of path variables in a settings file.

As you may have noticed from the conveniently placed image, I have also added mini maps for spring maps. These mini maps are currently linked from other hosts but I am interested in local copies.

Bandwidth at darkstars has also breached the 1% barrier for the first time ever! To help support the site, I’ve added a small google text advert to the side bar of the main site. Its not particularly needed as I have more than enough bandwidth, but its my aim that over the next 3 years I can reclaim the money I spent and break even, or who knows, buy a better server and boost the download speeds.

Stay tuned for further improvements!

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File Hosting

With the recent mess up at Unknown Files and the absence of iamacup, UF has remained down for the last week. In its place has risen 2 new hosts ran by sefidel and JJ, however these are not the best solution and have their own problems.

Licho has also devised an alternative to hosting entirely, by distributing an application that uses p2p torrents, but despite the high potential download speeds and the robustness of p2p, it does have downfalls, such as when all the seeders have gone offline and nobody has the file you want.

I on the other hand have vast amounts of unused bandwidth going to waste every week, more than enough to provide the spring community with the necessary bandwidth to serve files. Thus I have setup a subsite to provide files. Feel free to upload your maps and mods here.

Presenting Darkstars Downloads!

http://www.darkstars.co.uk/downloads/

Updates will be made to the underlying scripts to provide more information and improve reliability. This does not mean I do not support lichos effort either, and I have several projects in line to support both this site and lichos new p2p system.

While JJ and sefidels hosts are assumed to be temporary, my new sub site is not, and I intend to keep it running as long as possible.

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AFLobby Beta 4

A long overdue release with a lot of fixes, and new additions, including support for lua and map options.

AFLobby beta 4 Installer

AFLobby beta 4 zip

Posted in AFLobby, Spring, lobby development | 4 Comments »