Our last major file dump?

We are happy to announce that after this week’s upload of 300+ files on our Arts & Files archive, Defacto2 is finish! Well by that we really mean the long queue of files for processing that we have sat on for years is finally now complete. This means unless we receive a large and unexpected future file donation there will probably be no more large, bulk file updates such as this.

These are some of the highlights of this current dump, enjoy.

• The mysql-pre-database pre-release or dupe-check SQL database with nearly a million listed scene releases that was briefly floating around in 2007.
• Beta and pre-release PC and console cracktros from the late 1990s for Paradox and Fusion.
• Insider newsletters, documentation and test art for said groups.
• Logos and raster art for many groups and sites.
• Roy/SAC’s scene font and pixel art logo collection file packs. We have decided to host these as his website is now off-line
• NFOs and intros for various release groups and BBS/FTP sites from the 1990s.
• A Q&A conducted over e-mail that Ipggi did on the impact and history of the humble nfo text file.

November refresh

It may have seemed that we have been a little quiet at Defacto2 of late but there has been a bit of work behind the scenes. This week a significant backend upgrade has been rolled out to improve usability and file navigation.

• Redesigned the ‘Arts & files’, ‘Organisations’, ‘People’ and ‘Our favourite sites’ items navigation. To me it looks more cluttered but it should be more logical and easier to use. The categories and platforms have been given more meaningful names and have small descriptors that popup when the mouse is hovered over the link. While the navigation controls have now been clustered together. Thumbnails now have Sort By headers rather than being thumbnail icons lined side-by-side.
• Introduced a HTML 3 edition of the site. Only the Art & files section of the site has been converted into this mostly text based, legacy format. I thought some people on slower connections or who are using legacy PC’s to obtain the hosted files would prefer this format. Plus seeing as the site is mostly focused on the online activities of the 1990s it seemed apt that we introduced a mock 1990s, web FTP edition of Defacto2. You can find this retro mode at www.defacto2.net/html3
• Removed all the social network buttons within the site (except the welcome page) as they potentially tracked users and slowed the site down. If you want to remove all tracking (such as Google Adsense, Google Analytics etc) visit HTTPS://www.defacto2.net instead of HTTP://www.defacto2.net
• Twitter has removed all support for RSS/Atom feeds which the Defacto2 welcome page relied on for the Twitter Wall function. This feature has been temporarily removed but will return once the it has been reproduced using Twitter’s 1.1v API.
• Added improved tablet and mobile phone CSS optimisations.
• Individual groups, sites and organisation now have their own XML feeds that you can use with a feed reader to track their new file submissions.

File navigation changes

HTML 3 formatted file browsing

A minor Defacto2 refresh

Today brings Defacto2.net a nice site-wide point release update. With a significant tweaking of both the back and the front ends we hope to improve your user experience by bring a more unified site-wide theme in addition to some critical bug corrections.

One of the major changes is the complete overhaul of the CSS implementation which is rebuilt from scratch and offers extra CSS 3 values. The CSS is now translated into the Javascript based LESS dynamic stylesheet extender which allows a more structured code with less redundancy.

The new CSS implementation supports tablets such as the IPad held in either landscape or portrait modes. For example if viewed in portrait mode the site’s font sizes will automatically upscale.

Site wide searching is fixed and is reworked to into something more useful. We have introduced more attractive search term highlighting as well as more flexible result filtering.

We have optimised some of the site features such as viewing a file’s details to better support wide-screen monitors. Whereby the text based file information will remain on the left pane while video and image previews will float on a right pane.

Anyway take a browse through when you get a chance and please let us know what you think.

A Merry Bulletin Board System Christmas

Hey guys, here at Defacto2 we thought we would give you an early Christmas present by finally making public our collection of BBS files we have been sitting on for far too long. We are happy to give you nearly 1,600 new files to explore and play with. This new addition to our collection now increases our curated, public holdings by 45%!

Most of the files in this new collection are sourced worldwide from over 400 elite PC Bulletin Board Systems from the early 1990s. It was in a era when the BBS was at it’s peak and the underground art and demo scenes were just finding their footing including ACiD, Aces of Ansi Art, Bitchin Ansi Design, GRiM, Hype, iCE, LTD, Mirage, Superior Art Creations, Silicon Dream Artists.

So please explore this collection of ANSI art, coded adverts, session and screen captures to take a nostalgia trip back to the elite underground of 20 years ago!

https://www.defacto2.net/organisation/list/bbs/less/0/1

Scene Persons and File Credits Are Now Interactive

I am happy to announce that the final piece of the revamped Defacto2.net website is complete; the ‘People’ pages are now enabled. This new section contains the names of the people behind many of the files hosted and curated on the site. Not only are the credits now interactive but every person listed receives a dedicated site page listing all the files they have been accredited with.

These credits have been broken down into four sections, writers, coders, musicians and artists. The writer credits are not only given out to authors but also to interviewers and interviewees. While the artists category includes image creators, 3D programmers and font designers.

So far we have over 1,200 different people listed but the list is quite incomplete and likely to contain some typographical errors and duplications. Another potential problem is that many artists have used multiple aliases and even 2 letter initials rather than complete aliases when signing their works, which makes it too time consuming for us to accurately correlate the correct authorship for many files.

Persons are now also baked into our search engine, so if you do not feel like trawling through huge lists of aliases you can instead type an alias into the search dialogue.

Here are a couple of people pages to get started with.

The artist H20 who is known for his distinctive logos.
http://www.defacto2.net/person/h20

The programmer Hitchikr who has been the key figure behind some of the best scene crack-intros ever created on Windows.
http://www.defacto2.net/person/hitchhikr

The musician Maktone whose late 1990s tunes conjures up a slight nostalgia to a more naive scene.
http://www.defacto2.net/person/maktone

The personality The Renegade Chemist, whose longwinded ramblings often instigated both distain and laughter in equal dosage.
http://www.defacto2.net/person/the-renegade-chemist

The search results for the prolific programmer Hetero who has been going strong since the early 1990s.
http://www.defacto2.net/search/result?searchterm=hetero

Browse for Magazines the easy way.

For this entry I will show you how to discover scene magazines and publications the easy way. Let’s say you were looking for the following publications such as the 1990s Reality Check Network or 2000s The Game Scene Charts. Many people may just go to the Arts & File tab, select Magazine from the Quick Links only to painfully sort through the individual issues alphabetically or by publication date.

Listing magazines via the Arts & Files tab.

The easier way would be to select the Organisations tab and then apply the Magazine Publisher filter. This will then only list the current 67x organisations who have published a magazine, often self-titled. You could browse through these organisations and find the magazines titles you were chasing.

Filter to only display magazine publishers in the Organisations tab.

Scrolling down to The Game Scene Charts

Displaying the organisation page for The Game Scene Charts

Search Auto-discovery.

Recently we have included standardised OpenSearch auto-discovery for users of Firefox and Chrome. This enables you to quickly search our site directly from your web browser.

Chrome users can use their address bar to immediately search us. After visiting the site for the first time they simply need to type defacto2.net and then a space or a tab to bring up the Defacto2 search as shown in the capture below.

Chrome auto-search example.

Firefox users can quickly add Defacto2 search to their search bar. When visiting defacto2.net they can Add Defacto2 to their collection of site search engines.

Firefox search bar example.

Defacto2: New and Improved for 2011!

Finally after years of good intentions, 20 months of travelling distractions combined with numerous random work and personal distractions we can finally bring you the new and improved 2011 revision of Defacto2!

As mentioned this revision has been in the works for years and in fact it is probably the 4^th attempt at this goal. Previous updates were abandoned due to interruptions and ill conceived over complex design choices that had led to unfortunate dead ends. Thankfully that was not the case with this current implementation where we applied the kiss philosophy otherwise known as keep-it-simple-stupid.

Browsing the Eagle Soft Corp page

So besides the obvious aesthetic changes what has been improved?

• Defacto2 operates on a unified database that enables site wide searching and the grouping of files.
• Simplified and fastened the site navigation that is located in a single position no matter where you are on the site.
• Identified that the site is primary about the hosted files and we have reorganised the navigation and sections to reflect the most common ways users will look for resources; via authors, via organisations who create (such as art groups); organisations who publish (such as release groups). These are in addition to our traditional type-categories such as crack-intros, documents, nfos, etc.
• Art & file navigation were inspired from well developed search engines such as Bing and Google. We have added helpful drilldown options for filtering files by platform or media type and categories. Example, here are all our nfo tools for windows, our collection of ANSI logos, our video downloads.
• We decided there was no need to reinvent the wheel and so converted the old news section into a blog over at WordPress.
• Integrated contemporary social media with accessible Twitter dialogs, Google+ buttons, Facebook like buttons for individual files and organisations.
  For usability we have incorporated key visual elements from the hosted files to the site including large thumbnails, preview captures, document captures, file_id.diz displays and live YouTube embedding. This detail page for an intro for Origin by SAE is a good example of these features in use.
• File detail pages contain extra features such as the file md5 checksum; the listing of files and directories in archive packages; text, program and image content previews and a bug report submission form for user corrections.
• Art & files now have expanded credits that support multiple writing, programming, art and music authors as seen in this publication from Affinity.
• Programmed the site using common web standards with the goal of making it usable with non-traditional computing devices including touch tablets and smart phones.
• A much improved upload and file submission system that now adds much more automation and speed to the file upload approval process. Users can provide their own screen captures and data for the submission.
• A common help section that keeps all our in-house resources and how-to’s in a general area.
• In-house site search that scans and pulls results directly from our database.
• Site wide HTTPS support for encrypted browsing.
• A liberal copyright license – Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.

Server Migration

For the first time in 6 years we have decided to change web hosting providers. This is the first stage in a long process of giving Defacto2 a much needed internal update whereby we will eventually simplify and unify the data within the website. One of the big changes with the move has the switching of server platforms. Previously we used Microsoft Windows 2003 Server operating a commercial application server by Adobe. But the website you see before you is now running on an open source platform.

Obviously as with any large platform change such as this there are bound to be some hiccups. While we have extensively troubleshoot the website there are bound to be glitches we have missed, so please get in contact with us if you encounter any bugs, missing files or broken URLs.

The only obvious downside to this migration so far has been a random, yet noticeable write performance lag to our database. We are well aware of the issue and will look at resolving this in the future.

On a more positive parting note we have reintroduced missing magazines that were accidently deleted from the database mid-last year. This means all the issues of The Game Scene Chart are back on-line.

Enjoy.

What is happening to Defacto2?

I am in the very slow process of updating the whole backend of the Defacto2 website. This has meant rewriting the site’s database from scratch. Before then transferring all the data from an old, poorly designed MySQL catalogue, which itself was once migrated from an earlier Windows 2000 Access database. So because of this I have avoided adding new files to the site and this is why the it seems a little quiet.

I will continue to add certain, popular files such as The Scene Charts issues, but lesser known, obscure files will only be added to the new database, which obviously will not show up on the current site at http://www.defacto2.net.

Please DO continue to submit your old, scene related files though as all the submissions are collected, catalogued and stored. They will be placed online when the new site is ready for public consumption.