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 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.

Defacto2 Twitter

For those of you who use Twitter I thought I would remind the readers that Defacto2 tweaks. Not only are the latest updates from the site published to the Twitter account. We also tweet when files previews and progress updates on the website revision, news that you will not find on the website itself. You can find our Twitter page at Defacto2 Twitter.

No replies to Contact Us messages

In the past month if you have sent us a message using the Defacto2 contacts forms and have not received a reply, then I must apologise. Unfortunately it seems that the e-mail address those messages were forwarded to expired; so all the messages submitted in the past month has been lost. While the issue has now been fix there is not much I can do to recover the lost messages. So if it was important I would ask that you please resend.

Random Visitor Statistics for Defacto2

Today I thought I would do something different and list some of the more interesting statistics for defacto2.net in the past month. To give some idea of the type of users who visit this site and where you go. For web browsing, 62% of you use Firefox, 20% use Internet Explorer, 9% use Opera, 4% use Chrome and 2% use Safari.

91% use Windows, 5% use Linux, 3.5% run Macintosh machines.

22.7% use a screen resolution of 1280×1024, 19% use 1024×768, 15% are at 1680×1050 and 13% are at 1280×800.

A massive 81% of you have Adobe Flash 10 installed, the remainder have Flash 9 installed, while only 3.5% of you have no Flash plug-in at all.

84.46% have some form of Java support, with 15.5% having no support.

Speed wise, 34% of you are on DSL, 24% are on cable, 5% use a T1 line and fortunately only 3.7% still use dial-up, I feel for you guys.

22% of you come from the United States, 12% from Germany, 7% from Russia, 6% from Sweden.

The Japanese spend the most time on the site with an average visit of nearly 6 minutes, while the Indonesians spend the least with an average visit of only 27 seconds. The median visit is 2 minutes and 15 seconds.

Only 19% of traffic was direct, 40% of you were referred from other websites and another 41% were referred from search engine results.

The top five referring sites for past month were Wikipedia, the Russian site Softboard.ru, a blogspot.com item on our recent scene artpack, stumbleupon.com and aboutthescene.com.

Top search engines are Google with 96% of the referrals, Yahoo with 1.6%, Search with 0.8% and Microsoft Live with only 0.35%!

The most popular pages on the site were the front page with 21% of the total views. 2nd was the Defacto2 – NFO Utilities; 3rd the Razor 1911 group page at 3.1%; 4th the Scene Documents, text and NFO files page at 3% and 5th was the Reloaded group page at 2%.