Depending on where you look online you may be led to believe XeNTax is/was a company, supposedly a foundation and definitely a website. Yes, that is a XeNTaX website xentax.org distinct from the XeNTaX forums forum.xentax.com. In actuality, XeNTaX has its roots in the Dutch demoscene and it has just kept reincarnating.

XeNTaX started as a team of two, Mr. Mouse and Captain Corney, who were hacking/modding Commodore 64 games. XeNTaX grew into a much wider community over time because Mr. Mouse and Captain Corney wanted to be able to focus retrocomputing and to support others working on similar projects. For this XeNTaX developed MultiEx Commander which is a tool for unarchiving 100+ retro game formats, certainly no longer limited to C64.

On October 6, XeNTaX made a more upfront shutdown announcement[Wayback] with the shutdown being scheduled for the end-of-year. While there was still some possibility of a buyout or handover, it was unlikely. Instead, the XeNTaX community was encouraged to join the XeNTaX Discord server. Again, no surprises there: it has become fairly routine for old forums to retire to Discord which offers free hosting and a ton of features.

With this announcement, a second wave shot out. Word got out once again leading to several mass archiving efforts. However, this upset the staff enough to issue a warning on the Discord, with an emphasis on Data Privacy and consent. To quote Mr. Mouse:

Note: Members of the Xentax Forum have agreed to terms of the Forum and any public information. They have not agreed for their information being used on other sites. You may wish to look into the subject of data privacy. As such, while you’ve leeched my posts, I did not agree for those being hosted somewhere else. So remove my posts.

…

Remember to ensure approval from people before you put their stuff up that they did not agree to. In this age of data privacy and consent that is very important. As for Wayback Machine, they have a process that enables removal of pages if asked and are usually collaborative.

XeNTax Discord

This was a remarkable reaction because two things are being said here. First is the obvious point on data privacy and consent, but second is an undertone of leaching off of previous work and exploitation. The fact that the Xentax forums have shut down does not mean that the staff and contributors have quit completely. They are still around and will frown upon their work being plagerised now just as much as they would have while the forums were alive. And that is an issue most fellow archivists and hoarders have been fairly negligent of.

Amidst the archiving craze focussed on preserving the record, there was also a second preservation effort going on. An effort to preserve community. Although the XeNTaX Discord server offered a solution, many did wish for an independent forum. Even a short gofundme was run to see if maintenance costs could be crowdsourced.

The shutdown date was pulled a bit forward to November 3, 2023 as members were instructed to relocate to a new forum, Reshax, per the updated XeNTaX forum banner[Wayback]. In fact, when the forum did first shut down it began immediately redirecting to Reshax.

I’ve reached an agreement with Mr. Mouse, the owner of the Xentax forum, to promote ResHax and breathe new life into the slowly declining forum. Additionally, I’ll make an effort to bring tools from their site to ours. Once their forum becomes inactive, I’ll attempt to persuade Mr. Mouse to redirect the domain to our forum, ensuring that all users can find a new home here

Reshax admin michalss, “What about Xentax and Zenhax ?” on ResHax, Wayback Snapshot.

michalss also lamented on the recent death of the sister community Zenhax, which was abandoned due to the owner losing interest. And this could have been the end of the story, but people kept begging, asking “where are the tools, where are the assets?”…

On November 8, Xentax Discord Admin Richard Whitehouse came out with an announcement, later also shared on his homepage: Reshax and XeNTaX had reached an alternative agreement. From this point on, Reshax would be free to focus on reverse engineering however so they pleased; and XeNTaX members would be free to continue the tools and projects that they were already making. Whitehouse paints a picture of how he believes the XeNTaX community has been unfairly taken advantage of, and that this was a destructive force.

Many developers stopped sharing their findings and specifications (myself included) because they started to see their work exploited. By companies, which is morally reprehensible (and sometimes in direct violation of a given license/copyright) and serves to devalue the entire skillset associated with the labor. By other developers, who are socially positioned to exploit the labor in some other way. By people who just want to rip content to turn around and sell it, or claim false credit for it. In conjunction with unhealthy ego competition, this exploitation has made it impossible to create a culture of trust and sharing between developers.

…

We want to create an environment where developers are safe to work together without being exploited, and where developers feel valued by fellow developers enough to not feel the need to engage in pathetic ego-based assertions of skill. We want people to be fueled by their creative ambitions and technical fascinations, not their social standing. We want to create a culture beyond what Open Source can achieve under the constraints of our current socioeconomic systems. No matter how many people are left standing in the end, this is where we’re going.

Richard Whitehouse

On r/DataHoarder and other venues, the XeNTaX forum shutdown was treated as nothing more than a lost cause. There was once a XeNTaX, now there isn’t; we must therefore uphold the memory through downloading all we can. But to the alive and well XeNTaX community, these forum dumps were nothing more than an intensification of the routine stealing of their work they had grown sick of. Whitehouse’s open letter, which I have only abridged here, makes it clear what the Discord staff consider a XeNTaX contributor willing to invest time and effort to learn as opposed to internet passerbys who ask for something, take it and move on.

To further hammer in the point, Mr. Mouse issued another announcement on November 12 imploring members to not share full backups of the XeNTaX Forum on the XeNTaX Discord server. Once again, the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine were exempted as special cases, but else it was not allowed. This however did attract some internal protest from guild members, as one might gather from the reactions to the message.

This goes to show that the Internet Archive has built up enough of a reputation to not merely be heralded as leachers and pirates and that’s a good thing. Although, there is an implication here that websites just find their way onto the Internet Archive, when in fact there are automation processeces and groups like Archive Team who facilitate this. Thus we find ourselves in a Catch 22, where if something has landed on the Internet Archive it is deemed legitimate, but if it is stuck in transit it was stolen unfairly.

This is a paradox that underpins the challenge of being an archivist today: sucess means being invisible and that your archives are never widely distributed. Does that perhaps sound familiar? It’s the exact same situation the XeNTaX community finds itself in. They would rather preserve their tools and assets internally, circulating on a need-to-know basis than have it out in the open. This ensures that the community retains its knowledge, but also controls it. It’s self-determination against potential exploitation.

The XeNTaX situation is not over and hopefully it will never be over in the near future. The XeNTaX forums might be gone, but XeNTaX lives on. And I believe it sets a good example: Archivism as a hobby or profession is something which should prevail within every community, instead of the interventionist culture from 3rd parties that we have grown accustomed to today.

But that reversal we have is warranted. Many times communities do vanish or are made to vanish, whether it’s subtitlers on YouTube or artists who can no longer use Macromedia Flash. Often times, these communities do not have an obvious way of preserving their memories; the decision is out of their control and attempts at preservation necessitate challenging authority, ad hoc solutions and technical expertise (often from outside).

Whether you define yourself an archivist, a hoarder, a pirate, a cracker, an archaelogist or whatever; it is a must that you understand where the files come from. You don’t have to obey all of the wishes of the original creator, but you have to respect them. Especially if they’re still alive and kicking. The costs couldn’t kill XeNTaX, but from the looks of it archivists almost did.

• Jason Citron quote is from New York Times
• Discord CDN filehosting changes rumor and announcement
• EA/FIFA game delistings
• Nintendo 3DS/Wii U online service shutdown
• Typepad
• Goodboy Galaxy Interview
• Discord-Matrix Bridge: Out-of-your-element

BG: Jungle Waterfalls by Mark Ferrari.

Music: Meadow Breeze written by TECHNOTRAIN on Dova Syndome.

• Podcast: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/data-log
• Old Phone Preservation: https://twitter.com/OldPhonePreserv
• More info on i-Mode: https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2020/04/complete-guide-to-i-mode-games/
• Emoji and the Unicode Consortium: https://home.unicode.org/emoji/about-emoji/
• Snake on 7-Segment Displays, DIY project for the insane engineers among you: https://hackaday.io/project/166556-snake-on-7-segment-displays
• 7-segment by Vishnu Mohanan on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/9mSe-QS5JrA
• 3G by SoQ錫濛譙 on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/qiaomeng/5059237997
• Broadcasting tower in Trondheim, Norway by on Wikimedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_broadcasting#/media/File:Tyholt_taarnet.jpg

• David Helgason Interview: https://www.pocketgamer.biz/interview/58959/not-everyone-needs-to-be-king-or-supercell-unitys-david-helgason-on-unity-5-everyplay-and-unreal-engine/
• Unity Pricing Changes Blogpost: https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
• Cult of the Lamb Steam Page Announcement: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1313140/view/7249162346641740420
• The Chaos at Unity by Alex Heath: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/15/23875408/command-line-the-chaos-at-unity
• BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint (Home to some Web Unity Games): https://flashpointarchive.org/
• Fundraiser for Donkey Kong Programmers Story: https://hitsave.org/fundraiser-translation-of-donkey-kong-programmers-story/

• Ruffle: https://ruffle.rs/
• Public Domain Day 2023 Film Contest: https://blog.archive.org/2023/01/21/public-domain-day-film-contest-highlights-works-of-1927/
• Internet Archive: https://archive.org/
• Internet Archive Twitter: https://twitter.com/internetarchive
• Internet Archive Mastodon: https://mastodon.archive.org/users/internetarchive
• Jason Scott: https://twitter.com/textfiles
• Center for MI Jewish Heritage: https://www.tiktok.com/@mijewishheritage

Yesterday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced a purge on inactive accounts. Musk has cited the reasoning as “freeing [up] the name space” for users who might want a new handle. Musk then went on to assure Twitter that these “1.5 billion accounts” would be accounts which have not tweeted or logged-in for the last few years.

This is very much, an expected move. You might recall from our blogpost a while ago that Musk had expressed interest in purging accounts early in November. It should also be noted that Twitter’s previous management had failed a similar policy change in 2019, to expire accounts which had not been logged into for 6 months. That policy change failed due to outrage and protest across the platform.

Well then, should you be worried? Probably not for your own account. Some have expressed concern over the accounts of loved ones or deceased celebrities, which will more easily fit this criteria. If you have such concerns, we can recommend a useful utility from our friend JustAnotherArchivist, called snscrape. snscrape allows you to save public tweets from accounts on Twitter. It also works for a few other websites like Facebook and Reddit.

The code is available at https://github.com/JustAnotherArchivist/snscrape, but if you have Python 3 installed pip3 install snscrape is all you need to install it.

From your terminal or command prompt, the following command will save a local archive of Elon Musk’s tweets:

snscrape --jsonl twitter-user elonmusk > muskytweets.json

And if you want another account, just substitute the username and a file to save to:

snscrape --jsonl twitter-user RetroTechDreams > RTD_tweets.json

I might write a more detailed tutorial on snscrape if people are interested.

But for the time being, spread the word! Save what endangered accounts are valuable to you and be sure to tell all of your friends about snscrape.

This new era of Twitter has been quite turbulent, to say the least. More than half of the workforce has been fired or has quit, and site functionality is becoming unstable, as reported by the Seattle Times. Mastodon has emerged as a serious Twitter alternative. In fact, some of those who have departed Twitter now have their own Mastodon instance over at macaw.social. Personally, I am excited about the rise of mastodon as an alternative as I have been posting Data Horde updates over at @[email protected] for about two years now.

So, why not leave Twitter behind and move on? Now, Twitter allows you to request a copy of your personal data: Tweets and all. But it’s probably hard to leave a site that you have been on for over a decade. Especially, when requesting your personal archive is not even working correctly. Many people have reported that archive requests are being ignored or processed with delay. On a test account, we at Data Horde found that it took over 3 days to receive a personal archive.

In 2022 this is a big deal, not only for archivists but also for legality. Article 13 of the GDPR mandates a responsibility to provide a copy of collected data to users (i.e. data subjects) upon request. Outside of Europe, California’s CCPA has a similar clause protecting the right to know.

There are repercussion for not respecting these rules. Recently another messaging app, Discord, was fined 800 000 Euros for failing to respect data retention periods and security of personal data by French Regulator CNIL. That was actually a reduced fine, given Discord’s conciliatory attitude. If Twitter does not up their game, they may meet a similar fate, if not a worser one.

Now that I have your attention, I would like to direct it to the help page on how to request a personal archive from Twitter: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-download-your-twitter-archive . Even if a bit unstable, this is what you need to follow to save a copy of your Tweets.

The Twitter archive is big and burly but not perfect. Johan van der Knijff recently wrote a blogpost on some shortcomings, such as the t.co URL-shortener and some workarounds: https://www.bitsgalore.org/2022/11/20/how-to-preserve-your-personal-twitter-archive

Oh, and by the way. It gets worse: Elon Musk has also stated interest in purging inactive accounts and their Tweet history.

This might not seem like a big deal, except to the one or two of our readers who periodically scrape politician accounts off of https://ballotpedia.org. Yet it is actually a serious turning point. Currently, Twitter does not purge inactive accounts, except in the event of death or incapacitation and by special request.

In 2019 there was an attempted Twitter policy change to expire accounts which had not been logged into for 6 months. This sparked outrage across the platform by those who saw this as unfair to the memory of inactive accounts. In particular, fans of deceased K-Pop artist Kim Jong-hyun, otherwise known as Jonghyun (김종현/종현) came to the defence of his legacy overturning the attempt altogether. Turning back on this decision would go against all of that heritage, people’s heritage, Twitter’s heritage, web heritage. Alas this the projected course of things, even if we cannot prevent it, it is perhaps our duty to protest why it is wrong.

What about the extreme scenario of a total collapse of Twitter? What does that mean for web history? Well, the good new is that people have been thinking on this for much longer than before this year.

Already in 2010 the Library of Congress announced that they would be copying the entire internal archive of Twitter, starting from March 2006.

There are also many smaller grabs on the Internet Archive and archive.today, some of which you have seen linked above. Special mention goes to Archive Team‘s periodical Twitter Stream archive.

Last but not least, you can help! The Internet Archive is collecting Tweet dumps from people as we speak: https://archive.org/services/wayback-gsheets/archive-your-tweets Whether you just want extra insurance for your back-up, or to contribute to the wealth of the web you can help by using the above tool to upload your Tweets to the Internet Archive for generations to come.

Not all Flash media is the same. You see, the interactivity in Flash relies on a language called ActionScript. In 2006, ActionScript 3 came out with new features. Alas it was backwards-incompatible with AS2 and so not everyone was to keen on it. It wasn’t until the release of Flash Professional CC (2013), that authors were required to switch to AS3.

This has made Flash emulation quite a challenge. Understandably, Flash emulators have had to choose between prioritising AS2 and 3. For example the emulator Shumway focussed on AS2 (with some AS3 support) and Lightspark focussed on AS3. Unfortunately, Shumway hasn’t been updated in ages and Lightspark isn’t browser-based.

On the other hand, Ruffle, a relative newcomer to the Flash emulation scene has been picking up speed. Written in Rust and sporting WebAssembly, it runs wicked fast and cross-platform! Though Rust’s focus has too been mostly in one direction, namely AS2, they have started to make progress on AS3 well. Below is an abridged version of an announcement shared on the Ruffle Discord Server by our friend Nosamu.

The first few ActionScript 3 games are finally playable in Ruffle, Demos below! One of the first fully-playable games is Not To Scale, a simple but clever photo puzzle! You can try it out right now on Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/575849/format/flash?emulate=flash

Even more exciting, the beautiful minigolf game Wonderputt is now mostly playable with the Ruffle desktop app! The first hole is quite tricky due to collision bugs, but a fix is in progress, along with web performance improvements.

Watch our #announcements channel for updates in the coming weeks! As always, you can download Ruffle from https://ruffle.rs/#downloads.

But wait, there’s more – Ruffle web builds now have a fancy loading animation! If you own a website, now is the perfect time to update Ruffle! No longer will your visitors be greeted with a blank white screen while waiting for Ruffle to load. Check out the animation:

Also, if you’d like to add your own flair to the loading screen or disable it altogether, there are a few customization options: preloader, --preloader-background, and --logo-display. For more information, see our wiki.

And finally, we’re looking for help developing an official Ruffle app for Android! If you have experience with Rust development targeting Android, please check out @szőlő’s WIP repository: https://github.com/torokati44/ruffle-android and join the development thread: Native Android App.

Do you have a favorite Flash game you just wish you could play right now? It’s not emulation, but Bluemaxima’s Flashpoint collection might be able to run what you are looking for right now. Be sure to also check out our Flash Player Emergency kit for more tips on Flash after its end-of-life.

Then comes along Archive95 which is an archive of the pre-IA internet of 1995. It primarily uses two sources, the World Wide Web Directory and the German language Einblick ins Internet, to give an impression of an era when the web was small and monitors were bulky as heck.

– glmdgrielson, a young whippersnapper

The announcement came from longtime tech reviewer and moderator Charles Jefferies. As he reminisces over the rise and fall of NotebookReview and her sister sites, which have today only been reduced to unfrequented forums, he implores what remains of the once strong gearhead community to decide on what platform to migrate to in their exodus.

On behalf of the small but dedicated volunteer staff here, we wish you the best. We wish we could send you off a little more gracefully. Please enjoy the remaining time.

Best,
Charles Jefferies & the NBR Moderation Team

So without further ado, a complete list of sites closing down in the TechnologyGuide network are as follows:

• NotebookReview: a site dedicated to laptop news and reviews.
• TabletPCReview: tablet and pc reviews!
• Brighthand: smartphones and smartdevices.
• DigitalCameraReview: camera reviews, as well as tips for photography and editing.
• TechnologyGuide: the nexus of the network, TechnologyGuide had a little bit of everything from all the other sites, and then some.
• DesktopReview: now-defunct Desktop review site, which had already been absorbed into NotebookReview. Likewise, for PrinterComparison and its archive.

It should also be noted that Archive Team has been made aware of the situation as well. Yet we are not aware of any archivebot/grab-site grabs at this time. Be sure to comment or reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any archives you would like to share, and to stay tuned to catch up on any updates.