XeNTaX was a website with a 20-year history dedicated to reverse engineering video games. The site’s forum included a lot of technical discussion, speculation, etc that can’t be found anywhere else. The reverse engineering community already lost a similar forum, Zenhax, earlier this year.
There is a fundraiser to archive the site’s modding tools & wiki, but the forum itself will be lost once the site shutters in less than 2 weeks (in fact, it’s already privated).
Anyway, the site’s owner has been openly opposed to archival efforts. I’ve seen full, functional backups of the forum go offline after he’s requested they be taken down. He’s also floating the idea of requesting that the Internet Archive delete their copies of the site’s webpages.
This is all completely within his rights to do, and he has valid reasons for it, but still, the information contained within this forum is invaluable.
That being said, I suggest that anyone interested in video game reverse engineering try to save their own backups (from the Internet Archive) for personal use, before those are gone too.
wow I didn’t know they we’re closing down.
I learned game modding/translation from that xentax and zenhax and just retired last year.
I’ve never backup a site before, but I do have some self-hosting knowledge, any guide out there that will help me back up the site?
People who want to be forgotten deserve to be forgotten, usually. But data is data. Once it’s “out there”, the only thing you control is your response to it.
What backups from the internet Archive do you suggest downloading? The one with 2 stars, that the one?
I’ve seen full, functional backups of the forum go offline after he’s requested they be taken down.
So it’s possible to create a full backup then, as others have done it. Is there something stopping someone from doing it again?
If anyone actually has the backup copy. Message me. I have some options on hosting it for greater consumption.
Use a Large Language Model to ingest the entire forum. Then you could ask it anything and get an answer devoid of personal information. I can’t recommend any particular tool, however. And, of course, this approach does not deliver anything like the same experience as browsing an anonymized forum. For some purposes it would be better, for some worse. Some responses would be wrong or just garbage.
Does anyone here know how to do this with httrack?
Passing cookies did nothing but archive the main page onlgonl