HotU now redirects to some squatter site. Anyone know anything?

According to wikipedia its another accidental expiration of the domain name again.

Heh. When there aren't any decently kept rings left anymore, Wikipedia turns into the most important source of information about Abandonware sites. How sad is that?

Anyway, according to their forums, that's exactly what happened. The brutal truth: It just takes a few seconds to renew a domain name, and if 'dedication' is even lacking for such a simple task, the person in charge should really consider handing such tasks over. It fits in with the latest newspost from January (the part about turning it into a Wiki) too well somehow.

Oh, and in case somebody didn't notice - the site's online at http://209.120.136.195/.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 11:29 on March, 27th 2006

If it ends dissapearing I hope the huge cuantity of games they have is not lost, they have some rarities that I have not seen in other places.

But it is not too surprising, as they rarely update, and lately they had been adding more free games than abandonware.

I can't seem to be able to download anything from the underdogs, I think I should have made a better search in they huge collection and download the more interesting things.

Edit: http://www.the-underdogs.info seems to work fine, it's a temporal direction they have put.

Edited by Wandrell at 16:36 on March, 27th 2006

It's kind of interesting that www.the-underdogs.com redirects to Amazon anyway. Either way the site is nearly impossible for me to navigate anymore, with so many ads imbedded into the site.

The new URL stopped working for me again.

Well, the 'dot-com-boom' is over, web advertising payouts are at an all-time low and try to imagine how much bandwidth is transfered on a big site every day.

I'm going to tell you a few secrets:
-bigger site -> more visitors
-more visitors -> lower average intelligence
-low visitor intelligence -> repeated downloads of the same item (think PDF manuals being 'viewed' in a browser again and again or people downloading the same game ten times, because they can't get it to run or forgot where they saved it)
-bigger file -> more downloads (because game is newer)
-more site exposure -> more linkstealers

I know for sure a huge commercial site is leeching their files, and there isn't much which can be done about the first three points. That banning system they're using is a good start.

Of course, there are more extreme measures which are technically possible. As you probably noticed, I locked out Google from TGOD for almost two years in an attempt to reduce traffic. Big files are still on another server. There's a very safe way to stop leechers, but that requires visitors to have session cookies enabled - imagine the uproar if a big site required that. So every site including HOTUD still uses referer checking for some parts which is pretty much useless.

All that said, I do agree that HOTUD's ads are probably too many. What I especially dislike is these sponsored links Google puts into actual texts of a site. Makes seperation of editorial contents and ads a lot harder. Quite lame.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 12:49 on March, 28th 2006

A commercial site that leeches? Can't they do something with that?

Leeching to me is already some kind of scam, for the owner of the leeching webpage and the people that visit it, but getting money from that is insulting.

What can anyone do? Offering such files is illegal, no matter whether it's for free or not. So getting a site shut down always requires the same effort, leeching doesn't add anything. Since that site has been online for a few years already, I guess their server is located in a country which isn't so keen on enforcing copyright, making it virtually impossible to take legal steps.

I'm not sure what kind of technical workaround that site uses to get access to HOTUD's files, but it's apparantely working from what I've read. I also haven't seen the technical measures HOTUD is taking to prevent leeching, but as I said, a perfect (and 'politically' feasable) solution doesn't exist.

I do though appreciate her offering a Torrent alternative, I think torrents do not work in a case like this. With over 3000 games hosted, there are just not enough people with the interest to seed those files for a very long time. Torrents seem to work best with large files that are only going to interest people for so long, i.e. a video that only a specific group will want to access for a week or two.

I also understand the massive costs that the site must be incurring, but there has been some fairly popular games that are around ~700mb uploaded in the last few updates. Do you really need to have these up for download? I would rather have them not on the site then have a horrendous amount of ads. Also, a big portion of people using the internet think that HotU = abandonware. One forum I know of that has about 80,000 active users has a rule where the game must be found on HotU to be considered abandonware. It is a lot of these preconceptions that pound the site with visitors everyday.

Agreed. As long as there are regular downloads as an alternative, nobody will use Torrents. Also, seeding is a problem, because who will keep a downloaded zip file (unusable) on their hd? Torrents work if something is downloaded in the same state it can be used in, but not with compressed archives.

Again, I agree, but you have to keep in mind what I wrote above: bigger file size -> more downloads, i.e. such downloads are incredibly popular and 'in demand'. So while we might think this is unnecessary, the vast majority disagrees. And then it all depends for whom you're making the site...

That's just sad. Almost like the tons of people who insist on believing there actually is an 'Abandonware' clause in copyright law.

Anyway, in spite of our probably not fully positive opinions about the site, let's be honest: If HOTUD were to disappear, it'd be a horrible loss! I don't see any site being able to fill in the gap, even counting the following few years. I'm quite sure there are people who think they can, but they probably just have no idea about the financial and legal scope we're talking about here. UD did pioneer in many things, including keeping a cool head when the IDSA called (all previously threatened sites just shut down). Although that has become the norm, it's still ridiculous how panic breaks out every time a legal threat arrives in a webmaster's inbox. To think that these people could keep it up with the amount of warnings HOTUD gets... and the financial side (&risk) is obvious, I guess.

Oh, and I'm not even talking about all the sites which would have to give up, because they wouldn't have any games to add anymore. Who cares?

Edited by Mr Creosote at 10:11 on March, 29th 2006

Well, some people also think that abandonware is software that is older than 3 or 5 years. Some think that abandonware is perfectly legal. Some even believe in Santa Claus, in Osama Bin Laden = Saddam Hussein, and in a jewish world conspiracy. I guess we have to accept that a big portion of people believe in a big portion of nonsense.

As for abandonware, it's of course especially difficult to blame these people because there is no official definition. The term is hard-fought and subject to potential change. Imagine 9 out of 10 internet user say that abandonware is software older than 5 years. From some point, they would be right.

This I can certainly agree with. When you are the biggest and most visible you are going to catch a bunch of shit though. Just the way things go I guess. I have to admit, its one of the first sites I check when I'm curious about a game.



Such a logical point.

It's one of the first stops to get a game (especially since they loosened the definition of 'underrated' so much), but one of the last on my list if it comes to information. A 'review' which consists of two self-written sentences plus a full quote of someone else's review is more than questionable and completely useless. That's the dark side of it all

Well of course you know about the dark side, since you're the head of the evil empire!

Seems a bit of a shame the hotu has become the centre of the abandonware scene. It goes down and it sems to be gameover. Used to use tuol back in the day. Nice to see Mr. Creosote is still in the system.

Cheers Anyway, it seems the site is still 'down' without any official explanation. One or two lines on the front page for those who have found it is too much? Last time this happend, it was at least resolved quickly...

Adding this line to your HOSTS file on windows (or equivalent file on other OSes) will make HOTU perfectly useable:
209.120.136.195 the-underdogs.org


One good alternative I've found is http://www.abandonia.com They have a lot of games, extra files such as manuals, and useful reviews.


There is some basis that "abandonware" is a legal concept in the fact that things fall into the public domain when their copyrights expire. The problem is that copyrights don't expire for a minimum of 28 years (in older laws), 95 years in current laws yet programs supposedly become "abandonware" after 5 years.

Actually there is an official explanation, just click on his blog link or here is the link http://www.fringer.org/

I don't see how "For some very strange and infuriating reason, that domain doesn?t redirect to our site either" is an explanation. The only thing it does clear up is why that one person doesn't do anything right now. More than enough time before she left to either get the DNS entries right (a matter of minutes even for someone inexperienced) or get someone else to take care of it (a matter of seconds).

Seems like the-underdogs.org is gone for good though.