dshack.org Domain Acquisition

I finally got around to buying the original dshack.org domain from Blaveloper. The actual acquisition was much smoother than I thought it would be, and a lot quicker too, taking only around two hours to get everything situated. Owning the domain isn't mission-critical, but is a good thing to keep alive within the community I thinik. When the time eventually comes that I can no longer manage it, I'll give it to someone else in the community.

It had a good run between 2008 and 2018, and hopefully now it can enjoy a new life once again, being a dedicated address for Mario Kart DS hacking, rather than using the ugly and unsignedly dswiki.garhoogin.com address. At some point I may make those addresses redirect to their wiki.dshack.org equivalents, but that is to be determined later.

As for the home page, I've set up a simple index.jsp in the root directory to just show that the site is under construction. In talking with the Haroohie Pals on the subject, they recommended that the wiki be moved to wiki.dshack.org, with the main dshack.org domain being used for some grander purpose. A new forum is unlikely to take its place, since that will take a long time to set up, and the Discord server has largely replaced the need for such a forum, sad as it is.

What I've been thinking would be good to set up on the homepage might be a replica of the old forum. Since we have the forum posts preserved in the form of an SQL database, this shouldn't be too difficult to set up. The one glaring flaw, though, is that the databse did not preserve any user profiles, or even usernames. A while back I scraped archives for as many usernames as I could find, though this wasn't able to get most poeple's usernames, but most of the active posters have been recovered. Then again the obvious caveat is that many of these usernames were just forum displaynames, where I just decided to take the most recent displayname for each member.

Anyways, a lot can be done now that the old domain is within our circulation again. I think that a copy of everything from the Hack Store is preserved somewhere, maybe that could be restored as well, or at least enough to try to fix incoming links from other websites.