Dink Solutions going forward
In late 2010 I registered the domain name of ultraprison.net and also decided to rent out an inexpensive VPS server which I didn't have a clue of what to do with. The following week, as if by fate, Beuc posted on here with the intention of offloading the Dink Solutions site onto somebody else. I waited a few days to see if anyone who actually knew what they were doing would step up but they never did. I decided to confirm my interest and very soon after that it was settled, I would take over the site and keep it running.
My new ownership was not without conditions, however, and Beuc suggested that transferring the site from SPIP to a new collaborative platform such as a wiki engine would be the best way to refresh the site. With a wiki engine, a new era for Dink walkthroughs was envisioned in which collectively we could all pitch in together to write walkthroughs, as well as fix errors in the existing ones as well as provide endless improvements such as screenshots for difficult areas. Of course none of that ever came to fruition, at least not on the scale that I had hoped for. There are two things that are endless in this world, human stupidity, and the apathy of the Dink community, and the help that I expected in properly fixing up the SPIP markup never eventuated. Soon I had to face the fact that I was pretty much on my own and that I had been far too presumptuous. Thank you to the few who did pitch in, however.
I tried numerous techniques such as badgering people in the IRC to write walkthroughs, as well as running a competition encouraging forum members to write something. At this point, I was basically paying people to write stuff for the site which wasn't in any way sustainable, and after stemming the tide of spambots I more or less decided to let the site rot, with the most recent walkthough added in 2015. In this new period, fewer than ten new walkthroughs had been written and I think half were written by me.
Of course I had made the decision to pick the most bloated wiki engine I could find, MediaWiki, which ran slowly and was beset by numerous problems such as sign-up emails not sending even after upgrading to a new VPS with higher specs. Even installing Varnish as a cache and then later on using Buttflare didn't speed up the site at all. Most problems were eventually rectified, but even so, it wasn't ideal.
Late last year my hosting provider sent me numerous emails informing me that my OpenVZ instance was going to be deleted in January or February of this year. I made an effort of backing things up best I could. I didn't honestly expect them to delete it, but during the first week of January they just got up and did it. At this point, my assumption was that nobody noticed nor cared except for SlipDink, as he was the only person to say anything about the site's unavailability. Surely if people were still playing D-mods, they'd be posting their various questions on here while complaining about the site's disappearance. Eventually a few other people finally responded, and thus per RobJ's decree I set about resurrecting the site to a more functional state.
I decided to move them to a static site generator called mkDocs and went through each and every walkthrough I had available to in order to reformat them in Markdown complete with working pictures! The new collection of them is here with the vast majority of them having been transferred by now. At this point it doesn't make sense to have more than one Dink site on the web, and I plan on uploading these as a file on here which you will be able to open and host yourself. If you are thinking of writing a walkthrough, please just use the file discussion feature on this site unless you absolutely need images.
My new ownership was not without conditions, however, and Beuc suggested that transferring the site from SPIP to a new collaborative platform such as a wiki engine would be the best way to refresh the site. With a wiki engine, a new era for Dink walkthroughs was envisioned in which collectively we could all pitch in together to write walkthroughs, as well as fix errors in the existing ones as well as provide endless improvements such as screenshots for difficult areas. Of course none of that ever came to fruition, at least not on the scale that I had hoped for. There are two things that are endless in this world, human stupidity, and the apathy of the Dink community, and the help that I expected in properly fixing up the SPIP markup never eventuated. Soon I had to face the fact that I was pretty much on my own and that I had been far too presumptuous. Thank you to the few who did pitch in, however.
I tried numerous techniques such as badgering people in the IRC to write walkthroughs, as well as running a competition encouraging forum members to write something. At this point, I was basically paying people to write stuff for the site which wasn't in any way sustainable, and after stemming the tide of spambots I more or less decided to let the site rot, with the most recent walkthough added in 2015. In this new period, fewer than ten new walkthroughs had been written and I think half were written by me.
Of course I had made the decision to pick the most bloated wiki engine I could find, MediaWiki, which ran slowly and was beset by numerous problems such as sign-up emails not sending even after upgrading to a new VPS with higher specs. Even installing Varnish as a cache and then later on using Buttflare didn't speed up the site at all. Most problems were eventually rectified, but even so, it wasn't ideal.
Late last year my hosting provider sent me numerous emails informing me that my OpenVZ instance was going to be deleted in January or February of this year. I made an effort of backing things up best I could. I didn't honestly expect them to delete it, but during the first week of January they just got up and did it. At this point, my assumption was that nobody noticed nor cared except for SlipDink, as he was the only person to say anything about the site's unavailability. Surely if people were still playing D-mods, they'd be posting their various questions on here while complaining about the site's disappearance. Eventually a few other people finally responded, and thus per RobJ's decree I set about resurrecting the site to a more functional state.
I decided to move them to a static site generator called mkDocs and went through each and every walkthrough I had available to in order to reformat them in Markdown complete with working pictures! The new collection of them is here with the vast majority of them having been transferred by now. At this point it doesn't make sense to have more than one Dink site on the web, and I plan on uploading these as a file on here which you will be able to open and host yourself. If you are thinking of writing a walkthrough, please just use the file discussion feature on this site unless you absolutely need images.
Thanks yeoldetoast for your dedication and commitment to all matters Dink.
I suppose that it will be (now and into the future) less and less the case that those who visit https://www.dinknetwork.com/ will be motivated to contribute, whether via constructing and publishing a dmod here or uploading and maintaining a walk-through on http://solutions.ultraprison.net/. That is just a painful reality.
But that does not mean that Dink is dead, not yet!
I suppose that it will be (now and into the future) less and less the case that those who visit https://www.dinknetwork.com/ will be motivated to contribute, whether via constructing and publishing a dmod here or uploading and maintaining a walk-through on http://solutions.ultraprison.net/. That is just a painful reality.
But that does not mean that Dink is dead, not yet!
Thank you for making sure I actually do something about stuff like this. Also of note is that when transferring the walkthroughs across, most of the editing has been rather minimal, and so the spelling and grammar (or lack of it) has been left intact for historical purposes. Also of note is that d-mods starting with "The" are generally both under the letter T as well as the starting letter of the second word.
does this mean the age of telling you that the site is down is over?
@yeoldetoast:
Didn't you mean "most of the editing has been rather minimal, and so the spelling and grammar (or lack of it) has been left intact for hysterical purposes." ?
@Skurn:
Good question about this possibly being the end of an era!
Didn't you mean "most of the editing has been rather minimal, and so the spelling and grammar (or lack of it) has been left intact for hysterical purposes." ?
@Skurn:
Good question about this possibly being the end of an era!
Oh, this is good news.
It's good to see when anything happens in this place.
I will admit that lately, I have zero motivation for anything Dink related. I will have to wait til I'm back in the right frame of mind before I can continue any of the projects I have in progress.
It's good to see when anything happens in this place.
I will admit that lately, I have zero motivation for anything Dink related. I will have to wait til I'm back in the right frame of mind before I can continue any of the projects I have in progress.
@Robj:
I will admit that lately, I have zero motivation for anything Dink related. I will have to wait til I'm back in the right frame of mind before I can continue any of the projects I have in progress.
How can we help put you into the right frame of mind that encourages the completion of TDA?
I will admit that lately, I have zero motivation for anything Dink related. I will have to wait til I'm back in the right frame of mind before I can continue any of the projects I have in progress.
How can we help put you into the right frame of mind that encourages the completion of TDA?
