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July 19, 2004
 QB45.com Undergoing Massive Renovation
Rebuilders looking for any backed-up 'Future Software' content.
QB45.com, once one of the largest QB downloads collections ever assembled, has gone through crisis after crisis over the last year. Several months ago, QB45.com was brought to its knees by a crippling crash which left the site down for three months. At one time the most-visited QB site on the Internet, the site previously known as Future Software was left a shadow of its former self. Over the ensuing months, the QB45.com community has struggled to save the ailing website, which founder Jorden Chamid once said would never go down as long as there was a QB Community alive on the Internet.
Now if you visit QB45.com, you will be greeted by a large "Under Construction" logo with the eery silhouette of bigfoot. Two members of the QB45 community, Gered and Joe have taken it upon themselves to restore the site to its former glory, and are currently heading the massive reconstruction project.
The pair posted the following message on QB45.com last week, explaining the history of the site and their in-progress renovation:
The Qb45 Story
Many of you here remember QB45, or better known as Future Software before it went 'nuke. Some of you might be wondering what happened to the site since then. From 1996 all the way to 2002, it was owned and operated by a person named Jorden Chamid, and he operated it long after he quit programming QB to take up PHP scripting as a living. In 2002, it was sold to Wildcard, the former webmaster of Qbasicnews and all-around okay guy. He kept up the weekly updates, until managing both QB45 and Qbasicnews was too work, and so he sold the domain to Mike Doise, who now runs QB71, a rival programming site.
Because the site was still being run on the old flatfile content manager that had been there since Jorden's days, he installed postnuke, a popular content manager. This is where things went bad. The poor templating system and overstuffed webdesign of postnuke immediately began to draw complaints from the site's visitors. But the nail in the coffin was a long, 3-month span of downtime on the server that caused many of the site's visitors to abandon the site.
Soon after, the site was converted to a PHPBB forum for a very short while. But after the forum was rejected by its visitors, the old postnuke site was reestablished, and a makeshift perl site with a forum was put in its place. Recently, the server that hosted that site was attacked and shut down, and now QB45.com is hosted here as it is redesigned.
Of course, restoring the QB45.com site will be no easy task, and large amounts of old content have been lost over the years through mismanagement and server mishaps.
Luckily, the QB45.com community is fully behind the renovation project. This is truly is a community effort; Fling Master, Jason, Jofers, Chaoticmass, JQB45 and others are all working together in this QB45.com restoration initiative. The future of QB45.com looks anything but bleak!
Is the old Future Software Returning?
While the QB45.com community has banded together to restore their site, two members, Jatos and TheBigBasicQ have banded together to restore the old Future Software site, which evolved into QB45.com in 2002. Future Software's old site was widely visited and well-loved, offering much unique and original content that disappeared from QB45.com during its many makeovers.
Jatos and TheBigBasicQ hope to restore this precious resource by using backed-up copies of the old site from around the QB Community as well as Internet archive sites like The Wayback Machine. Unfortunately, the back-ups available online are anything but complete. The website's availability is spotty at best, and most cached backups are full of broken links and images.
As a result, the two have posted messages around the QB Community searching for any lost remnants of Jorden Chamid's old site that can help them in their rebuilding process. On the various QB community forums and news sites, messages like the following one have appeared in great frequency over the last two weeks:
TheBigBasicQ 07/05/04 - 14:14:19
qb45.com - recovery of the old site
Hi guys. Jatos and I were archiving old content from the old qb45.com website. We are looking for any webpages that you might have lying around from the old qb45.com website. We are particularly interested in webpages from the begining of the site to the end of 2002.
We want to find out if its feasible for us to recreate the site. But that depends on how much content we get from the old site.
Anything you might be able to contribute would be great.
Whether or not Janus and TheBigBasicQ can recreate the old Future Software site remains to be seen. Piecing together an entire website from old remnants stored on peoples' hard drives and backups like Archive.org is certainly no easy task.
But no matter what happens, it's clear that QB45.com / Future Software will not be in its present state for much longer.
Pete's QBasic Site encourages anyone that has any backed-up content from the old Future Software sites to submit it to Jatos and TheBigBasicQ.
And those of you waiting for the QB45.com restoration, check out QB45.com for the latest details.
Submitted by
Pete
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