QB45.com Undergoing Massive Renovation

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QB45.com Undergoing Massive Renovation

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<p align="right"><b><font size=3>July 19, 2004</font></b></p>

<p><font size=3><b>QB45.com Undergoing Massive Renovation</b></font></p>
<p><font size=3>Rebuilders looking for any backed-up 'Future Software' content.</font></p>
<p><center><img src="/sections/qbnews_storage/qb45_construction.gif"></center><br><br><b>QB45.com</b>, once one of the largest QB downloads collections ever assembled, has gone through crisis after crisis over the last year. Several months ago, <b>QB45.com</b> 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 <b>Future Software</b> was left a shadow of its former self. Over the ensuing months, the <b>QB45.com</b> community has struggled to save the ailing website, which founder <b>Jorden Chamid</b> once said would never go down as long as there was a QB Community alive on the Internet.<br><br>Now if you visit <b>QB45.com</b>, you will be greeted by a large "Under Construction" logo with the eery silhouette of bigfoot. Two members of the <b>QB45</b> community, <b>Gered</b> and <b>Joe</b> have taken it upon themselves to restore the site to its former glory, and are currently heading the massive reconstruction project.<br><br>The pair posted the following message on <b>QB45.com</b> last week, explaining the history of the site and their in-progress renovation:<br><br><blockquote><br><center><u>The Qb45 Story</u></center><br><br>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 <a href='http://jorden.chamid.com/siteinfo.php'>Jorden Chamid</a>, 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 <a href='http://qbasicnews.com'>Qbasicnews</a> 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 <a href='http://www.qb71.com'>QB71</a>, a rival programming site.<br><br>Because the site was still being run on the old flatfile content manager that had been there since Jorden's days, he installed <a href='http://postnuke.com'>postnuke</a>, a popular content manager. This is where things went bad. The poor templating system and overstuffed webdesign of postnuke <i>immediately</i> 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.<br><br>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.<br></blockquote><br><br>Of course, restoring the <b>QB45.com</b> site will be no easy task, and large amounts of old content have been lost over the years through mismanagement and server mishaps. <br>Luckily, the <b>QB45.com</b> 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 <b>QB45.com</b> restoration initiative. The future of <b>QB45.com</b> looks anything but bleak!<br><br><br><font size="+1"><b>Is the old <i>Future Software</i> Returning?</b></font><br><br>While the <b>QB45.com</b> community has banded together to restore their site, two members, <b>Jatos</b> and <b>TheBigBasicQ</b> have banded together to restore the old <b>Future Software</b> site, which evolved into <b>QB45.com</b> in 2002. <b>Future Software's</b> old site was widely visited and well-loved, offering much unique and original content that disappeared from <b>QB45.com</b> during its many makeovers.<br><br><b>Jatos</b> and <b>TheBigBasicQ</b> 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 <b>The Wayback Machine</b>. 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.<br><br>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:<br><br><blockquote><br>TheBigBasicQ 07/05/04 - 14:14:19<br>qb45.com - recovery of the old site<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>Anything you might be able to contribute would be great.<br></blockquote><br><br>Whether or not <b>Janus</b> and <b>TheBigBasicQ</b> can recreate the old <b>Future Software</b> site remains to be seen. Piecing together an entire website from old remnants stored on peoples' hard drives and backups like <b>Archive.org</b> is certainly no easy task.<br><br><br>But no matter what happens, it's clear that <b>QB45.com / Future Software</b> will not be in its present state for much longer. <br><br><b>Pete's QBasic Site</b> encourages anyone that has any backed-up content from the old <b>Future Software</b> sites to submit it to Jatos and TheBigBasicQ. <br><br>And those of you waiting for the <b>QB45.com</b> restoration, check out <a href="http://www.qb45.com/">QB45.com</a> for the latest details.

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<p align="right"><font size="3"><b>Submitted by

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Now if only...

Post by Pete »

Now if only someone would recreate <b>NeoZones Production</b> and <b>GBGames</b>...
Jofers

Post by Jofers »

Heh heh :)

If you want the "inside scoop", we're actually almost complete, in a sense. I'm taking a break on forum development to prepare for finals, but it'll be up soon enough. This whole "restoring content" thing is kind of wierd though, that's a thing Jatos is doing for his own website. We have most of the downloads, those never went away. It's just heavy script work that we're finishing up, mainly some admin pages and a nice forum that interacts with the login system. It should be up some time in mid-august, though realistically it's a hobby project and we suck at deadlines :)

(PS. The ape picture is bigfoot. The reason for him is at qb45.net. I was making redesigns and fell in love with the shades :P) He may or may not be on the final site design. To be honest, there are over 20 designs of the site, and these are the ones I can remember off the top of my head.
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Post by Pete »

Thanks for the info! I've updated the article so that the information is correct (as far as I can tell). I guess I should have done some more research before I wrote that!

Glad to hear QB45.com is finally making a comeback!
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