Character List

[cael]

Hi,

I'm back after a 6-7 year hiatus and lost my spreadsheet on a busted computer that had all my characters. I'm able to recall some of the character names, but I am pretty sure I'm missing a few lvl 30+'s that should have survived auto-delete. Is there a way for imms to search player files for my email that was linked to the characters via the old forums, or even a common last name that I shared between characters?

Thanks,
BJ

[Elysia]

Current immortals cannot check for players' characters via email. We can use IP traces, but the time frame of 6-7 years is usually too long for that info to still remain or for us to connect known characters and trace unknown ones.

You can shoot me a message listing the names of your known characters though, and I can cross reference to see if there were ever notes on those characters that might refer to your unknowns.

[Vala]

If the hard disk still functions you can put it in another PC as a second drive, then read the files. If the disk's connections are incompatible with your equipment, if one of the machines is a laptop, or if you'd just really rather not open the case, there are USB cables available that have all the right connections.

[Shzrei]

If anyone knows how to access caches etc. or has the archive of the old website or forums (ahah or knows how to navigate the Dark web )

There was once access to a list that said EVERY character creation and its creation date.

I've failed to find it 4-5 times, but browsing through that might work to remind you.

Also I really want to see it!

[medina]

I know neither of those things, but if I remember correctly the only list available was the one that was connected to the old forums. Those are unfortunately inaccesible due to the robots.txt file of the page (not that I have any clue to what that is).

[Jomin]

robots.txt is a file on a website which contains simple, informal, but generally respected instructions to Crawler Bots - usually to not bother indexing and added websites or pages thereon to their store of what is where on the Internet. On forums like these you can sometimes see them in the "Who Is Online" at the bottom listing on the front and possibly other pages. Note that unlike Spam Bots, Crawler Bots are generally helpful in that they make the pages they find available to be found by users of the Search Engine Website that they work on behalf of. However it is that task that makes places where they look targets for the b****y Spam Bots who generally want the Crawler Bots to follow links to other sites that the Spam Bots are trying to promote.

{Search Engine Optimisation is a polite term for what the latter are paid to try and do in that the ne'er-do-wells who control the Spam Bots take money to pollute places where the Crawler Bots are welcome with links that they cannot resist following even though they are, at best, nothing to do with the places like forums where the links wildly off-topic and at worse illegal/immoral for a person or harmful to a computer to browse.}

Of course one set of important Crawler bots are those working on behalf of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine - and telling them to go away in the robots.txt file is a sure-fire way to make sure your website is NOT saved for posterity.

[Ahri]

Thanks Jomin

Just to be clear - there wasn't any archive of the old wotmud.org forums saved anywhere?

[Jomin]

Yep, the file is still there and as it says:

Code: Select all

# go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

it means for any bot (User-agent: *) - don't store any part of this site (Disallow: /) and so the ones that respect this convention - like the aforesaid Wayback Machine - won't have taken copies. Now, one might speculate that some agencies - e.g. FBI/DHS treat such conventions as not worth the paper they are not written on, but getting the information out of them would not be straightforward, though it would not be counted as "Top Secret", by say, the CIA so that it would not be subject to the sort of awkward review processes that they do not admit to having.