oh my god i think VCL finally went dark. i check it every few months and it's actually down.
🫡
check it again in a few months! it's a fun mystery!
the first time i heard of VCL going a bit wobbly, which was early 2019, i spent a weekend figuring out how to archive the whole site. turns out i had a little more time than that - the site limped along for another 6 months before it stopped responding, which was enough time for that hasty copy to accrete some supporting scripts that could keep said copy up to date by just downloading changes. i ran said scripts informally whenever i remembered, which was most days, a week at most. as you can imagine, it saw very little traffic this late in life - but it wasn't none! i planned to keep pace with it until the end. though hopefully without being the one to destroy it
the mention of "supporting scripts" might attract a look from the computer-knowers. "anf, why not just run wget or something? tell it to send an If-Modified-Since header" it's a great idea. also i did. wget-or-something quickly revealed that the site has Idiosyncrasies. like technical ones, not just full-of-scanned-pencil-drawings-of-vixens-from-1996 ones. when i caught wget downloading an artist's gallery's Page 598 of 0, all having the same empty template HTML as the prior 597 pages and showing no sign of stopping, well, ok, wget had some options to filter that out. and the next quirk i found. and the one after that. but soon they piled up to the point where my favored solution landed on the side of writing a script. though that's probably me being obsessive because most web crawlers will get most of it.
anyway, the details are probably a post for another chost. the main thrust today is one of the weirder Idiosyncrasies i've observed over the years: months-long outages, followed by sudden returns. i haven't kept rigorous notes, but if i search my Discord for the infodumping i've subjected people to, it seems to happen most years
Holy shit.
I would happily contribute to a patreon or subscribestar or kofi or something that exists to help with vcl server costs tbqh
