The long-running Japanese software portal vector.co.jp is ending their hp.vector homepage service and deleting all hosted sites on December 20—this service hosts a ton of turn-of-the-millennium doujin and homebrew pages, including a lot of pasocom-relevant material for PC98, MSX, etc by many authors who never moved and/or went MIA and aren't going to back up their pages of their own accord, so if there's anything you want to save, don't sleep on it. (IIRC they never expanded their 5MB hosting cap, so we're not talking unwieldy levels of data.)
Looked into this a bit, and hoo boy that's a fair amount of old internet about to get some GeoCities-style purging in December. The good news though is that it seems pretty archivable in the time we have, not just due to the aforementioned 5MB data cap, but also a decently predictable URL format. (EDIT 2024-07-18: There's also an archive of a now-defunct authors listing page, didn't find out until after I first posted)
Most hp.vector pages seem to abide by a URL format of hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA0xxxxx, where x can be any base 10 digit. Based on the double-quoted web searching I've done of possible values, it seems xxxxx could be anything under 50000 (EDIT 2024-07-18: Based on the aforementioned authors listing archive, seems like this actually goes up to at least 60227). So there's a good starting point for archiving the sites, I also wrote a lil Python script to output the values:
with open("./hpvector.txt", "w") as out:
for i in range(0, 70000):
out.write("hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA" + str(i).zfill(6) + "/\n")
That said, there do seem to be some outliers to this format, with the linked Wayback Machine URL list showing things like etc, images, jpn, or tfuruka1 in place of the VA0xxxxx entry. Other examples of these seem to just return redirects/not found pages though, with shurei for example redirecting to an independently-hosted site, so the shown format could still be the vast majority of the content.
So yeah there's my spiel about archiving a doomed hp.vector. One corporation's trash, an actual person's treasure!






























