Old Chaotic District Website Archive (and rambling about hiSTorY)

[haloman30 168]

Hey, so uh, for any of you who might have been around back in early 2014, you might remember this. No, I'm not talking about Nuclear District - I'm talking about the original name of this specific incarnation of Chaotic United - Chaotic District.

 

I know, original name. Much creative. Very original. Wow.

 

The original website was up at http://chaoticdistrict.net23.net for the longest time - and I'd kept it online for quite a while - but it appears that the host I used at the time, 000webhost, decided to remove my account at some point - without notifying me. I shouldn't care but knowing that I could've just logged in once in a while and preserved that URL seriously fucking hurts me deep down. Knowing that something is gone that I could've prevented from being gone.

 

But, while the actual URL itself is gone, the content on the site never was. Multiple backups were taken over the years - once when we first came over to the new webhost, again when 000webhost were about to migrate everything to a new system, and again at some point later for what I'm about to go into.

 

A fully functional, usable, and essentially flawless carbon copy of the website can be found at http://chaoticdistrict.net/.

 

I've had that domain for a while, but it sat dormant and empty for a lot of its life. Around a year ago (give or take, not sure when exactly) I did some tweaking to make the original forums/database work with the current webhost. See, back in the day 000webhost used a fucking abysmally old version of MySQL - which I suspect is part of why they migrated to a new setup entirely. I never got the old site to really work after the migration - things were broken and buggy, and while trying to upgrade the database to use multi-byte encoding, the database reached the size limit for 000webhost and it sat broken until it's deletion.

 

The archived version on chaoticdistrict.net is, and has been mostly fine, minus the fact that IP.Board 3.x really hates having its URL changed. It mostly worked, but most theme assets and logos failed to load as they were still pointed at the original website - which obviously doesn't exist anymore.

 

The files were all there of course - I just had to tell the site to use them. And that's what I've just gone ahead and done.

 

Feel free to go in and browse - though there really isn't much to see. Only a handful of forum topics - all of which are also available here on the CU forums as I manually copy/pasted them myself right after the switch. However, I suppose you can see the really awful stuff I put together and called a "theme" (literally just consisting of changing the logo and nothing else).

 

On a similar note, if you happen to fancy the overall look of that website, it's basically the default theme of IP.Board 3.x - a theme which I'm in the process of re-creating here on the CU forums and will hopefully be available in the future.

 

I suppose some of you may question why I bother doing this kind of stuff, keeping this ancient shit online and running - and it's for preservation. I'm of the belief that anything and everything should be preserved. So much content online is lost forever because of various people, companies, and other entities deciding that it should be removed or purged. I think that, if nothing else, it's a good way to see where we came from and how much we've grown. While the actual population of CU hasn't grown a great deal since all those years ago (which is pretty sad in its own right), to say we haven't grown and learned would be dishonest.

 

Forgive me if I sound like I'm tooting my own horn or bragging - but I think it's fair to say that the overall quality of the web content, in-game content, and most everything we have nowadays has shot up drastically since those early days. Even so, it's all based on those small origins. You may not know this (or care), but there's a lot of data from those early days that's still kicking around. I mentioned forum topics - all of those are still around. On MC, every single spawn/hub we've ever had since Chaotic District is still present. Each one has sat in a dedicated hub world - where all hubs are placed. Every hub from first to last can be found within that world somewhere. This is part of what made the CU Archives on the server a thing we could do. Most of the content was already there, and has been for years.

 

Other things such as configuration files, ranks, and so on - many of them still having traces of their origins. Speaking of ranks...

 

member:
  group:
  - member
  options:
    prefix: '&8[&7Member&8]&r '
esponshadwo1:
  group:
  - member
bruno593211:
  group:
  - donator
k1ll3rxc4shx12:
  group:
  - admin

This is a part of the data that stores player ranks, prior to 1.8 when UUIDs were implemented. Not sure how it ended up so far down the list, but you'll notice "k1ll3rxc4shx12" as a username - this is one of the folks from the Chaotic District days. See, originally CD wasn't exactly intended to be "CU 2.0" (or I guess CU 3.0 if you count ND), it obviously had some of the CU spirit in it (as if it wasn't obvious), but it was still largely just a server designed to be belonging to me and my Xbox LIVE buddies. They didn't really stick through all that long - but the remnants of those days still remain - back when there was a proper "admin" rank on MC. The rank doesn't exist currently as any community admins are listed as Manager ingame (because only i can be red huehuehue) - but there's little bits and pieces all around. Not many that go that far back, but a few.

 

I tend to leave these kinds of things in place on purpose - because at the end of the day, they don't harm anything - in our case, there is no Admin rank, if he logged in and PermissionsEx decided to carry over the legacy data, they'd have no rank. I look at these little bits and pieces of configuration files, HTML, and other things as pieces of history in themselves - Little bits of DNA that serve as small reminders of where we came from. And as long as they continue to be harmless, those little things remain. Maybe I'm a bit too sentimental about things as seemingly meaningless as server configuration, but hey - it doesn't hurt anyone, right?

 

Anyways I got a bit off-track. If you're interested in seeing what the old Chaotic District website was like for the brief time it was up, check out http://chaoticdistrict.net. If not, that's okay too. Only a select few were even on back then.

 

Since that forum is intended to be an archive, I have also disabled new registrations to the forum. This is also done as a sort of security measure, as IP.Board 3.x is pretty old at this point and likely has a number of security holes. Even should it become targeted, there's nothing of relevance on that site - not even login credentials are up-to-date. The database user is a different user - so even if someone could manage to access the entire SQL user, it wouldn't be able to touch anything except that database. Consider disabling registrations a courtesy - as that's something you'll never need to worry about getting leaked out or hacked or whatever.

 

Anywho - that's all for now folks!