Where did highball trainz go?

[tangerine]

I was looking for a trainz Saluda Grade route and I found one by Highball trainz, however the link did'nt work and neither did typing in the url. I would like to know why Highball trainz shutdown.

 

[JCitron]

I just did a search and found this link right away in Bing.

highballtrainz.weebly.com

This is the route you're looking for.

I was lucky that I was able to find it. In the future, please provide the URL for the website you're looking for it makes things a lot easier for those that are helping you.

 

[Forester1]

Kinda odd though. If you try just https://highballtrainz.weebly.com it gets a 404. I went to Google and all of the links that come back get 404

 

[wreeder]

John provided a link to the route directly. You are getting the 404 error because the default HTML page is missing. I would guess the user or weebly deleted it. The path John provided to the uploads folder is still valid. Likely just sloppy server management on weebly's part.

https://highballtrainz.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/1/132165535/southern_railway_-_saluda_grade.cdp

 

[Forester1]

Yeah, understood, and I got the download from John's link when I thought it would go to the site (didn't check the URL in the bottom left corner). Then curiosity got to me, so I was trying to figure out if I could go to the site, which as you say, is no longer available.

 

[JCitron]

Yeah, understood, and I got the download from John's link when I thought it would go to the site (didn't check the URL in the bottom left corner). Then curiosity got to me, so I was trying to figure out if I could go to the site, which as you say, is no longer available.

That's what confused me as well! I really did think the site was still alive after that.

Apparently, from what I read here, the site is in fact dead, but the download link is still kicking. This unusual because when a site dies, usually that's the first thing to be killed.

 

[1611mac]

There is one save of the site on the waybackmachine at internet archive. There is a download page from 2020 but I couldn't download anything..
https://web.archive.org/web/20200510055500/https://highballtrainz.weebly.com/downloads.html

 

[Joaquin_2011]

Hi there, I am making this message for the owner so they dont have to make one.

The website was removed about a week ago since HighBall Trainz shutdown almost a year ago. At the same time. The owner, CryptoPilot. Kept the site up for a long time until eventually it was recently removed. Hope that answers your question.

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

If creators and route-builders put things on the DLS and not exclusively on third-party websites, this kind of crap would be a non-issue, but they keep finding reasons to avoid the DLS.


.

 

[wreeder]

That's what confused me as well! I really did think the site was still alive after that.

Apparently, from what I read here, the site is in fact dead, but the download link is still kicking. This unusual because when a site dies, usually that's the first thing to be killed.

I'm guessing the uploads directory is a symbolic link to a common directory shared by all sites. This was a common practice many years ago on a lot of servers. It isn't considered to be secure these days.

 

[JCitron]

I'm guessing the uploads directory is a symbolic link to a common directory shared by all sites. This was a common practice many years ago on a lot of servers. It isn't considered to be secure these days.

Wow that's interesting. I was never that deep into website setup other than uploading company pages about news briefs and product info. All boring stuff.

 

[wreeder]

Let's assume that weebly.com servers are doing name based hosting which means that all the sites have the same DNS records all pointing to weebly.com. An HTTP request comes to the server for highballtrainz.weebly.com and the web daemon accepts it because somewhere in a config file it is still listed as a hostname it should accept. The web daemon looks in the directory for highballtrainz and fails to finds the requested files and returns a 404 error. But in your link the web daemon sees the file path starts with the uploads directory and instead of looking in the highballtrainz directory for the uploads directory, it follows the symbolic link to the shared folder and finds the file there. It then offers the file for download. At some point in the future the highballtrainz host should be removed from the list of valid hostnames to answer for and then the download will break.