Trainz 3rd-party Websites that Suffer from Linkrot

shebashetan7

Well-known member
Hi everyone,

From Trainz's early beginnings to the present, has attracted the ire of many people of different backgrounds from everywhere in the world. Many of them spent their free time producing quality content for the game. Quite many veterans of Trainz have been with us since the early days of UTC, however some, especially Magicland and Marlboro, eventually move on to pursue other interests.

Now speak of that let's talk about the 3rd-party websites owned by Trainz content creators. Many of these sites, like Jointed Rail, Ocemy, and RRMods, are unlikely to vanish anytime soon due to their prominence in the Trainz community, and close ties with N3V because of the partnership program.

Others, such as Virtual Railroader, and Protrainz, are no longer with us today. They are now gone because off link rot; the owners of those websites stopped paying their dues to the hosting service, and thus the sites have been closed and pulled off the web, because they were no longer being payed for. Many of these links are now dead, or redirect to some boring landing page with a template-style background bulked up with ads and a notification announcing that the domain is on the market.

It is quite frustrating while hunting around the net, trying to catch missing 3rd-party dependencies for a route, when your search on Google and the Kuid index yields nothing, leading you to think that the dependencies were sourced from a site that is no longer active on the web, and it's links will generate errors, or redirect you to a virus, or a page full of ads.:mop:
 
The fact that many 3rd-party Trainz content sites are no longer available due to link rot; failure to pay for hosting costs, closure of the site by the owner, the host is shut down, or for that the website even gets completely wiped from the internet. From your perspective, you would get a 404 error, a redirect to a virus or landing page full of ads, or a site completely unrelated to Trainz or even railroading if you follow these dead links.
 
Such has been the nature of the web since it began in the early 1990s (and yes, I was there back then). 3rd party (and even 1st party) web sites are never permanent - even if their links remains active their contents can change. That, plus uncertainty over authorship, the possibility of malware, etc, is the main reason why I don't source any assets from 3rd party sites.

I grew tired a long time ago of hunting for missing kuids that were in an asset I had downloaded from the DLS so now I simply delete the asset. This stops me from uploading a route that contains 3rd party assets and means that others, who download my route, are not forced to go on the same hunt. I know that there are threads here and index sites that will help you find a missing kuid, but they can give no guarantees.
 
Such has been the nature of the web since it began in the early 1990s (and yes, I was there back then). 3rd party (and even 1st party) web sites are never permanent - even if their links remains active their contents can change. That, plus uncertainty over authorship, the possibility of malware, etc, is the main reason why I don't source any assets from 3rd party sites.

I grew tired a long time ago of hunting for missing kuids that were in an asset I had downloaded from the DLS so now I simply delete the asset. This stops me from uploading a route that contains 3rd party assets and means that others, who download my route, are not forced to go on the same hunt. I know that there are threads here and index sites that will help you find a missing kuid, but they can give no guarantees.

What I would do is list the KUIDs with their links to the 3rd party websites in the description of the asset, route, etc so people can find them easily. You CAN go into Content Manager and view the dependencies of your own content and determine whether or not different assets are built-in, on the DLS or are from 3rd party websites. Also, if a website was shutdown that used a KUID that a route, asset, or any other kind of content needed for it to work; I would immediately update that piece of content NOT to use that KUID anymore so people don't have major issues in the future when trying to find that KUID because it doesn't exist anymore.

Honestly, whatever KUIDs I can't find I don't care about in the end. I operate on routes with missing KUIDs all the time. Northbay County is missing KUIDs and it looks perfectly fine! The Reading and Northern is a different story though, that was never finished when Jointed Rail released it to begin with.
 
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