The Shyguy Kingdom

[HylianDev]

Hello,

I've been active one way or another in the Nintendo fan & fangaming community for what seems like a really long time now, since about 2006. I remember a lot of things, like when MFGG's current site was brand new, when Mark Brown was Bacon & Shane was Badass Bill, and most relevant, when The Shyguy Kingdom was a major sprite resource.

For a few years now, I've been concerned with the future of The Shyguy Kingdom. I think it's becoming increasingly important to archive the history of fangaming & resources. I can think of several sites that are lost to time, and I'm sure I don't even know a fraction of the sizable communities that existed.

I made a few topics on MFGG:

https://phpbb.mfgg.net/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=20797

https://forums.mfgg.net/thread-234-post-...l#pid23263

I did end up noticing (embarrassingly late since it was on the front page) that Dazz / tSR took over hosting at some point. I believe this to still be the case? If not, it would be cool if someone could point me in the right direction.

Recently, someone made a topic that caught my eye, despite my inactivity lately:

https://forums.mfgg.net/showthread.php?tid=2500

The site appears to be down. Since it's a 500 error, it seems like the server's updates have broken compatibility with the site's old code, though that is just a guess. If this is the case, it was inevitable. Even MFGG's site doesn't really work on PHP 7, as far as I can tell.

http://tsgk.captainn.net/

In the interest of preserving this piece of fangaming history, I would like to make a request, which may or not be practical:

Could we make it a fangaming community project to fix the site? I don't know what the ethics of open-sourcing the website would be, considering the developer is no longer with us. Rest in peace, Webster. But I'd like to open up a dialogue: perhaps another option would be to make a private github repo or something like that where selected developers can take a look at the site & see if the issues are easily fixed. Not to mention that version control is awesome for preservation.

Thanks for reading, I hope we can reach the best possible outcome for preservation of our community's history

[Kesha]

I'd gladly help get the site up and running again if anyone needs help doing so, absolutely would like to look at a more long term solution to avoid these kind of errors.

[Kold-Virus]

Hi there! Are you the same Kesha from NCFC? If so, hello!

I miss Shyguy Kingdom. Found it via my best friend!

[Kesha]

Hi there! Are you the same Kesha from NCFC? If so, hello!

I miss Shyguy Kingdom. Found it via my best friend!

That's me! Though I think by now HylianDev has probably done more for NCFC than me 

[Kold-Virus]

Cool! Hi hahaha!

Yeah well, I remember the name from the forum and the Discord, so I took a chance lmao

[Petie]

I replied to the most recent linked thread but I'll put this here as well. We do not currently host TSGK but if someone manages to get in touch with them, I wouldn't mind setting them up here. We are running PHP7 so it might require some tweaking but if I could get access to the logs (or we simply migrate the site which will obviously give me access to the logs here), I should be able to figure out what's going on and get it back to a functional state at least, most likely as a read-only archive since maintaining it would likely be pretty messy.

[HylianDev]

thanks for your input petie!

i managed to find a bit of contact info for whoever appears to be running the site now, ill get in touch with them and see if i can find some answers there

[Ton]

If I remember correctly, there was an issue with the site because Nfinity had all the login info and none of the other staff did, and they were in the midst of recoding parts of it, but they all got locked out after a while, or something like that. I don't recall the exact details. It's been a while.

[HylianDev]

damn. i shouldve really taken more initiative, the site could have been properly scraped a long time ago.

luckily though we were able to download a lot from the Wayback Machine, lets hope that works out!

[JewyB]

Oh wow, TSGK, that takes me back a long way, i remember very little, i think i remember the layout, and possibly the community, but its been way too long.

I cant really comment on the situation, just wanted to vent my nostalgia.

[Goemar]

Well I'm definitely digging up a long dead thread here, but well, was googling TSGK as was feeling nostalgic, learnt it was now down-down and thus - popped back here as it came up on my Google search.

TSGK used very, very weird code. Like, people have looked at it before and found it to be pretty much unreadable and claiming that it simply shouldn't work. Way, way back, when myself and others from the forums were looking to revive it, I was simply given a user account for the the site - it pretty much crashed it. Think I managed to get one update up but getting things to work just took ages.

I know Waxpoetic was in talks with everything being shifted (content-wise) to tSR (which I assume has been now). The TSGK community was in talks with doing something with the site, but well - a lot of bad stuff happened around that time in a lot of our personal life's (I believe it was when my first engagement ended and I was going through a box of wine a day). It was heart-breaking really, we really wanted to do something so it wouldn't just die, Webster was a great guy, but his death left a lot of us pretty hollow at the time and life just kept throwing punches.

But yeah, it was some great times. Flash (think that was his username, was a yellow or green Mega Man edit for his avatar), Waxy, Stewie_for_gov, the little mouse avatar girl - honestly had such a great time with those guys (and more whose names I've forgotten). Ripping a mad amount of sprites while chatting to Locke_gb7 on MSN Messenger and having a ball on the TSGK/Captian N forums was such a happy carefree of my life, was a beautiful time.