I’ve just been restoring the files from my old MPQ backups and found this picture of one of my favourite reviews, yep Sadism by none other than Vondur. Not sure why it’s stored as a gif, but there you go.

So what’s the status of this there MPQ Archive? Well I’ve now got all the old DBISAM tables converted into a nice long SQL file that creates a MySQL database. Next problem is to write the code to display that content. I’ve been debating whether to just do the bare minimum, i.e. a review archive / listing or recreate the actual site again but without the input forms.

I’ve decided to go with the latter. I think it’d be fun to have all the old content visible and by going down the route of not having input forms comment spam won’t be a problem. It’s not something I want to be dealing with really. Potentially I could use a free Captcha style system but I don’t think it’ll be worth the effort. Most likely I’ll a have link to a post on here where people can enter comments. What do you think?

In terms of map downloads I’ve had to do a bit of messing around on my part. Apparently I already have 168 maps zipped… but there are 443 Quake reviews. But this isn’t too big a problem to sort, I’m in process of knocking something up that’ll go through the reviews, find reviews without .zip files and then go search my maps folder. If it finds a match it’ll zip them up. I’m hoping I’ll have all the maps but if not, I’ll be posting on func_msgboard. Someone there will be able to help.

By the time this post goes live, all the review images – 1861 files totalling just 66MB – should be uploaded. The next batch of content to upload will be the map downloads when I’ve sorted them out. I’m not sure what to do for a site design, Vondur did me a WordPress theme, but given I’m not using that, I’ll need something else. I quite like the colours of the holding page that Jay did but would also like to have the option to have the old site themes selectable. We’ll see though.

ETA for when it’ll be finished? How long’s a piece of string? If anyone has any suggestions or ideas for MPQ Archive, please let me know.