It's his server, sure, but removing it this way is undoubtedly going to cause some conversation. I can't call everyone who cares or voices an opinion about that entitled, when he could have preserved it all easily if that was his goal.
Agreed. A courtesy "hand over" period for dedicated individuals or teams to have the time to go over what hasn't been preserved elsewhere should become a standard these days. We've lost enough data as it is, preventable losses from conscious decisions should be avoided.
Thankfully some former forums (non-vintage computing related) that I know have at least let this happen by having set specific dates for sunsetting the ability to post or otherwise add new content, before the actual shutdown itself. In between the end of new content, and the shutdown, dedicated teams had the time to properly archive the whole shebang to ensure valuable information isn't lost to the sands of time.
No one is entitled to that, for sure, but no one is entitled to other common courtesies, yet we generally do show these to others just because it's a good thing to do. The whole thing with the statement still comes across as super weird to me, and the whole thing with the $20 DVD set being incomplete and the abrupt end of the site altogether just leave me with a rather negative feeling.
Again, I don't want to come across as wanting to push one person to burden a load they couldn't bare themselves, but I do also hope for those people to reach out to the community for cooperative solutions. That did not happen here, communication was minimal, and it's all just confusing and sad.
To get to the meat and potatoes of the potential missing data, was there any index of what was hosted at MacGUI, which files were missing from earlier archives/the DVD set, etc.? It's, at least to me, completely unclear if any of the data lost is potentially available elsewhere (e.g. Mac Garden or Repo), if there's any data/software missing that is now gone forever unless someone has a copy locally, and what the share between those two is.
