Compet-n revived on Gamers.org

[Xymph]

Compet-n (COMPET-N) was the first database site for Doom demos, and a vital part of the classic community. But in recent years it had slowly fallen idle while the Doom Speed Demo Archive grew to become the center of the speedrunning universe, especially after its 2019 relaunch. So it wasn't a huge shock when @fx02 announced late 2021 to close his site by July 2022. Due to community requests, pointing out its historical value and its use for Compet-n record tables on the Doom Wiki, this was later extended by a year, and the site was archived to the Wayback Machine.

 

Behind the scenes there were some brief talks about migrating and keeping the site alive, but this only kicked into gear after May 2023, when an (ultimately unrelated) incident forced fx02 to shut down the site early. It eventually resurfaced in October, but incompletely, and will soon redirect to the new host. Meanwhile, fx02 accepted my offer to host the site at Gamers.org, and after receiving code tree and database dump, I worked on it for a few weeks during July/August. A lot of tweaks were needed to make the site run on current PHP/MySQL versions, along with a fresh install of the latest phpBB forums, and I ran out of time for this project until the past few weeks.

 

And now, after more testing and bug fixing (including some long-standing ones that apparently had flown under the radar for years), Compet-n and other Doom Croatia (doom.com.hr) content are operational on this new host:

 

https://compet-n.gamers.org/

 

In a way, it comes full circle, as during its very early days Compet-n was a subdirectory in the idgames archive for some time, before leaving to do its own thing. Now it returns to the Gamers.org nest, which makes sense as keeping old games archives alive, even if mothballed, is our main purpose. (Note that the host is just a VM on one of our physical servers, so if it's hammered it's likely to be sluggish.)

 

Thank you very much to @fx02 for making the database and entire website available for us to continue this historically valuable corner of the DOOM community universe.

[Biodegradable]

You can always count on this community to go the extra mile to preserve its history. This is awesome news.

[Andrea Rovenski]

incredible news! great job to everyone involved on maintaining vital history