Disappearance of very important online sources

[Steamed_Banana]

Hey guys, I have been wanting to ask for a while, what happened to WW2aircraftperformance.org? It's gone though you can find it on the Wayback machine. And someone posted a copy here. But all of this is far too precarious. This is really distressing. I did find a thread on it here, but it doesn't answer most of my questions.

That was (is!?) such an incredibly useful, simple but well organized site packed with extremely helpful primary sources for both serious researchers and amateurs. I'd rather see it be much further expanded, definitely really hate to see it disappear. If it's a matter of funding I'd be glad to contribute the pittance I could afford (and continue doing so, if needed). I would think a crowdfunding campaign should be able to raise some money.

Can someone tell me what is going on and what if anything I can do to help? I gather some forum regulars here put it together, right?

I was kind of traumatized when another excellent aviation site - Pacific Victory Roll - mysteriously disappeared a few years ago. It can be found on the Wayback Machine here, but that is far too precarious for such an excellent site. This beautiful site had all the Australian and New Zealand air forces victory claims for the Pacific Theater in WW2, bios of scores of pilots, articles about various battles and other events. Really a treasure for anyone interested in this Theater or in Aussie or Kiwi aviation / military history.

Can anything be done to bring this back?

I think we need something that can prop up these super useful sources. In another field I am involved in we have taken steps which have assured similar web based resources stay funded and maintained. Given the continued interest in WW2 aviation arising from computer games etc., I would think this should be possible for WW2 aircraft too. Is anyone else concerned about this issue?


I'd like to discuss possibilities of preserving some of the best online resources like these. if anyone is interested. Post other good sites you know of as well which do still seem healthy, like PacificWrecks is a good one. This Site on the Lend-Lease US and British planes in Soviet service is also very useful. It keeps moving around so I think it may be in a precarious situation too.

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

You probably need to contact the owners of the site. Unfortunately, we are not associated with it, and cannot bring it back.

I do believe someone associated with it was active here. Let me check.

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Yeah, Mike Williams and Neil Stirling

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Yeap, M Mike Williams and N Neil Stirling can possibly answer your questions.

 

[Steamed_Banana]

I started a new thread because I think maybe some more 'meta' approach to this problem is in order. Is the community here willing to try to buoy up some of these sites that are so useful to (almost) all of us?

 

[bada]

Hi, The .com domain is up as backup.
The .ORG has issue with it's dual domain. "Spitfireperformance.com" had expired, Mr Williams renewed it but the link between the 2 domains does not work anymore on the hosting side, so all pages that were hosted before on spitperf.com are dead.
My backup is not perfect (some links and "back" issues still present, but usable) but got a life, so finding all quircks by myself (and time to correct them) is not always easy, even with the 404 listing provided by the hosting.
If you see some redirection errors, do not hesitate to send an email (see contact page) with the info needed to correct.
Otherwise, am working on a full rebuild of the wwiiaircraftperformance so it can be viewed on portable devices and modern browsers (with high res) and in darkmode. But it takes some time as each page need to be totally rewritten with modern CSS. Even With Claude Sonnet helping, the end result isn't always what i have in mind, so i need to correct manually. ( good way to re-learn HTML coding )So i can also made a new architecture, much more clean and easier to handle.

About the idea of having a backup of old sites>>> issues:
- getting all the website from "webarchive" is in most cases not possible because of missing pages or old no longer unsupported features (109lair as a perfect example)
- getting in touch with the creators and be able to get the data from them (some of them do not have the original data anymore and email adresses not in use anymore, people dead, etc...)
- Insert the "archived" website into an already existing website requires to rewrite all pages' connections, it's really (like hell) time consuming. Not even talking about the site architecture that sometimes is really "bad" ( to stay polite )
Had this idea also, as like you, i think too much data has been lost in the last years, sadly.

The best way is to backup the old pages still existing today using HTTrack (or equivalent). Do not do that with "modern" websites. check for "last modified" first. if you see the page is maintained regularly , do not bother. Check also Whois for domain expiration date and do the backup few weeks before the expiration.

 

[Marcel]

It's a general problem.

I'm already working on similar problems for Dutch ww2 sites. I've recently backed up and modernised 3 sites for the original authors. We're discussing the hosting.

So the problems are general:
- websites are created by people with no technical knowledge concerning webhosting
- authors are thus only focused on content, so updates have been neglected, making them run on deprecated tech stacks.
- hosting costs money for hardly any gain and gets more expensive because of the deprecated techstack that has to be supported
- Often authors lose interest as they get older, this is accelerated by the problems above.

So I modernized these old Dutch websites and planning to move them to cheaper non-custom hosting.

I'm not looking for work, so don't look at me for fixing the sites you mention

 

[bada]

Marcel
Groetjes buurman.
you're totally right, but the hosting part, you learn on the fly, sometimes with hard landings, but it's not the hardest part i think.
What do you mean by "cheaper non-custom hosting." ?

 

[Marcel]

Marcel
Groetjes buurman.
you're totally right, but the hosting part, you learn on the fly, sometimes with hard landings, but it's not the hardest part i think.
What do you mean by "cheaper non-custom hosting." ?

The sites I mentioned are using a very old CMS, based on a very old php version. We're talking about 25 year old versions. The owner is paying extra in order to have a hosting that supports these old versions of MySQL, php etc in order to keep the site alive which costs him a few hundred euros per year.. If you don't have these special requirements, the average standard hosting will set you back for less than 40 euro/year (in The Netherlands at least) and sometimes way less) and you can already host multiple sites/domains on that. His hosting is much more expensive.

Having said that, many sites don't need a CMS. Lot's of these informative sites are basically static sites, maintained by only one or just a few people. For that I would advise against even using a CMS, skipping the dependency on databases and PHP and the like all together and just use a static content generator. This will also make the site lightning quick and no security problems. I just converted the "dordtopenstad" website to Hugo which works fine. I am hosting the test version on my band's domain until the owner approves (time is an issue). I am thinking of hosting it on github pages, making hosting virtually free and only costing the domain registration.

 

[Steamed_Banana]

So we had a similar problem with another set of data for a completely different time and place, but in a way kind of similar. We had an increasing number of translations of primary sources scattered all over, also precariously situated on disappearing sites. This was twenty years ago.

What we did was the following:

1. Set up a crowd funding operation to raise some money from the community of researchers and amateur enthusiasts, which was growing at the time (and still is). But probably isn't as large as WW2 aviation in terms of popularity.
2. We also allocated some funds from certain events.
3. Found someone who could kind of take charge of the thing. Originally this was a part time volunteer, after a few years it became a part time job. We also recruited a handful of other volunteers from the community who helped with the technical web site stuff (see below).
4. Began to organize the data into a new website. They chose to do it as a Wiki though this could be done a variety of ways.
5. Once the website was in place, we started to get a lot more data coming in from all kinds of researchers around the world.
6. After a year or two, we (they) began to aggregate some of the data and publish books from it.

The crowd-funding supported the initial setup. Today this Wiki is effectively a small publisher and has released dozens of books, and this along with donations (I think they have a Patreon or something) pays for the ongoing operation, including a salary for the main guy mentioned at #2 and one or two other people, as well as pay for hosting etc.

This thing is now a highly valued free resource for both academic researchers, serious amateur researchers and authors, and more casually interested people.

I don't know if something like this would work with this type of community, but it's at least feasible. I have seen it work. The hard part for this group maybe is #2, finding a person with enough time to take it on, and also probably clearing copyright and / or making arrangements with the people who originally collected the data. But this website seems like a fairly useful gathering place for this kind of thing, and one could spread the word to the various WW2 air-warfare gaming communities. Maybe it could even be expanded to other wars and other times and places, eventually.

 

[Steamed_Banana]

Hi, The .com domain is up as backup.
The .ORG has issue with it's dual domain. "Spitfireperformance.com" had expired, Mr Williams renewed it but the link between the 2 domains does not work anymore on the hosting side, so all pages that were hosted before on spitperf.com are dead.
My backup is not perfect (some links and "back" issues still present, but usable) but got a life, so finding all quircks by myself (and time to correct them) is not always easy, even with the 404 listing provided by the hosting.
If you see some redirection errors, do not hesitate to send an email (see contact page) with the info needed to correct.
Otherwise, am working on a full rebuild of the wwiiaircraftperformance so it can be viewed on portable devices and modern browsers (with high res) and in darkmode. But it takes some time as each page need to be totally rewritten with modern CSS. Even With Claude Sonnet helping, the end result isn't always what i have in mind, so i need to correct manually. ( good way to re-learn HTML coding )So i can also made a new architecture, much more clean and easier to handle.

About the idea of having a backup of old sites>>> issues:
- getting all the website from "webarchive" is in most cases not possible because of missing pages or old no longer unsupported features (109lair as a perfect example)
- getting in touch with the creators and be able to get the data from them (some of them do not have the original data anymore and email adresses not in use anymore, people dead, etc...)
- Insert the "archived" website into an already existing website requires to rewrite all pages' connections, it's really (like hell) time consuming. Not even talking about the site architecture that sometimes is really "bad" ( to stay polite )
Had this idea also, as like you, i think too much data has been lost in the last years, sadly.

The best way is to backup the old pages still existing today using HTTrack (or equivalent). Do not do that with "modern" websites. check for "last modified" first. if you see the page is maintained regularly , do not bother. Check also Whois for domain expiration date and do the backup few weeks before the expiration.

Thank you so much for doing this.

 

[Steamed_Banana]

It's a general problem.

I'm already working on similar problems for Dutch ww2 sites. I've recently backed up and modernised 3 sites for the original authors. We're discussing the hosting.

So the problems are general:
- websites are created by people with no technical knowledge concerning webhosting
- authors are thus only focused on content, so updates have been neglected, making them run on deprecated tech stacks.
- hosting costs money for hardly any gain and gets more expensive because of the deprecated techstack that has to be supported
- Often authors lose interest as they get older, this is accelerated by the problems above.

So I modernized these old Dutch websites and planning to move them to cheaper non-custom hosting.

I'm not looking for work, so don't look at me for fixing the sites you mention

Thank you for doing this.

 

[MIflyer]

Tailwheel was a very useful Dutch site before it was taken over by the forces of evil.

 

[Steamed_Banana]

I think it would be pretty easy to make a book of just say, all the Hellcat primary source data, or all the Spitfire data, all the Bf 109 data, all the P-40 data etc. etc. You could find a few public domain images, maybe a photo of one of the warbirds for a cover shot... it could easily become a series, for the hard core enthusiast (or researcher).

 

[Marcel]

I'm not a fan of books for public domain info. Books get out of print, become obsolete or can be difficult to get in certain parts of the world.
Wikis can be a good way if things are a community effort. You do need some good curation and moderation, though.

One problem I see is that data on some websites can owned by the author, think images and documents, that could have been taken quite some effort and money to acquire. It will be difficult to get permission to use that on a community owned website.
We see those problems here on the forum all the time.
And of course you have the problem of monopolitising the data source. Diversity in research has its benefits.

 

[fubar57]

Someone must have worked on the home site lately. My anti virus isn't going nuts anymore.

 

[Marcel]

Someone must have worked on the home site lately. My anti virus isn't going nuts anymore.

That's not your anti virus. A great example of a non-maintained ssl certificate. It deprecated in 2022 and no-one bothered to renew it.

 

[Steamed_Banana]

I'm not a fan of books for public domain info. Books get out of print, become obsolete or can be difficult to get in certain parts of the world.
Wikis can be a good way if things are a community effort. You do need some good curation and moderation, though.

Books don't need to be obsolete these days, due to the magic of "print on demand", but the situation I'm referring to, which is very real, does both of course. People who buy the books are the ones who particularly like a certain subset of the data and want a keepsake, essentially. The Wiki maintained by the same outfit (partly with the help of the profits from the books) is for everyone worldwide, for free.

One problem I see is that data on some websites can owned by the author, think images and documents, that could have been taken quite some effort and money to acquire. It will be difficult to get permission to use that on a community owned website.

You start with the ones willing to play ball, obviously. If it works and establishes itself as a respected effort, many of the rest will come.

We see those problems here on the forum all the time.
And of course you have the problem of monopolitising the data source. Diversity in research has its benefits.

One thing which happened with our Wiki is that it took a lot of private, you could say 'siloed' and sometimes much more agenda driven efforts and aggregated them into something which became a genuine community resource. There is the effect of transparency which tends to correct errors over time. The quality is better now than most of the private efforts were, at least for certain things. Private research does continue but in more advanced and specialized areas, while the Wiki consolidates the best and most widely understood data.