Subj : Lost a couple door game websites this year
To : Craig Hendricks
From : Martin Kazmaier
Date : Thu Dec 05 2024 10:42 am
CH> For those who may not have heard or noticed, we lost a couple prominent
CH> door game sites earlier this year.
CH> * Sunrise Door Software (sunrisedoors.com)
CH> Sunrisedoors.com started reporting an Error 500 roughly sometime after May
CH> of this year. I reached out to Al Lawrence to ask whether he was aware,
CH> and he told me "Yes, I am aware that the website is down Permanently [bold
CH> and underlined]. Mother Nature has a way of telling you to call it quits
CH> !!!!" I didn't press him for details of what he meant by that, and instead
CH> just thanked him for his time and contributions to the BBS world, and
CH> wished him well.
CH> Al had been offering his doors for free (with an optional "coffee fund"
CH> donation) for many years, so they are often found running on many BBSes,
CH> sometimes in their own dedicated category. They're good games, too. Wheel
CH> of Fortune in particular enjoyed a high amount of play time on my board
CH> back in '22.
CH> It's sad to see the sun set on Sunrise. Best wishes to Al.
CH> * Metropolis Gameport (gameport.com)
CH> This was the "official" home of LoRD, LoRD II, Planets: TEOS, plus a bunch
CH> of Worldgroup addons like MajorMud. Arguably this website had already been
CH> dead for many years, considering the owners had been generally
CH> non-responsive to requests for door registrations, leading to years of
CH> frustration for many new sysops wishing to run legitimately registered
CH> LoRD games. One of its many signs of age was the fact that the
CH> registration page instructed purchasers to print the order form page and
CH> mail it in with a paper check, leading to stories of mailed payments
CH> (CASHED payments) with unreceived keys. Some persistent sysops did
CH> discover that the doors could be registered by emailing William Hughes
CH> directly, and often within the same day he provided keys in exchange for
CH> Paypal payment. Maybe that's even still the case; does anyone know?
I'm pretty sure this is still true.
CH> In any case, the website has been reporting a "Host error" since
CH> approximately September of this year. Certainly not the first time we've
CH> seen this happen for this site, but considering this long of a stretch,
CH> I'm calling it dead. Even if it comes back from the dead, it will still be
CH> dead to me.
