For those who may not have heard or noticed, we lost a couple prominent door game sites earlier this year.
* Sunrise Door Software (sunrisedoors.com)
Sunrisedoors.com started reporting an Error 500 roughly sometime after May of this year. I reached out to Al Lawrence to ask whether he was aware, and he told me "Yes, I am aware that the website is down Permanently [bold and underlined]. Mother Nature has a way of telling you to call it quits !!!!" I didn't press him for details of what he meant by that, and instead just thanked him for his time and contributions to the BBS world, and wished him well.
Al had been offering his doors for free (with an optional "coffee fund" donation) for many years, so they are often found running on many BBSes, sometimes in their own dedicated category. They're good games, too. Wheel of Fortune in particular enjoyed a high amount of play time on my board back in '22.
It's sad to see the sun set on Sunrise. Best wishes to Al.
* Metropolis Gameport (gameport.com)
This was the "official" home of LoRD, LoRD II, Planets: TEOS, plus a bunch of Worldgroup addons like MajorMud. Arguably this website had already been dead for many years, considering the owners had been generally non-responsive to requests for door registrations, leading to years of frustration for many new sysops wishing to run legitimately registered LoRD games. One of its many signs of age was the fact that the registration page instructed purchasers to print the order form page and mail it in with a paper check, leading to stories of mailed payments (CASHED payments) with unreceived keys. Some persistent sysops did discover that the doors could be registered by emailing William Hughes directly, and often within the same day he provided keys in exchange for Paypal payment. Maybe that's even still the case; does anyone know?
I'm pretty sure this is still true.
In any case, the website has been reporting a "Host error" since approximately September of this year. Certainly not the first time we've seen this happen for this site, but considering this long of a stretch, I'm calling it dead. Even if it comes back from the dead, it will still be dead to me.
þ ù ú codefenix ú ù ú ConstructiveChaos BBS ú ú ù þ þ þ þ ù (https/telnet/ssh)://conchaos.synchro.net ú ù þ
...Moderation is a fatal thing - nothing succeeds like excess.
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