H&P Railroad forum....

[Silverback]

Has been comprehensively spammed and looks possibly compromised to me

[Hawk]

I noticed that as well.
I've sent Steve a couple of PM's and also sent him an email from the H&P site. Haven't heard anything back yet.

It's really a shame.

[Gwizz]

That is not good. Steve has had an important Railroad Tycoon site in the past. This may just be the last straw for him. I hope he can recover from this.

Maybe I should back up all of Jesses files.

[Silverback]

Maybe I should back up all of Jesses files.

Good idea if you get the chance. With the Poptop site and other official ones gone too there's not many Railroad Tycoon sites left

[Hawk]

If you're thinking about the C to C Expansion and the 1.05 patch, they're both available here, as well as at The Terminal and ExpressWorld.
The maps over at The Terminal are another story though. There's some available there that are not available here, but I do have them all on my hard drive.
It's still a good idea for Gwizz to make a back-up as well though.

[proudcanadian]

What an absolute shame. Steve's site was one of the ones that really made me interested in buying RRT3. When the map archive went down, that was bad, but now this? Let's hope he can cope with this.

Speaking of which, does Steve really come to this forum anymore?

[Hawk]

Steve let me know he was shutting down his map archive so I added all the maps from his site to mine.

Steve isn't even a registered member here. He was on the old forum, before the hack, but since I re-established, he hasn't joined. I think he's developing for another game now.

[Hawk]

Update!

Steve is alive and well and has deleted all the spam from his forum, and has made necessary changes to the registration process to hopefully stop this crap in the future.

[Hawk]

Sad news folks!

I just got an email from Steve and his forum got bombarded by spammers so he's shut it down. I don't think he's going to bring it back either.
He mentioned that his yearly hosting is up later this year and I think he's going to shut his site down.
I scrambled over there and got all the tips and strategies he had on his site, and with his permission I'll be adding them here once he does shut his site down.

Our community is slowly dying folks.

[Knave]

Sad indeed. I had RRT 2 and 3 . And I knew I liked the games. However there was a few things I was having a hard time understanding I had not played in awhile and went surfing. I found Poptops site and Steve's site and RR info across the pond. Steve's site had guides and hints for us beginners that really opened up these games to me. I have really enjoyed these games and the resulting community because of the time he and a few others put into sharing what they knew. I still remember spending hours at his site. It is truly a sad moment in our hobby to see it go. Just a little more weight on yer shoulders there Hawk!!

[proudcanadian]

This is truly a shame. As I said before, Steve's site was probably the first one that got me really interested in buying RRT3. The tips and hints were great to get me started, and I also liked seeing some of those "jumping trains" screenshots. I really hate to see that all go.
Looks like this site is one of the last holdouts for the Railroad Tycooning community...

[Hawk]

Actually, there's still The Terminal and Railroad Tycoon Info, as well as ExpressWorld, so this isn't the only one left, and as I mentioned - Steve gave me permission to grab all his tips and such and add them here, although some of the screen-shots are only thumbnails now, the original full size images gone.
I'm actually working on the pages of Steve's stuff right now. Here's a screen-shot of what they're going to look like. Steve gave me permission to use his background image and his other images as well.

Click on image to view full size

There's also a couple of RRT2 sites left, which can be found on the Links page here at this site.

[Silverback]

Steve was using an old version of Yabb - Bulletin Board software. some versions were vulnerable to attack and were used to hack the underlying websites and I suspect thats what the spammers were doing and may already have done. CeeBees site went the same way. The Gathering forums were hacked several times. Its a full time job nearly for a webmaster to secure a site and keep it patched.

I've got copies of some old versions of the site somewhere (not the forums) and have just taken a last copy for my own use.

Steve was going to shut the site down 3 years ago - from his site news page.

"July 23, 2005
The end is in sight. I probably
won't be keeping this site and the map archive much beyond October of this year. That is when I have to renew the site rent. As I don't need the large bandwidth nor storage I may renew at much lower size and scale or not at all. Depending on what my business needs are. So if you want the maps or in order to store them for posterity you might want to download some before that time.
The site html pages will probably be stored on that Time machine WebPages archive for a long time however."

[Hawk]

This is true Silverback. He's using version 1.3.1 and the current version is 2.2.3
The main issue with him, according to him, and why he didn't drop the forum when he mentioned, was due to a credit card screw up. He did try to stop his hosting but they billed him anyway, so he decided to run it after all.

This time, due to the spam attacks, he's finally fed up and has decided not to renew his hosting account later this year when it's time to re-bill. Sadly this will include the site, as well as the forum.

You mentioned that you had back-ups. I emailed Steve and asked him if he had any of the full sized screen-shots of the thumbnails on his site, in particular - the leaping trains sent to him by Lars (Lama). He found a couple but not all of them. Did you, by chance, also back-up the full size images? If so would you mind sending them my way so I can add them to the pages I'm putting together?

[KevinL]

The site html pages will probably be stored on that Time machine WebPages archive for a long time however."

The "time machine archive" website is http://www.archive.org/ in case you didnt know.

[Bonneville455]

Sad news folks!

I just got an email from Steve and his forum got bombarded by spammers so he's shut it down. I don't think he's going to bring it back either.
He mentioned that his yearly hosting is up later this year and I think he's going to shut his site down.
I scrambled over there and got all the tips and strategies he had on his site, and with his permission I'll be adding them here once he does shut his site down.

Our community is slowly dying folks.

Yep - that is sad news and kinda baffling to me, since Railroad Tycoon is such a great strategy game series. I'm surprised that there aren't more flight simmers here and involved with RRT as well. The flight sim community is still very vibrant and I would think the same people would enjoy both hobbies - but then again I guess I'm the exception and not the rule. I was a flight simmer beginning in 1984 and have been ever since. RRT I came out several years later and I immediately got hooked on it as well.

I would like to think another new release that built on and expanded the strengths of RRT II would get it going again. Speaking of which - I haven't checked in a while on forum section for the new project that Milo was working on. I'd better go do that - not sure how far that ever got and how serious it is.

[Silverback]

Did you, by chance, also back-up the full size images? If so would you mind sending them my way ......?

Sent PM with all the jpgs I could find that weren't in the map archive. about 3MB worth.

[Gwizz]

Steve had a very good site. I was the biggest bucket mouth at his site with more posts then he or anyone had.
I was sending all my RT2 maps to him. I sent a folder with 3 of my maps. As it turned out one was not my map, but one sent to me by Loco-motive. I sent a PM to Steve asking him to not post Loco-motive's map. I don't know what happened because he did post it. That irritated me and I quit posting there. I wish I hadn't done that as I had learned a lot about map building from Steve. Steve made a lot of excellent maps.

[Hawk]

Sent PM with all the jpgs I could find that weren't in the map archive. about 3MB worth.

I never got the PM.

[Silverback]

Tried again. It said it had sent it