The website of the freeware fun shooter World of Padman exists since January 2002, at that time attainable under the domain www.planetpadman.com. Since February 2003, it is still accessible at www.worldofpadman.com, even though it currently runs on worldofpadman.net and this currently represents the main domain. This is mainly for technical and organizational reasons. Originally founded by ENTE and supervised by Harmonieman until 2006, Smiley then took over the position of the webmaster and launched with the release of World of Padman as a standalone game in April 2007 a completely new and self-developed website. It received a refresh in design and substructure in mid-2011 and ran until the fatal server crash in February 2015. Since December 2016, the website appears in its current form and is being managed by Kai-Li.
In this long term of the WoP website, there was always loss of content. In particular news posts were lost with each conversion or were only partially migrated. Back then, the loss of old news did not seem to be too bad for us, and the server crash in 2015 was the end of it all. As PadMod turned 15 this year, it was important for us, and also in preparation for the upcoming Christmas campaign, to get an overview of the events of World of Padman’s first 4 years of development. Since we have no backups of previous websites, we only had the opportunity to research database content via the web archive. The recovery was successful for the years 2002 to 2005, albeit with some gaps.
Despite the considerable workload, we have now set ourselves the goal of restoring the contributions of the remaining years as well as possible. Already with the release of the current website in December 2016, we had already restored some of the news articles from the years 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. Now we have completed all the entries of these years and have been able to supplement the German original contributions for the most of it again. Among them are also many contributions by the community reporters from back then available again. This includes many pictures and screenshots, of which there is still a backup available.
In the next step, we will tackle the years 2006 to 2009 piece by piece. Due to the technical implementation of the website from 2007, we will only succeed with the English content, since the web archive, with a few exceptions, has archived mostly these contributions. Also the then bilingual available RSS feed of the website has been preserved in the web archive only in English.
In the web archeology practiced in this way, there are always traces to lost files and pictures that we are currently collecting and documenting. We will then post this documentation in due time with the hope that we, with the help of the community and former or currently inactive PadMembers, will be able to make this content available to all again. Until then, stay tuned.