The Linux Game Tome will shut down on April 13. Those of us who have
maintained happypenguin.org over the years now lack both the time and
the ambition to do what is necessary to keep the site afloat. If you've
been paying attention, you've noticed the spam clogging the forums, the
lack of updates and the increasing brokenness of the site. The code
driving this site, written by a novice web developer in 1999, is sorely
out of date. It's time to put it out of its misery.
If the community misses this resource, I urge it to build The Linux
Game Tome v3.0. If such an effort ever came to fruition and publicly
pledged to remain free and not for profit, I would be delighted to
transfer ownership of the happypenguin.org domain. Sometime soon, I'll
make available a dump of the Game Tome games database (minus user
information) that anyone may use for any purpose they'd like, including
building a successor site. Before you ask: no, you may not have a copy
of the site code. It is not fit for human consumption. Even as a
reference, it can only corrupt.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to the site over the years, either as moderators, contributors or benefactors.
I've just used my favourite
search engine to search for "happypenguin myusername" and I've had a
nostalgic time reading stuff I'd written under various user names since
2001 :D Back in those days Linux was really exploding and it was a very
enjoyable period visiting this website and discussing gaming, so I thank
you for that experience. Off the top of my head I'd say that the Fashion Cents comments were some of the funniest because of the loony things some crazy woman was saying :P
I'm glad that you're not going to leave this site up any longer because
it looks sad now with all the spam, the neverending Summoning Wars 0.5.6
announcement burned into my grey matter, the "hello, is anyone there"
posts. It's shame because so many people over the years have offered to
assist with it and then the mods go quiet which is strange when you
consider many things Linux are collaborative (I could never understand
that).
Anyway, the team over at the Linux Game Database
have done a fantastic job of filling the void, it's very professional
and there's quite a network of news sites that it aggregates, but it
needs more people posting loony comments on the game pages to encourage
more input from readers.
This news is sad, but I can't
say I didn't see them coming.
I want to thank all the people who made TLGT (which for me it will
always be known as Happy Penguin) for many, many years of news updates. I
found most of the games I tried on GNU/Linux on this site, and many of
them even worked.
I expect you get involved on interesting projects. Good luck.
