I had 2 dvd's of free stuff from poser 3 upwards which are lost, i have found at least 70% free sites are gone.
Its such a pity that so much fantastic stuff has vanished forever, i believe Serge Marck's poser historical fashion for women dead.
i miss the pose ,4 5 and 6 female historical outfits, 'i am just wondering if he is still about, or any of the other people around the world who had fantastic stuff free.
i dont even have JTrout freebies their gone as well a pity.
so much gone a real shame of poser history down the pan.

Poser fashion was down for awhile, then up again, and some people said they got some kind of warning about the site maybe harmful to their computer. I never got any such message. However, now I see the site is down again and the address can't be found.

You can still see much of it at this internet archive link:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.poserfashion.net/

But yes, many links that I had and have in my freebie bookmarks folder are in fact dead. But such is life. It costs money to keep sites up and running, and many put up freebies as a hobby.  Eventually life gets in the way, or finances change that you have to weigh the cost of keeping up a site that is a money pit vs taking it down and putting that money towards something else.  I did that to my own website for about 5 years. It was just costing me too much money to keep it running.

Ta
Its hard with costs now, but pity thier was nowhere, for someone to ut thier freebies up for a couple of weeks for people to download.
Would be nice a depository where old stuff could be shared.
Lots sites have someone complain about it being spyware ect, firefox usualy has a field day with warnings.

Thanks,Acadia.

Why couldn't they just transfer their stuff to shareCG and use Rapidfile or some such device

If hosting it somewhere is too much trouble, they could release it as open source or public domain, so it wouldn't be lost...

Quote - If hosting it somewhere is too much trouble, they could release it as open source or public domain, so it wouldn't be lost...

Or better give permission for others to host it.

The thing that often happens is that people move on to other interests.  Once interests in Poser wane, they don't feel like taking the time to set up an account on another site and populating that site with everything they made.

This is something that freebie creators need to keep in mind when they set up their readme files. If they make their readmes less restrictive, their work can be shared amongst users forever. Otherwise, if they lose interest in Poser and let their website die, their creations become dead and unable to be shared to new users for about a century due to copyright laws. Some content creators may prefer having limited distributions on their freebies, but I'm sure that many would like to see them available for free forever.

There's also been more than one case in which creators have lost their stuff due to a computer failure and had no backups. They've had to appeal to anyone who might have their items to send them copies. I can understand that at the time they release something, people may not want to just make it public domain. They may not be thinking about the future, including the fact that they might die in a few years, which has happened as well.

The repository idea has been discussed on occasion for a long time. IMO, it's the best idea since it would give creators some control over the circumstances under which their creations would be released - if I die, if I loose interest etc. It needs to be organized and promoted though by a reputable entity that will hopefully be around long term and can be relied on not to try to sell the items, take credit for creating them etc. - preferably, it would be part of the community rather than a generic 3D site. That pretty much means Daz or Renderosity though I'm sure others might qualify as well. Daz is more into their own stuff so here seems to me to be the best choice. It would take some work to figure out the specific mechanisms, but I think it could work and it would certainly be a great service to the community.

Attached Link: Wayback Machine.

Check with the Internet archives (the Wayback Machine), and you might be able to get a small portion of it back...just pop in your old URL, and it might show up.

It is a shame how many free sites have died... Especially when you're looking for a certain piece of content you've seen in a render, and you can't find the site. You find links to it, but they're all broken... and then you find the coolness that is the Wayback Machine, and it has the site, but no zip files from it :sad: I hate it when that happens. It seems to me that a lot of free sites were lost when Yahoo Geocities (or is it Geosites? never paid much attention) closed. At least, during one of my last content hunts in the dusty corners of the web I kept finding links to old Yahoo Geo[?] pages, but they were all broken. Grr...

I agree that people just move on. You see that even with some of the older freebies here on Rendo... the image is now replaced by a question mark, and if you try to download, the source no longer exists. No one is obligated to maintain their free items forever. But if I wanted to keep playing with the free and experimental stuff posted by fellow hobbyists, I'm sure the contents of ShareCG and other remaining free sources would outlast my interest in doing so.

In addition to the Wayback Machine there are a couple of special Geocities archives. I don't know if thay have any additional sites that Wayback doesn't. I tried downloading an arbitrary file from a site on OoCities and it worked, so maybe, one chance in a million you may find something useful.

www.oocities.com/

reocities.com/ 

 A few years back I found a Poser free site that had a bunch of downloads.  I did not have the time to get them so i bookmarked the site. When I went back a few days later to download the freebies the site was totally gone! 

"When I went back a few days later to download the freebies the site was totally gone! " 

I think that became a circular problem, at least some years ago. People would download everything for fear that the site would close down. The resulting rush would bust the site owner's bandwidth limit and they'd get hit with a bigger bill. They'd ask people to only download a couple of items a day etc., but in the end, some of them just said to heck with it and shut down. I think that's what doomed Lannie's and some other classics.

That was before places like sharecg and the file hosting services, and maybe bandwidth allotments are more generous these days, so I don't know if that is as much of a problem today or not.

On the bright side, ghastley  209.92.41.204/Poser/  is still online and greylight www.greylight.com/poser.html still has Poser 3 vintage freebies.

• "People would download everything for fear that the site would close down"* ** lol exactly!

There was also a time, several years back when the Rendo store was just  taking off, and freebies were at an all time high, quality wise.  I noticed several items I had downloaded as freebies were no longer free but in the Rendo store instead. Can't blame the creators though.  It takes mega-hours to create Poser stuff.
**