User:Tomjol
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PeerWeb is a popular website, primarily indexing files on the Gnutella2 network. The site does not host files for download, rather the index data is formatted into Magnet links which allow users to download files directly from peer-to-peer networks. In recent times the site has become more community-oriented, as displayed by its thriving forums.
[edit] History
The PeerWeb was founded by Sarevok in mid-2002 and located at the free peerweb.tk domain. At that time the site comprised of a system of static pages which had to be edited and published manually by the founder himself and the first staff member Pyronite (a personal friend of the founder). In early 2003 the peerweb.org domain was purchased and a new site was created using the PostNuke content management system. Later in the year the site merged with a small website called KaBuddy, which served a similar purpose to PeerWeb but with a focus on the FastTrack network. The merger saw the retention of the PeerWeb name, domain and content while incorporating the more community-focused attitudes of the KaBuddy staff, Nas (then known as nasrules) and HuH0x.
In November of the same year, the iPowerWeb company which hosted the site cancelled the account held by Sarevok and accused the PeerWeb staff of breaking the company's Terms of Service by committing Copyright infringement. This claim has never been pursued and the host provided no evidence to substantiate the claim. However, the disruption to the working of the site was not unexpected by the staff due to the ever-escalating cost of running a popular website with the over-capable and resource-intensive PostNuke system. As such, the staff took the decision to take the site offline until a new publishing system was decided upon. In the end a new PHP and MySQL-based system was developed by the administrator Nas, launched on New Year's Day 2004 and hosted by InstantNetworks.
Mere weeks after the re-launch of the site the PeerWeb merged once again, this time with Crucial P2P. The merger saw a number of new staff members, most notably Lee and Stealth (formerly stealthspy), as well as the indexing of files on the Ares Galaxy network. The forums switched from an open-source bulletin board software (phpBB) to a commercial one (vBulletin) due to the ownership of an unused license by the Crucial team.
The backend of the PeerWeb was progressively improved and upgraded throughout 2004 and 2005 while the frontend also went through a number of design 'refreshes'. After moving to a new server late in 2005, disaster struck in January 2006 when the RAID array on which the database for the site was stored became corrupt and beyond economic recovery. Due to upheaval with server changes the most recent backup retained by the site staff was dated October 2005 and was itself incomplete, meaning that much of the site content and many user accounts were lost. In total, an estimated forty thousand users' details were lost.
After approximately a month of uncertainty, among the site staff as well as the users, new hosting for the site was arranged to be provided by the ex-administrator Stealth and the forums returned in February with the main site coming back online in mid-March. Since that time, the number of registered accounts has risen steadily as has the number of active users.
[edit] Community
Large numbers of users have expressed their appreciation of the community aspect of the site, with many stating it as their primary reason for visiting the site on a regular basis. With a large section of the forums being dedicated to...
