I don't know how the Internet works, but what I imagine is, even though the site is offline, the servers that hold the doujins, all those files are still safe somewhere?

The server is gone or, if TheDoujin server was the same as Gelbooru's, all the doujins were wiped.

Someone (not necessarily an admin) may have archived or backuped all of them privately. They could put a torrent up but I doubt they'll bother. I don't see a reason to bother archiving it all to begin with (especially as an admin if the plan was to shut it down permanently).

So there is a chance, but I would say it's all pretty much gone.

No, the server still exists. I'm not sure why you think it would suddenly be gone. The server is still up and running in our datacenter rack, you just need to be a system admin to be able to actually do anything with it.



It isn't.



This is also false. It will probably happen eventually, but for now all that's happened is that the site itself was set to redirect to Gelbooru.



This is pretty much true. To be completely honest, much of our content was imported from elsewhere, so there isn't really much to gain by archiving it. Even if we did archive it, it would be a bad time. The original doujin archive files are literally stored with just their post ID's as filenames, so there's no way to find anything specific unless you already know what post ID you're looking for. The individual pages are stored the same way we do on Gelbooru - their filenames are just their MD5 hash (of the individual page, not the doujin!) stored in a subfolder based on the first 4 characters of that hash (so 23a84039e25798d7542ca93f5768c7ff.jpg is stored in /23/a8/). In either case, it's definitely a bad time.

Why would you be paying for a server that's not up?

Because we aren't paying for it? We own it.

I just stopped by the forums and heard about this happening. Awfully sad, especially considering the current scanlator drama and funny business with exhentai's tags.

Out of curiosity, about how many gigs worth of doujins were stored on the site? I can't imagine them taking up that much space given that it's mostly black and white images which would make lossless compression much easier. You say it wouldn't be worth it because of the file naming conventions, but I bet if one of the admins did go the torrent route and included the proper database materials you could probably get some autists from 4chan or 8chan to help figure something out.



Redundancy is reason enough. The more copies of the material that are out there, the less likely it ends up getting lost to the sands of internet time.

Why do I get the feeling that this has something to do with Google's delisting shenanigans or some kind of legal threat. Must be the silence and suddenness about it. If I'm correct, mod edit this out of my post.

Cause depending on location your electricity alone probably costs like hell, and it's non-negligible even though the price tag is nowhere written. I know if I hosted a powerful server where I live I would be paying hundreds of dollars in that alone. Obviously though it's a lot cheaper for industrial zones if you had a real server farm. I mean, if running a server costed nothing just cause you own it why even run ads? Just put the site up and forget it cause supposedly it'll be up there forever.

When I said 'server is gone' I was talking about HTTP server (or even the OS) not the physical server. I assumed you wiped it and put it to good use (i.e. cache Gelbooru) or you wiped it and shut it down for later use (in which case I assumed redirection is at DNS level). Why even down it if you're not going to cannibalize it? Really, if the server is still running and doujins are still there just put it back up lol.

Maybe, they're waiting for the heat to simmer down or something?

TheDoujin's server is definitely nothing that would be considered powerful by any metric, and would definitely not cost hundreds of dollars in electricity for you to run.



Ads are to pay for the internet connection, which is definitely way more expensive than the electricity. However, since datacenters usually charge based on actual bandwidth used, that isn't a big deal either if nobody's actually using the site.



The server probably will be cannibalized to be used for something else at some point. It's in a different state from where lozer lives, so it probably isn't a huge priority.

Different country even. 6.7TB of space.