The c64g games download site will be relaunched.
The main reason why the site is relaunched is maintainability. The current version is running on PHP and uses the Symfony framework. The Symfony framework used is deprecated and while the site is compatible with PHP 7.2, PHP 8 is around the corner and the site has been suffering from being excluded from Google’s search index despite it having ranked #1 on many search terms in the last decade. Someone at Google decided that the site wasn’t good enough to be considered being indexed.
c64g.com was the first site worldwide that had an authentic nostalgic Commodore 64 website design and was even featured on Italian television. Likewise many original authors of games had contacted the site stating how happy they are to see their games again and available online.
But Google employees don’t care about that. They care about wikis providing content for free for them so they can index that and display as their own content.
As a result the site is being relaunched. Technologies used are the Go language, MongoDB database server and the Angular framework. Also the site will receive its own dedicated VPS.
Users from the current site will be migrated and receive an email with their new account data. They will be asked to set a new password.
The relaunch has happened on the day PHP8 was announced :)
The editor is still work in progress. Base functionality works, search, game and file index, commenting. i18n support is there but not enabled yet. It’s still a good way away from the envisioned site and true multilingual wiki experience, but we’re getting there, step by step :)
Feedback is of course welcome.