Well, looks like it finally happened. The Xbox Chaos forums are no more.
Not that it was much of a surprise – the site had been very inactive for quite a long time, and only really got bot traffic towards the end of its life. Thankfully, however, it didn’t simply shutdown out of nowhere, permanently sealing away all of its content.
First and foremost, Lord Zedd (one of the administrators of Xbox Chaos, and the primary developer of the Assembly modding tool) went ahead and released every blog and forum post on Archive.org, ensuring that all the collected knowledge and research isn’t lost. On top of that, he collected all the old mods that folks had put together and released those on Archive.org, too.
However, at the time it wasn’t clear if there was going to be any sort of archive or preservation of the information there. All that was said was that XboxChaos was going to close down – and that was it. So, I did what I normally do when I hear that something I love is going to be potentially lost forever – I back it up.
I’ve done this with a number of things over the years – be it old YouTube channels, websites, software, and so on. I’ve built up enough data over the years to warrant an over 40TB file server in my home. Some would consider this excessive, but to me, I’m putting my money where my mouth is.
I hate when companies and communities close their doors – and I especially hate when they do so with no thought or care given to ensure that what was once available, remains available for those who cared about it to revisit it years or decades later. It’s why my gaming community, Chaotic United, makes sure to release all of its older Minecraft worlds. It’s why that, in the unlikely event of a total shutdown, I’d almost certainly release everything – forum posts, blog posts, forum themes, plugins, worlds, configs, and so on.
I think preservation is important – and so I try and do my best to not just complain online about it, but to actually try and preserve as much as I can – as well as make that stuff publicly accessible for folks to enjoy.
What Is/Isn’t Archived
As of right now, the entire XboxChaos website as it would’ve appeared to guests has been preserved exactly as it was prior to its closure. The website itself is entirely composed of static content – which means that no backend functionality or additional data remains. You won’t be able to login or view any private topics or posts, nor any private messages of any sort. The shoutbox was also not preserved, as it was removed prior to the website’s closure.
File downloads are also not present on the web archive, for now. At some point in the future, I do want to include these again – and I did go through and save those as well. However, these can be found on the archive.org page posted by Lord Zedd.
The halo.bungie.net Archive
A while back, prior to the halo.bungie.net shutdown, I went and made sure to back up everything there as well. At the time, the content was hosted under elaztek.com, the website for Elaztek Studios. However, with some recent legal changes over there (such as registering Elaztek Studios as a formal LLC), I figured it’d be best to move that content away from elaztek.com, since it could potentially be seen as copyrighted content. As such, the entire archive has been moved to bnetarchive.haloman30.com – with the original URL of bnetarchive.elaztek.com redirecting to it. No other changes were made there, and no content was removed (and never will be).
Where can I view this stuff?
The buttons below will take you to the XboxChaos web archive, the archive.org page by Lord Zedd, and the new halo.bungie.net archives. If you encounter any issues, please feel free to reach out by commenting below, or by contacting me on Discord. My Discord tag is haloman30#8798, and while you’re free to message me directly, you’ll get a quicker response if you join either the Chaotic United Discord or Elaztek Studios Discord server.