Xfire

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Xfire
Xfire logo
Xfire social content
Xfire social content
URL http://social.xfire.com
Status Offline
Archiving status Partially saved
Archiving type Unknown
Project source xfire-grab
Project tracker xfire
IRC channel #archiveteam-bs (on hackint)
(formerly #xfired (on EFnet))

Xfire was a proprietary freeware instant messaging service for gamers that also served as a game server browser with various other features.[1]

social.xfire.com was a community site for Xfire users, allowing them to upload screenshots (photos and videos) and to make contacts.

On June 10, 2015 Xfire announced that they were shutting down the Xfire client and purge all user content on social.xfire.com on June 12, 2015 (yes, 2 days' notice).

The client got shut down and the export function ceased to be available on or around June 27, 2015. The site got finally shut down and the contents got deleted on July 6, 2015.

Shutdown notice

http://social.xfire.com:

[...] we have decided to sunset the Xfire Client and the social site so we can focus our efforts on The Xfire Tournament Platform. This hasn’t been an easy decision. We have a lot of loyal users and we know many of you will be disappointed by the loss of the client and community. But we feel that we are well positioned to make a significant impact in bringing the exhilaration of esports from the pros to the masses, and we can’t do that effectively while also maintaining the client and social website.
We’d like to thank our loyal fans and users who have stuck with us over the years and we hope that you’ll join us on the next chapter of Xfire either as a tournament organizer, a team owner, a participant, or a spectator.
We understand that a lot of our users are attached to the screen shots and videos that were uploaded to your profiles and we want to make sure you don’t lose them. If you’d like to recover them, you can do so using the form below.
Thanks again for using Xfire, and we look forward to see you in a tournament in the near future.

See also:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/39a41v/xfire_social_profiles_shutdown_save_your/

Site structure

Since the notice, requests to social.xfire.com had been redirected to the page of the notice and export. However, fortunately, profiles were still accessible on crash.xfire.com and a couple of other subdomains, as well as videos and screenshots on media.xfire.com and screenshot.xfire.com, respectively.

Archiving

Users were, theoretically, able to export their content on http://social.xfire.com/, however, the export tool was very slow and buggy. According to the reddit thread, the export tool ceased to be available around June 27, the profiles were still accessible on the web, though.

User computerfreak did an efficient username discovery earlier, the results of which (~21M usernames) can be found here.

ArchiveTeam decided to save what they can. There were millions of videos, screenshots and user profiles to save. The site was also quite slow, often unavailable for short periods.

ArchiveTeam started downloading videos (~7 million) on June 19, and went on to grab screenshots (~130 million max.) on June 30.

At or around 2015-07-06 24:00 UTC, the site got closed down for good and content got apparently deleted.

ArchiveTeam successfully downloaded most of the videos, and like 20% of the screenshots. There was, unfortunately, no time left for the user profiles and the rest of the screenshots.

Archives

Archives are stored in WARC format on the Internet Archive in the archiveteam_xfire collection. Content is also be accessible through the Wayback Machine, however, note that much of the content couldn't be saved from their original urls, but from crash.xfire.com instead of social.xfire.com, so ArchiveTeam's crawls must be searched for in the Wayback Machine that way. Also, for technical reasons, html pages of the screenshots weren't saved, only the screenshots themselves.

References