PSharing
| PSharing (ivPicture) | |
| |
 PSharing, a Hungarian image sharing service | |
| URL | http://psharing.com[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb] / http://ivpicture.hu[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb] |
| Status | Offline |
| Archiving status | Partially saved |
| Archiving type | Unknown |
| IRC channel | #archiveteam-bs (on hackint) |
| Data? | archiveteam_psharing |
PSharing.com (a.k.a. ivPicture.hu) was a Hungarian image sharing service. From its start in 2007 until its closure in 2016 it hosted more than 860,000 pictures.
The service was interrupted on May 11, 2016.
History
The site – apart from minor issues – worked quite fine. Administrators seemed to be active, they kept posting cute animal pictures on their Facebook page. Hajdina Bt., the company behind the site seemed financially stable.
Although not too many people used the site (200–300 pictures uploaded per day, this is a lower scale even in Hungarian context), they had nearly 8,000 followers on Facebook, and they were able to provide a quality service, on two domains (ivpicture.hu, psharing.com), for several years.
Furthermore, through the service they were able to advertise their other websites and services. The latest such one was their 2015-founded webhosting service tarhelyotthon.hu.
Earlier they also planned and tried starting some other services (ivMarket, ivLink, ivSystem, ivGames), with more or less (rather less) success.
Shutdown
Despite the care and stability described above, the service disappeared on May 11, 2016, with no signs and no notice.[1]
According to the log of the ongoing archiving process, on 2016-05-11 at 17:49 (UTC+2) their server got disconnected ("Connect timed out"), and starting from 19:34 requests to ivpicture.hu and psharing.com were redirected to tarhelyotthon.hu, which is still the situation as of 2016-06-09. Also, as of that date, still no notice was published about the shutdown.[2]
On May 12 (one day after the shutdown), user:bzc6p wrote a mail through the contact form on tarhelyotthon.hu (as no other contact option is provided, such as an email address), but received no reply.
Content
Most of the uploaded pictures seem to be original user content (e.g. photos, screenshots).
Until May 2016, more than 860,000 pictures were uploaded.
The site also provided an album feature, but it was not too popular: as of March 2015, there were less than 500 albums, with just a few pictures in most of them.
Site structure
Incrementing numbers were assigned to the uploaded pictures. There were public and not public pictures, but knowing the ID, every picture was accessible. (Non-public pictures were not shown in the image-browser.) All images seem to have jpg extension.
Although the site was accessible through both the domains psharing.com and ivpicture.hu, the links provided to images contain ivpicture.hu, and the files seemed to be physically stored there, too.
To be saved:
- Image page (18+ confirmation appears): http://psharing.com/pic.php?id=830028 or http://www.ivpicture.hu/pic.php?id=830028
- Bypassing the 18+ confirmation: http://psharing.com/pic.php?id=830028&mode18o=set or http://www.ivpicture.hu/pic.php?id=830028&mode18o=set
- Still the image page: http://kep.ivpicture.hu/830028 (redirects to http://ivpicture.hu/pic.php?id=830028)
- 140×140 thumbnail: http://kep.ivpicture.hu/830028.t.jpg
- 600×600 size: http://kep.ivpicture.hu/830028.jpg
- Original: http://kep.ivpicture.hu/830028.N.jpg
This way, besides all versions of the pictures, the most often used URLs[3] are saved along with their 18+ confirmation pages (they could be skipped using cookies, not doing so is intentional). Page requisites must already be present in the Archive (but have finally been included in every item, regardless).
Private and public pictures
Public pictures are those that appeared in the image browser (http://psharing.com/pic.php). Those not appearing are the private pictures, so an index of both the public and private pictures could be created with some discovery. However, the page mentioned above showed new pages by scrolling, one at a time. This could not be processed automatically. However, the appearing pages could be accessed directly and separately on http://psharing.com/pic_new.jq.php?page=0, where the page parameter started from 0 showing most recent public pictures, and went up to cca. 11600 (as of April 2015).
Archiving
Wayback Machine itself archived only a few thousand pages.
user:bzc6p started archiving all the uploaded pictures in April 2015. He also saved private ones, based on a discussion, the conclusion of which was that they should be saved, but probably darkened (i.e. made inaccessible in bulk) after being uploaded to the Internet Archive and ingested into the Wayback Machine.[4]
user:bzc6p started with the private pictures, which got saved all up until ID 830,000. Then came the public ones, but the unexpected closure cut the process at ID 50,206. Albums were not saved either.
Archives
- Private pictures in ID range 1 – 829,999: Saved
- Private pictures in ID range 830,000 – 860,000: Could not be saved
- Public pictures in ID range 1 – 50,206: Saved
- Public pictures in ID range 50,207 – 860,000: Could not be saved
- Albums: Could not be saved
- Their Facebook page: here is the archive
You can obtain the archived images (either private or public) from the Wayback Machine if you have the link.
Some of the content marked as "could not be saved" might also be available in the Wayback Machine, it's worth giving it a try.
Notes
- ↑ To be honest, the writer of these lines hasn't visited the main page prior to the shutdown, so there may have been some notice there, but what is sure that there was no notice on their Facebook page, having 8,000 followers. This allows the presumption of no notice at all.
- ↑ Interesting that they still shared a cute animal picture on Facebook on 2016-05-18, regardless.
- ↑ If we don't differentiate between
www.example.comandexample.com– the Wayback Machine doesn't, either –, then everything is saved, otherwise a small portion of the shared URLs are not saved in their exact form. - ↑ http://archive.fart.website/bin/irclogger_log/archiveteam-bs?date=2015-04-02,Thu&sel=148#l144
