Hosted a MEP~!
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@theartofmadeline

roma★
todays bird

Discoholic 🪩

Origami Around
Misplaced Lens Cap
occasionally subtle

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blake kathryn

Kaledo Art
ojovivo
One Nice Bug Per Day

#extradirty
Peter Solarz
AnasAbdin
DEAR READER

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

oozey mess
wallacepolsom
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@papermoonproductions
Hosted a MEP~!
GOS is back 😊
Rejoice.
In case people want to access the new domain through the old (digitalperversion.net) links, I made a redirection. 👇
DOWNLOAD: SimFileShare | Dropbox
Steps to install (very easy):
Download the "Redirector" browser extension (Firefox / Chrome) ;
Download the JSON file above ;
Open the extension's settings > Edit Redirects ;
At the top of the settings page, you'll see a few buttons, one being "Import", click it and select the JSON file I provided.
Hope this will make the transition a bit easier :)
And big thanks to @fireflowersims, @julessims and @teaaddictyt for dusting that Resurrect-O-Nomitron!! 🫶
Ty for bringing this issue to our attention! We just fixed the redirect, so you don't need the Redirector extension anymore.
Sims2artists is undergoing maintenance
Worry not citizens, we are just doing some maintenance and upgrading. We will soon be back to your regularly scheduled pretty cc
You may see some errors. This is to be expected.
Edit 23:55 GMT+1 June 7 2026
Aaaaand done! The forum looks a bit different as all mods have been removed in preparation for the move to 2.1.7.
See edit above: maintenance ended! We're running SMF 2.0.19 now!
GOS is back for good!
Hello! I was the one who fixed it.
Well it wasn’t just me, to be fair. I would have never been able to without @fireflowersims help and HugeLunatics trust in both of us. Thank you to both of them for their work and thank you @teaaddictyt for reaching out and doing the more public communication.
I’m super happy I got the chance to work to fix it. It wasn’t an easy undertaking. It seemed like every little thing would cause more errors, I fixed one and another thing broke. But now it seems stable, finally.
A lot of technical stuff below the cut, beware.
Jules, I cannot emphasize enough just how cool you are for having done all of this work to get GoS back online! I'm glad I was able to provide a good new space for GoS to live from now on and assist with all the DNS. It was a trip alright, and I'm glad we could work together on this!
You are a hero and I (and I bet so many others) am so grateful for your skill and dedication! ♥️
Massive shout out to @julessims and @fireflowersims for saving a community pillar! 👏 You both rock and thank you for the open communication and also giving some background on the fixes!
In case anyone wants it today- back in 2020 or so I archived the Old Wood and Dead Metal (Build/Buy) section of GOS when MediaFire looked like it was about to go down.
It's probably less useful than @simnostalgia 's big 2023 scrape- I know I didn't get everything- but more backups are better than less backups.
There's @goatskickin's woods, a bunch of Ja and Kativip and NixedSims, some @mustluvcatz-reloaded ...
@sims2packrat
Mixed Messaging.
Back in 2023, @hugelunatic-deactivated20260510 gave @simnostalgia shit for archiving/scraping GoS “just in case,” citing concerns over scraping, bandwidth, and preservation itself.
Now GoS and Sims2Artists are suddenly gone, and people are left scrambling through remnants, mirrors, and whatever archives survived.
That is exactly why preservation matters.
You cannot discourage archival efforts and then act surprised when people are upset that massive parts of Sims 2 history vanished with little warning. You also cannot get angry over backlash when there was never any clear, direct communication to the wider community.
People were explicitly told that if GoS was truly at risk of going down, there would be an announcement.
No real community-wide warning was ever given.
And honestly, this is where the messaging becomes incredibly frustrating.
We were told:
hosting costs were manageable,
the site was not going anywhere as long as ads/donations covered most costs,
out-of-pocket expenses were still within budget,
scraping was mainly an issue because it increased bandwidth/server load,
“if I were not willing/able to continue, then there would be an announcement,”
and later posts even made it sound like things were functioning again after the PHP fixes.
Most people interpreted that as stability returning.
So yes, people are understandably confused and frustrated now, because the messaging for years was essentially: “Things are annoying, but manageable.”
Not: “Hey. This is serious. Archive what you can now. I may be done.”
And no, buried technical posts about PHP upgrades and drive failures are not the same thing as directly communicating that to the wider community.
I literally had to use archived Tumblr pages just to reconstruct the timeline before speaking on this.
And honestly, we are lucky @simnostalgia even had the foresight to preserve as much as they did back in 2023, because otherwise even more would likely be gone forever or nearly impossible to piece back together. But that archive is still missing huge amounts of resources, attachments, images, updates, and years of content added afterward.
What makes this even more frustrating is that @simnostalgia received backlash for trying to preserve the site in the first place. At this point, I honestly hope they feel vindicated, because this situation is exactly why archival efforts matter.
People absolutely would have helped preserve, mirror, archive, financially support, or even transition these sites if the situation had been communicated clearly, especially if HugeLunatic had simply said: “I am done. Someone else needs to preserve or host this now.”
yes yes GOS is down i get it
but i think this is an appropriate time to tell all of you that internet archive/wayback machine is *also* not safe for making backups
they have repeatedly been the target of legal battles, some of which they have already lost (see here and here) and which have nearly bankrupted them
so putting everything on the internet archive and calling it a day is a majorly stupid idea. Ideally, we'd need SEVERAL backups of everything, in different places.
Also, the archive requires active and regular archiving. You can't just do it after the site goes down.
The usual rule of thumb for me is, as someone with all over 40gb of CC, is to keep my CC that I don't use and keep a record of it on Google Docs. I also make sure to help with WCIFs on forums, as well as share - especially older and more elusive content, so that there are more touch points online for people to find that CC if any sites go down. Wayback is a last resort. When everything else has been exhausted. And if it's not on there, you can only hope to go find someone who may have it deep in their downloads folder.
About GOS
As a web developer who works on the daily with this kind of stuff (and php!) it makes me sad how little preservation was actually tried. I understand that a php upgrade isn't possible anymore at some point, especially if the base is old, but if you know what to do, you can edit databases, remove all personal data like mails and usernames, leave the threads as is and upload it to an archive.
I think there are several people in this community who could have helped, or still can.
It just makes me sad to see so little care put towards this huge piece of history.
If any of you have an old ass php webpage, reach out to me, I can probably help.
Thoughts on the Loss of GOS & Sims2Artists
I am not usually someone who gets involved in Sims community discourse or public callout-style posts, but this genuinely breaks my heart to see.
A massive amount of the custom content, creativity, and inspiration behind my work on Vermillion Sins came from communities like Garden of Shadows and Sims2Artists. They were huge pillars of the Sims 2 creative space for years.
What hurts most is not even just the shutdown itself. It’s the lack of warning.
These sites were not just forums anymore. They had become archives of nearly two decades of community history: old creators, inactive creators, forum attachments, resources, tutorials, contests, shared knowledge, and years of creativity that helped shape this community into what it became.
A simple “hey, this may go offline permanently soon, please archive what you can” would have allowed people time to preserve pieces of Sims 2 history before they vanished. Instead, so much appears to have disappeared overnight.
And to be clear, I do not think anyone is owed endless unpaid labor or permanent site maintenance. If someone no longer has the time, energy, money, or interest to continue running something, that is completely understandable.
But I do think the community should have at least been given the chance to help. People absolutely would have pitched in through backups, mirrors, technical help, donations, archival efforts, or simply having enough warning to preserve pieces of history before they disappeared.
The Sims 2 community has survived because people cared enough to preserve things. Without archivists, backups, mirrors, and Wayback captures, huge parts of this game’s creative history would already be gone forever.
And honestly, I hope this becomes a wake-up call moving forward. Preservation should matter.
TOUs and repost policies should not become barriers that result in entire pieces of community history disappearing forever the moment a creator or site owner leaves, especially in a community where everything is interconnected.
I respect active creators wanting credit and boundaries. But abandoned content should not be treated like untouchable lost media while the community watches it disappear forever. Communities preserving older Sims games and their content are a huge part of why those games remained alive and accessible long after EA itself had largely moved on from supporting them, and likely played a significant role in renewed interest surrounding things like the Sims 2 Legacy release.
I hope more people begin supporting archival efforts, mirrors, and preservation projects before more Sims history is lost for good.
SimCave
The news of what happened to GOS makes this a good time to mention, probably, something that I didn't mention earlier because of the hate I received when I scraped GOS.
But I also scraped SimCave.
GOS backups
https://simfileshare.net/folders/189789/
HERE are all the backups I have from GOS. Quite a few, but not all, monthly themes are archived. Wayback machine is no help.
Hopefully the site gets back up and running soon.
Garden Of Shadows - All Custom Content
I've successfully scraped all of the available Custom Content that was linked on GOS from Mediafire, Box, and SimFileShare. (Mirrors on 4shared not included)
Of course, I can't go back in time to retrieve things that are already long gone but here's a .zip of 49 GBs of content. This is everything from the beginning of GOS to September 2023.
This is the entire site's worth of custom content scraped. There are a few things that you need to know.- This is not checked to see if depe
Spockthewok (aka Will Nixon) wrote a master's thesis on pink flashing, figured out the cause and potentially found the first genuine fix.
The fix itself (along with the thesis for those interested) can be found here:
A patch to fix the 'pink soup' bug in The Sims 2. Contribute to spockthewok/TS2MemCapRemover development by creating an account on GitHub.
“Be glad of your human heart, Feyre. Pity those who don’t feel anything at all.” A certain Spring Court High Lord's throne room... What'd you think? Did I hit or did I miss?
Throne rooms are one of my favorites to build...
Building something a bit magical~!
Been working on some sims with some recolors of various clothing and accessories. First, we have Tamlin. I must admit, I did like the idea of having him look proximal in his fashion to the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, especially since the story borrows from that fairytale. But, I felt the initial design was too muddied for someone like Tamlin. While he might wear something this frilly for court affairs, I feel something more structured but rugged was essential everydaywear for him. Spring Courtier fashion always seemed to me to be a mix of Late Rococo and Tudor styles: opulent, layers, structure, and a lot of extras. Lots of saturated bright or pastel colors. Lots of gold and fine leathers.