Remember ZIP Comments?
reddit / bbs

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Iron_Slug · 2021-09-24 21:42

I do.  I put a bunch up on my site for nostalgia's sake.

Check 'em out if you're bored:

[https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/gallery/zip/](https://www.iping
thereforeiam.com/bbs/gallery/zip/)

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iheartbaconsalt · 2021-09-24 23:51

Niiiice.

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akacastor · 2021-09-24 23:58

[-AV the original blue check](https://imgur.com/gallery/DRax8Mp)

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denzuko · 2021-09-25 01:59

Yes! and still use them with jar files ;)

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denzuko · 2021-09-25 02:02

Also.. Amazing that you put an archive like this together. I'll dig
around and post a few from my board when I find them. But major kudo's
for releasing this. :D

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Iron_Slug · 2021-09-25 02:14

Send text files to
[sysop@ipingthereforeiam.com](mailto:sysop@ipingthereforeiam.com) and
we'll add unique ones to the collection.

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denzuko · 2021-09-25 02:16

Gladly but what no fidonet?

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Iron_Slug · 2021-09-25 02:21

I have a Fido node, but I'm not a Luddite. ;-)

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denzuko · 2021-09-25 02:23

no worries mate. Just yanking your chain anyways. I'll shoot over
whatever I find.


Mind if I mirror it for [textfiles.com](https://textfiles.com) and the
internet archive?

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Iron_Slug · 2021-09-25 02:33

Go ahead and mirror.

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cognitivegear · 2021-09-25 17:01

Ok, now that is evil and brilliant. Take my upvote.

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jonblaze02302 · 2021-09-25 22:20

You fucking bet..there were some cool ones.

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benrett · 2021-10-10 11:47

That's a nice gallery.


Coincidentally I had the same thoughts and a number of months ago
created a tool to batch view and extract ZIP comments.
https://github.com/bengarrett/zipcmt

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Iron_Slug · 2021-10-10 14:15

Do you have any good comments to share?

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benrett · 2021-10-11 09:07

I did rip about 25,000 zip comments that you can find in this 11MB
file. They're encoded both in UTF8 and CP437. There are some dupes, as
certain BBSes would use the same ad but label the comment with a disk
number.


https://defacto2.net/f/b428b6e

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Iron_Slug · 2021-10-11 19:08

THAT is going to be hard to digest.  There are a lot of dupes that
differ only by the specific file info, plus it looks like many include
the DIZ data as well.  I'm looking at it.

Thanks.

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benrett · 2021-10-11 20:58

Unfortunately BBSes often shoved DIZ data into the ZIP comments. Maybe
this was done as a redundancy? I ran the zipcmt tool over a collection
of 560,000 zips and it skipped tens of thousands of identical dupes.
But it is much harder to program a means of identifying near identical
text where only a few words or characters are different.

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Iron_Slug · 2021-10-11 22:25

I've removed some of the most common dupes and reduced the collection
by about 7000 files.  I'll continue to wade through it to get
something more manageable.

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benrett · 2021-10-13 05:03

Nice, will you be happy to share the results?

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[deleted] · 2021-10-13 13:41

[deleted]

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Iron_Slug · 2021-10-13 21:50

I'm making a new post...