Yeah man, I just saw this in a store today just a few hours ago!! I took a photo so everyone could see it right in the magazine:

http://twitpic.com/362z00

Crazy, eh? I kind of thought it's a little more attention than we're really looking for, though...

The idea behind the Mac Garden isn't to provide free games, it's to preserve games that would otherwise disappear completely.

We're building something good here, something to be proud of. Great work everybody!

Got to agree with MCP, although it's good news as it may bring in more Mac users with collections of older software, the site mission statement is about preserving original Mac software. It would be good if the site review had just mentioned this, all the time, effort and expense many of us go to, to find this software would then feel rewarded.

Well, that ´s right! A little bit of recognition is good... but, probably the site may need some bigger advice about our (preservation) intentions and old software.

I think "...Macintosh Garden (macintoshgarden.org) which keeps a meticulous archive of "abandonware" that is now free to use." is a pretty accurate statement.

The writer was talking about where to find free games, his intentions were not to expose upon the virtues of software preservation. Unfortunately we don't have control over what others write about this site, so in my opinion, we should just be happy that the blurb may bring in more people willing to share their abandonware.

If somebody feels strongly enough about clarifying this site better to the person, I suggest getting his/her name, and seeing if they're interested in doing a more complete write up, maybe even having a question/answer with one of MacGarden's Admins.

Oh yes, it is good to get some recognition in the printed media. And keeping a meticulous archive of abandonware is a result of what we aim to do. Still feel the main aim is to actively collect abandonware and to discuss and and document our finds, experiences, and in some cases, opinions.
It's a labour of love for many, trawling eBay every few days looking for any new gems or finding original media for those titles that may be up here already but are not in that form, or are missing the audio tracks.
I regret having only secured (and uploaded) about half of the titles I go after on eBay.

I feel a bit scary about such a focus.
EA's advice about the site is not that appealing, and I would prefer no other game company reach the same point...

I don´t want to spoil your party,
but I´ve always liked, and preferred the ¨UNDERGROUND¨ side of the Garden,

for some reason , I don´t like the ¨mainstream¨promotion
(though it´s good from the business side point of view)

but, maybe I´m just shy...

Not sure I like that "now free to use" line.

If someone from LucasArts reads that Monkey Island is "now free to use," he might think "hey, aren't we still selling that game?"

I agree with Euryale and mathieudel; never trust journalists. They are whores of the pen and most of the time plain stupid. Never forget, abandonware is not legal but condoned. I even would recommend admins to see that the discussions of MacGarden are not grabbed by search engines. MacDomain is much more wise here.

That piece in the mag overall is probably a hinderance as it will mostly direct people here who are just looking for access to old games, resulting in sapping Bandwidth and maybe a few lazy questions from those who cant get their head round the instructions on the wiki however, If anyone joins the community as a contributor or genuine enthusiast ect, it would be nice to hear that that found us through that mag

Nehoo, all this wingeing on software being taken down, that is a big part of what makes this site legitimate. We would assume that EA have a copy of everything in Mac format for archival purposes so in terms of our goal, it is no big loss. Without complying to requests like that, were no better than the Pirate Bay crowd

www.macintoshgarden.org is not grabbed by www.archive.org! Check yourself. I hope it remains this way. There seem to be ways to do this since I noticed that many websites are not indexed by archive.org or stopped to be indexed after a while. I wouldn't wonder if behind archive.org are the same gangsters who want to bring us all into the 'Matrix' as behind Google and Second Life, etc.

It's probably because it just hasn't entered the archives yet. Macintosh Garden re-launched in 2009, and it takes a year or so for archives to appear. We need to write a robots.txt that excludes Google and Yahoo but includes Archive.org. In the case that Macintosh Garden does disappear, do we want everything, including the list of software and all the discussions to simply and permanently vaporize?

My response... Oh dear, there are quite a few things wrong with that article:

1) Technically, Secret of Monkey Island is not abandonware. In fact, LucasArts / TellTale Games made a re-make for the PC. Definitely uh-oh territory... as are many of the games here.

2) The magazine thinks we are making games free for download, but here's the thing: the games were uploaded without any of the companies' permission. Granted most companies do not seem to care, but I think it might be a little risky. All we are doing is preserving Mac stuff so it will not be lost fifty years later... which might be what could happen years from now.

3) Relatively minor, but the writer accidentally had "Dogfight City" as "Dogfighter."

4) Abandonware merely means it is not supported by the company anymore - it does not mean it is free nor does it mean the company does not care about it.

Just my two cents. =P

It's not like this site has been hidden. I'm pretty sure I found it through a google search. So exposure is exposure. I don't see how the mac life mention has fundamentally changed anything.

So if that's the main argument, and there have been many concerns stated, I'll address that.

I have stated before that this site should just provide external links to all of the uploads, for various reasons. If that were the case, then "draining resources" would not be a concern. The suggestion doesn't seem to be well received.

Therefore, an alternative would be to only allow members to download from the site. Once someone becomes a new member, they could also have some restrictions placed on them regarding downloads, if necessary. Problem solved.

I think, MacGarden hast to find a balance. Look at MacDomain: here access is quite strict but there does not seem to happen much. They have a good ftp archive but its not updated like the MacGarden archive. Discussions they have to enforce through a point system but still discussions are not as lively as here. A good way to be lively and at the same time be not too well known is simly by being open and easy to newcomers and at the same being not too loud i.e. no press, no Wikipedia and limited Google.

Mac Garden used to have a Wikipedia article a long time ago, but it was declared non-notable and deleted.

A good way to be lively and at the same time be not too well known is simly by being open and easy to newcomers and at the same being not too loud i.e. no press, no Wikipedia and limited Google.

As far as I know, that's what we have now, correct?

Unfortunately, like I said before, "exposure is exposure", and in it's current form, we cannot prevent journalists from discovering MacGarden, nor prevent them from writing about us.

So we either be more proactive in directing what they write about us, or else we don't complain about what they write when they do write about us.

Vitoarc, regarding press and Wikiipedia you are correct: this is what we have. Regarding Google I think presence in Google can be reduced (not killed) a lot with a robot.txt as amatecha suggested. What I especially don't like is that our discussions are grabbed by Google because this is what they especially like, for with this they can build up user profiles of every one of us. And don't believe our virtual names are not connectible to our real persons. Some here have already made their email adress public. Some use their virtual name also elsewhere, e.g. in the Google group Mac OS 9. Most of us surf other websites before and after MacGarden, check email, especially GoogleMail, etc. All of us have an IP.

We should not feed the monster Google. Í have a feeling that they plan to do something like "Psycho Historic" as in Isaac Asimov's Foundation triology (or now series).

You can't be too cynical about this!
Basicly, we need someone inside Google to disable all this for MacGarden. Google has the technical means since it is rewarding and punishing web contents and their respective search results all the time. Google is by no means objective. They do not only want all information but also create realities. This is why they are so dangerous. People are so stupid to believe that Google search results are complete. Far from that. Much interesting but subversive information (I am talking about legal stuff) is blocked out or put at the end of many long result lists. Certain information is favoured by the search engine especially information to make people even more stupid and trusting in the lies of the mighty and rich.

@xy: go read a bit about it, Google does not have that much control -- as for search results, that is very automated. If people don't go to this "subversive information" much, or it's not widely linked, or it uses "search engine optimization" tricks which Google doesn't approve of (and believe me, a lot of them do -- such tricks fool many simpler search engines).
Unless takedown notices are sent to Google, in which case they remove the result and say they did.

Well, Balrog, I have not read about what I said but experienced it with Wikipedia scientific bibliographic entries. Some of the entries (which were approved of by Wikipedia editors/authors) were not listed by Google although Google gives preference to Wikipedia articles. We wondered and tried a test: We placed the the same bibliographic entries in other (more remote) language Wikipedias on the same topic, and suddenly Google listed the entries but only for a while and only at the end of all search results: after a frew days the search engine did not find the entries at all anymore although they were and are still in the respective Wikipedia articles! Of course, Google still finds those entries now but only if you change the search string and avoid certain search words. The interesting thing is that Scholar Google does list these bibliographic entries with no problem since they also appeared in print. But Scholar Google is less well known.

Most of the stuff might indeed be automated by Google (that at least is their propaganda you can read about) - but obviously not all.

Having a healthy apprehension about Google is probably a good thing, and I try to keep things in perspective regarding internet anonymity.

As I understand it, if anyone is really concerned about this issue, they can always log into a site using Firefox along with TOR. This works for the Garden, with all plugins disabled, the only caveat is that cookies need to be enabled. But since your IP will now be masked, you can comment and it will never be associated with your IP. In fact, I'm using TOR right now as a test and I'm logged into MG with an IP from Germany, not my actual IP.

This should work to provide 100% anonymity providing that the MG member created their account, and has done all subsequent uploads/downloads/comments using TOR all along. Obviously what has already been logged cannot be undone.

I'm only testing TOR now on this site, just for kicks. I'm not too concerned about any more anonymity than this site provides. However, if anyone is, I think TOR is an excellent option.

Interestingly, when I tried to download a file just now from MG, I got a message telling me that an external application needed to be loaded to do so, and at that point I could be "unmasked". Firefox suggested that if this was a concern, I should use a transparent TOR proxy (which I don't currently use).

Does TOR provide 100% anonymity? From what I've read, if used properly, yes.

Is the InPrivate browser of Internet Explorer similar to TOR?

@xy: not at all.

Err, sorry, it's actually "Tor" not "TOR". Not sure how I got that in my head...

Anyway, Wiki has a nice summary about Tor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)

I'm still trying to understand this whole "unmasked" download/exit node thing, but from what I understand, if you don't use a Tor Proxy when downloading, and the Tor network node is being monitored at that point in time, the downloaded file can be traced to your actual IP (which is unmasked for the download).

However, the Firefox message uses the word "can" and not "will", which implies that it's not a certainty that your IP will become unmasked during the download. At least that's how I think this whole thing works...

Somebody feel free to correct me if you know otherwise...

Here's all the information that can be gathered about you as you visit any website. Tor allows you to adjust your security preferences in each of the categories listed:

https://torcheck.xenobite.eu/

(website is a Tor check site which assesses your browser's security; you don't need Tor in order to view your current settings)