Building The AVS Archive — Forum Archive

I'm building an AVS archive. I was inspired by the resurgence of Milkdrop with the introduction of Milkdrop3. It's a shame AVS has languished for so long. I want to preserve AVS, and I also just want this for my own personal enjoyment and for anyone else too. I started this a long time ago, sort of, when I started downloading the top rated AVS packs, but I never bothered to get them all, but now I want everything. This artform is too beautiful to fade into obscurity, forgotten, and lost to the internet forever. I'm also hoping this will inspire some serious work on updating AVS like what has been done to Milkdrop. I know there have been attempts to update it, but they've all failed, even Justin's own.

I'm starting with Winamp's collection of AVS packs and individual presets. When complete, it will be uploaded to a variety of sources and shared. Anyone will be able to install anything and easily consult a spreadsheet for relevant information on the pack/preset, as well as original description by the author and the review by Winamp staff if applicable, and retrieve what they want from a zip: gold or garbage. I will also log certain assets installed, such as fonts, that certain presets require and a registry of AVS artists, their Winamp pages, DeviantArt, etc. (if they still exist). I have had to use the Wayback Machine to download, but it's extremely tedious, not to mention slow. Maybe If I was skilled enough to write scripts, I could automate it. (I know about Winamp Heritage, but it's not organized like the old site was.)

I have downloaded the entire VISBOT catalog from their site (all 355 packs), as well as the top rated packs and presets already from Winamp, but acquiring the approximately remaining 2300 will prove daunting. There were also many packs released by many renowned AVS artists on DeviantArt, quite a few that weren't released on Winamp, but that has proven difficult. Many of the older files are no longer available because they were lost in a server crash. Also, many were already released on Winamp, so that's taken a back seat. Redundancy is the bane of digital archiving. I don't know if there were any unique ones on DeskMod or Customize.org, (You have to search from homepage or you get a file download, last I checked.) but the former is barely archived, with files being impossible to recover and the latter contains nothing but a domain seller. Since Winamp has the largest collection, I've started here, because the Archive's fate is in question due to lawsuits, and with the US judicial climate being especially in favor of corporate interests for the near future short of reform, nothing can be assumed to last.

After much searching, I came upon a few threads about there being an AVS archive, but as expected with anything over ten years old, the download links are dead:

There is also something on the Archive containing packs that were preserved on Winamp Heritage, but according to the screenshot, it's only about 344 packs. Someone also attempted something close to what I'm doing over ten years ago and posted a request on DA, but I don't know if they were successful. I have reached out to them, but I'm not expecting a response so long after the fact.

Does anyone still have the 2010.4 Archive? This could help things, though I would still need to log page descriptions and staff reviews. Am I correct in assuming this archive would only be of the packs and presets submitted to the Winamp site? Is there a torrent that I don't know about? Has someone already done this? Does anyone want to collaborate?

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