The electronics firm I mentioned a couple of days ago have now closed.
They've done this by, amongst other things, closing down their wirelessthings.net website.
The one that had the technical details of the stuff they were selling: important information necessary to use it.
They previously had two other sites on ciseco.co.uk and openmicros.org – the former had the shop, the latter had things like the documentation, source code and discussion forum.
Archive.org has a good selection of pages from all three sites, except that it won't show them. Both the older domains redirect to the newer one. Partly because it was built using a completely different content management system (CMS), it has a robots.txt file that says to any vaguely responsible search engine 'don't look here' at exactly the place the CMS on the older sites used to display everything. So archive.org, being vaguely responsible, looks at the page you want (say openmicros.org/index.php/importantstuff), checks openmicros.org/robots.txt, gets redirected to wirelessthings.net/robots.txt, sees that it's not to show anything from /index.php/ and says 'won't'. Google has copies of many pages too and won't show it for the same reason.
I emailed the firm last week saying this was a problem and needed fixing, but it's still happening.
I have copies of the stuff I need, and one critical library is on github, but the irresponsibility of unnecessarily taking your documentation off the web is appalling. I'm glad they've gone.
Hi, I found your blog while trying to find where the openmicros forum has gone. I have an OpenPi and a couple of wireless temp sensors etc from Cisco. I am a director at Leicester Hackspace and was very enthusiastic about Cisco and Wireless Things kit. Is there a way to get the forums archived? I missed out on the 70% off sale and would like to get a few more temp sensors – do you know if anyone grabbed the last ones for further sales?
Yes, it was nice kit.
Unless archive.org can be persuaded to relax their rules in this case, it's possible we may be waiting until openmicros.org lapses or at least stops redirecting to a wirelessthings.net that has this robots.txt.
I was going to make an offer for their stock of one thing as I could collect easily enough, but as the end approached, they stopped answering the phone. Understandable, in a way – I suspect the 'consultation' about their future that was supposed to have started around the 22nd August was meaningless.
The lot who bought them and EasyTherm – if I had one of their boiler controllers, I'd be going 'oh no' – last year is still in existence, just. It's Agile365.co.uk and they're probably the best bet for anyone wanting anything from any remaining stock to the rights for the Ciesco /WT /EasyTherm stuff.