News / Preservation

YoYo Games to permanently delete the legacy GMC archive

After this, anything not backed up will be gone forever
Posted on November 23, 2019

Update: YoYo Games has pushed the date back to December 17th.

Back up your favorite posts from the archive as soon as possible, or else you might lose them forever.

The legacy GMC archive contains 14 years of tutorials, example code, and information pertaining to a variety of GameMaker products. Many of the posts feature broken links, as well as tutorials for legacy versions of the game creation software, making them less useful to those using the latest versions.

To try to cut down on the volume of outdated information being presented by search engines, YoYo Games plans on removing the legacy GMC archive in its entirety. According to official forum topic, the deletion is scheduled for December 3rd, 2019.

The original GMC was archived April 8th, 2013, due the IP.Board software they were using being vulnerable. Just the month before, an attack caused 5000-8000 unencrypted passwords to be leaked, and soon after being archived, a hacker defaced the homepage and caused portions of the forum to become inaccessible.

This wasn't the first time YoYo Games had been a victim to attacks. The "YoYo Games Forums", a separate GameMaker forum from the GMC, was attacked on May 23rd, 2012, the day after GameMaker: Studio 1.0's launch. Much like the GMC, the software the forums were using was old and insecure, causing them to move all the users to the now legacy GMC forums.

When the GMC was was archived, it was soon succeeded by the current iteration of the forum. At the time, YYG planned on keeping the archive available at gmc.yoyogames.com, while the new forum was placed at forum.yoyogames.com.

Archiving efforts are underway, with GMC moderator Nocturne setting up four topics (Tutorials, Programming, Game Development and Design, Past GMC Jams) for users to post the contents of any posts they deem worth saving. Some users have asked for a deadline extension, as many don't feel they won't have ample time to browse the archives until their holiday break.

As of this time, the removal is still scheduled for December 3rd, 2019.