A backup of powder.unaligned.org has been found, for more details read below or see http://powdertoythings.co.uk/OldPowder/

 
Please note: the old server was almost entirely unmoderated, and contains numerous things that are against powdertoy.co.uk rules including: abusive and useless tags, various vote gimmicks and reminders to vote, insults, self-voting, and nudity. Younger users should probably avoid it for now.

Any problems or interesting saves can be posted here, but please no NSFW saves.

More details

The Powder Toy was originally written by Stanislaw K Skowronek (aka Skylark), and was available at powder.unaligned.org. Powder Toy saves could be uploaded to powder.unaligned.org between January 2009 and January 2010. But then Skylark stopped working on TPT, and the server was shut down.

Later in 2010, Simon obtained the source code for TPT and took over development. Since the old server was inaccessible, he had to make a new one from scratch, resulting in powdertoy.co.uk. All saves uploaded to powder.unaligned.org were presumed deleted. However, a backup of the old server was recently found by Skylark, and a copy was given to me and Simon.

The saves are accessible in three ways:

• Using a modified version of TPT v24.9, the last version which used powder.unaligned.org
• Using a modified version of TPT v88.2, a recent stable version as used on powdertoy.co.uk
• Directly via the website - search page here

The relevant modified versions of TPT can be downloaded from http://powdertoythings.co.uk/OldPowder/download/. The replica of the old server is read-only. You cannot upload new saves using these modified versions of Powder Toy, and you cannot login, vote, comment, tag, or report saves.

The old server was almost entirely unmoderated. For now, it has been left this way. This is for two reasons: to give an accurate picture of what the old server was like, and because moderating it would be a very big job.

FAQs

Which is the first save ever? The first save which still has a database record is save id:16 "Simple Nuke " by Skylark. Most of the earlier saves have been deleted, but for some saves only the database record was deleted, the save data file still exists. These can be found in the OrphanedSaves folder. The earliest one in there is save id:12, title and author unknown, made using Powder Toy version 20. save id:0 was not created earlier than save 12, as it has a file modification time at the beginning of Feb 2010 (roughly when the old server was shut down).

Can I steal someone else's saves from the old server and publish them on powdertoy.co.uk? No. Some of the current users and moderators were around in the powder.unaligned.org era, and are likely to notice and report the save, or apply the banhammer. In addition, note that many of the old saves contravene current powdertoy.co.uk rules.

Can I get my old saves from the old server and publish them on powdertoy.co.uk? It's probably best to wait. Verifying that accounts on powdertoy.co.uk are the same as powder.unaligned.org accounts is a bit tricky, but may happen in the future. Another difficult task is verifying which powder.unaligned.org account originally made a particular save, since there was so much copying on the old server. For now, copies of old saves uploaded to powdertoy.co.uk are at risk of being unpublished for stealing. Also, some form of semi-automated import may happen in the future. Feel free to download copies of your saves to your computer though.

Are there any significant differences between how powder.unaligned.org worked compared to powdertoy.co.uk? Yes.

• Voting was per tag on each save, instead of per save. The score for each save was the sum of the tag scores. Tags could be up or down voted, but not down voted to 0 or below.
• There were no private saves, all saves were published.
• Self voting was possible, widespread, and virtually without consequences.
• Moderation was pretty much non-existent.
• No save comments or report button.
• There was no save history, only the most recent version of each save was available .

Who is this ballsup person I've heard mentioned by old users? In short, an old user who was an enormous nuisance. Much stealing of saves, spamming, trolling, self-voting, etc.

Is the old server replica running exactly the same code as powder.unaligned.org? No. The server code has been completely rewritten, since it contained a few security holes, and although I didn't benchmark it, some of the SQL queries looked like they might run unnecessarily slow. For speed, sorting by votes does it by overall number of votes for a save, not the number of votes on tags matching the search query. Additionally, search has been changed to look in titles as well as tags, since so many of the tags are irrelevant or otherwise useless. However, all the data - saves, users, tags, and scores, is exactly the same as it was on powder.unaligned.org.

Threads about TPT history (accuracy may vary)
http://tpt.io/:52 http://tpt.io/:700 http://tpt.io/:986 http://tpt.io/:1642 http://tpt.io/:3378 http://tpt.io/:7841 http://tpt.io/:10337 http://tpt.io/:12804