Hi all,

Apologies for the delayed explanation for what happened to garrysmods.org. I hope this helps to shed some light on the situation.

In a nutshell, the site had to shut down back in August 2023 due to financial reasons. From the get-go, it relied on Google AdSense to cover the hosting and storage costs. However, things took a turn when Google disabled my AdSense account, citing issues with copyrighted content hosting or linking. There was no option to review the account being disabled, and honestly, the with the majority of addons containing third-party IP content, I doubt a review would have changed anything.

Behind the scenes, the site was scraping text from archive.org and copying files and images from the original S3 drive from garrysmod.org. Big thanks to Garry for helping preserve historical links by giving me access and pointing the original garrysmod.org domain at my infrastructure too.

To keep hosting costs down, the site required users to log in through Steam to prevent excessive downloading of addons. As a result, the files aren't available on archive.org. This is an unintentional side effect of protecting myself from unexpected hosting bills. Fun fact: this didn't always work and a certain months AWS bill was around $2000 because of excessive downloads by a single user.

While garrysmods.org might be a thing of the past, if someone's really keen on it, they could try reaching out to Garry for access to the original S3 drive and recreate the scraping functionality to archive the content to archive.org, though there's no guarantee he'd agree to it. This is not an endorsement or suggestion, just a thought.

Thanks to everyone who was part of the garrysmods.org journey, especially the moderators who helped keep it running smoothly. It was a fun ride, and I'm glad to have been part of it.

Best,

Adam

Edit: I don't have the files or database for garrysmods.org, or access to the original S3 bucket.