Just a moment ago I finalized loot.p101 and rehosted a mirror that was created with WinHTTrack.
Loot.p101 is a perfect example of the typical Pirate101 fansite: ambitious yet short-lived. The author created a website using Webs.com in October 2012 that sought to catalog all of the premium items in the game. The site mentions “pirate101loot.com” everywhere but the only way to reach these pages is through the URL pirate101loot.webs.com. A little sleuthing reveals that the author had registered pirate101loot.com but never renewed the domain when its registration period was up.
Lots of fansites build on a platform that provides free (or cheap) hosting, such as Webs.com. It is relatively easy to use and can be deployed faster than other methods, but comes with the caveat that the (free) website name will end in “.webs.com”. Often, a website owner may decide that they do not want their website to end in “.webs.com” or the domain of any other hosting service, so they can buy a vanity domain name to use instead (Blogger also makes this fairly easy). The content is still stored on the “.webs.com” domain but you access it using a custom, non-“.webs.com” domain. Unfortunately, domain name registrations are not permanent and expire in as short a time as a year. If a website creator loses interest in the project, cannot afford the renewal cost, or simply forgets to renew, the domain becomes de-registered. Many Pirate101 fansites have been lost this way. Thankfully in the case of Webs.com they do not delete a website just because the vanity domain expires and I was able to access the content.
This brings us to the next problem:
Evidently the author had paid for some type of premium package long ago. Now that the site is not being maintained or funded, the hosting company has essentially taken it hostage. This annoying banner shows up on every single page and prevents you from clicking on links to other pages. There are ways around it (I actually didn’t notice it at all when running the NoScript Firefox extension) but this involves disabling parts of the website and is generally a pain. Normally I proxy websites that are still up but this stupid window would ruin everyone’s experience.
Every time I discover a new fansite I make sure to download it with a program called WinHTTrack. This way if the website were to go down in the future I would have an archived copy that I could put back up for everyone to enjoy. I have never had to re-host a website downloaded using WinHTTrack because thankfully none have disappeared since I saved them. Having the raw website HTML files saved on my computer, I did some poking around. A short time later I found the script that creates this banner at the very end of the page, along with other nasties like Google analytics.
Simply deleting this group of code fixed it. It took some time to delete this from every single webpage, but it worked! I was able to go to all of the pages on the site without running into this paywall. This goes to show that I can modify abandoned websites to improve user experience, or, in this case, get it working in the first place.