Tips and tricks for finding freebies

From Poser and Daz Free Resources

This page is a collection of useful techniques that some of the wiki's contributors use to find free resources.

Harvesting free resources from the Wayback Machine[edit]

Occasionally, you'll have the URL of a site where a free resource used to be, but the site isn't on the "live" web any more. You know about the Wayback Machine, but it didn't get a complete copy of the website, so you can't find the download page again.

However, there's a chance that a copy of the freebie might be saved even if the page wasn't.

As an example, we're going to look for Whisper, a one-piece wardrobe item for Aiko 3 that used to be available at free.daz3d.com

  1. Go to the Wayback Machine, type in the host part of the URL of the page, then type in a slash and some random letters instead of the path - for example, free.daz3d.com/something - then click on the "Browse History" button
  2. You'll get an error message: Wayback Machine doesn't have that page archived. Want to search for all archived pages under http://free.daz3d.com/ ?
  3. The URL in the error message is a link. Click on that link, and you'll get a list of everything archive.org has for the site - in this case, 288 URLs have been captured for this domain
  4. There's a filter box below that header line where you can type in common file-format suffixes so that you don't need to look through the entire list. For the example, type in "whisper"
  5. Follow the links you get - either you'll be brought to the freebie immediately, or you'll be sent to the usual Wayback Machine page that you get when they have multiple copies of a file.

This isn't a foolproof method - sometimes, the Wayback Machine saves a "file not found" message or a "login to continue" screen instead of the free resource. It is better than nothing, though.

Harvesting free resources from Broken Renderosity Freebie Off-site Links[edit]

Sometimes you will get a redirect on a Renderosity Freebie and the site or page will no longer be available. The pop-up window will display the url where it thinks the freebie is located. If you copy the link from the pop up window then you can use the Wayback Machine to find the old site or older version of the page and maybe the zip file as well. As an example, selecting The Cropped Shirt for Victoria 1 & 2 (https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/cropped-shirt-for-victoria-1-2/21586) download button, the pop-up window Renderosity takes you to is http://www.byrontaylor.com/download.html which is no longer available. By copying this link into the wayback machine you can go to https://web.archive.org/web/20080119130810/http://www.byrontaylor.com/download.html where there is a viable link to the zip.

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