Sites, which are running like this, are prone to shut down at a random date because a single person decided to say "screw it".
Please tell me I'm wrong.
Sadly, you're correct. Ultimately it will be up to a few various factors on what will cause a site to continue on if it were to 'die' and/or shutdown. Those being things such as:
- Any license agreements made in the background users may not be aware of.
- Any good-faith agreements made in the background users may not be aware of.
- Any paid for assets/tools/etc. that are not able to be made public.
- Any paid for API accounts/keys that are not able to be made public.
- Any sensitive user data such as payment details, personal identifiable data, etc.
It's not always as easy as just handing things off or making something public/open source. NDA's would exist to cover a lot of these, which would be broken if just handed off or made public without adhereing to strict guidelines and in some cases laws.
Guildwork's demise is mostly on Stan and how he treats most of his projects leading up to Discord. He had a large tendency to push something hard, milk it dry for what he can get out of it, then abandon it soon as it starts to die and he no longer sees a profit future with it.
Sadly, that's business for you and how things pretty much happen with anything involving money.
In regards to FFXIAH, I'd say it's probably a similar story with Scragg, except there are other things at play I'll get into below.
It's entirely possible he doesn't know how to fix it, or at least hasn't touched it for so long he forgot the intricacies of how it was all setup.
He probably hasn't touched it in 3-4 years since there was no need to.
I don't personally feel like this is the case. And rather its just a lack of communication and ability to have someone able to directly work on things that are broken. Rooks is gated behind having to middle-man things to Scraggs to push live. He has no direct access to what would need to be worked on/fixed, so it leads to the long delays in updates people have seen on this site over the last years since Rooks became admin. (Again, this is not Rooks' fault.)
The bigger problem, is if it's this hard to fix something like this imagine if the developers somehow change how the auction house works in some minor way. Then there will be no sales listings either.
Recreating this site isn't hard to do and all the information needed to recreate the headless client to connect to the AH servers and dump history data is freely available. However, there are issues that would come from having a public tool that everyone could use whenever they wanted be available. (ie. a plugin for Ashita/Windower to directly do lookups per-item and junk.)
Hammering the AH server with that many requests, all the time, will definitely put SE on notice to potentially change things and thus, brick this site in the process. It is why we (Ashita) have opt'd to not release a plugin we made that can do this already publicly. We do not want to put a site that the community widely uses at risk for a small convenience.
We have no means to determine if any type of agreement was made, or if it may contain things such as:
- How often FFXIAH's tool can ping their servers.
- How often FFXIAH's tool can dump/cache a full servers AH history.
- How large of batches the tool is allowed to run for.
- How many categories the tool is allowed to dump in one go.
- How many times per-hour, per-day, per-week, etc. it is allowed to run.
- Is the tool still a headless homebrewed client or did SE open a private API?
And so on. This falls under the behind the scenes agreements, good faith agreements, potential NDA's, etc.
So while someone can easily recreate this site, will it have the same 'positive' response FFXIAH was given and a 'silent' ok from SE to continue running?