Q: Why?

A: Autism, probably.

Okay, well that's not true since I've never been diagnosed and according to therapists I make far too much eye contact. Whatever the mental health reasoning may be, I did this because there is far too much content for The Sims made by the community that is in danger of just being lost to time.

While it would be worthy of just saving the content for the sake of players who still play the older titles, there is also the issue of newer games... Uh, lack of newer games. As of writing, it's currently 2024 and it looks as though The Sims, The Sims 2, The Sims 3, and The Sims 4 are sort of it. However, The Sims games made during the 2000s still tend to be the most easily accessible with the least amount of intrusive marketing and actually, you know, does the thing that The Sims was originally made for? Fostering creativity and open-ended play? 

Q: How?

A: For many sites, I'll scrape with special tools such as HTTrack and for forum sites I'll use a SEO tool to scrape links from specific file sharing sites (usually mediafire) then download those using an program that is specifically for downloading content in bulk. There are some sites that are too large or complex so they're downloaded the old fashion way. This means for sites like TSR, for example, not everything is going to be downloaded and we have to make decisions on what seems more important.

For sites like MTS, the site is open to sites like archive.org and don't really need to be backed up here. However, there are lots of pieces of content from the site but those are more incidental (things that got caught in other scrapes that just happened to be from MTS) as well as content that I just downloaded for myself. After all, this archive might be public but it's just as much my own stash as anything.