SpookShare
From iA wiki
See also: File sharing | Protocol
Home Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/swspookshare/
SpookShare was a funny little file-sharing protocol created by an (at the time) 16-year-old who calls himself "TOGoS" working in his basement around the year 2000. There were approximately 1.63 different servents made to work with the protocol, all written by TOGos in either Perl, PHP, or Ruby. It may or may not have been usable as a file-sharing network, as nobody ever tried to use it (TOGoS's node was the only one ever seen reporting to SpookShare's only public index node.
Protocol
The main point about the SpookShare protocol was that it was easy to implement, and made it easy to interface with nodes. It worked entirely over HTTP, and all information was URL-encoded (none of that durn bloated XML-RPC for this developer!). It was rather esoteric, however. It was based on a data format called "SSSD", which looked something like this:
clear
set href=http://foo.bar.com/
set title=The FooBar page
set class=webpage
create res
set href=http://183.23.45.9/filez/Acid_3.0_crack_path.exe
set title=d00d3Z!!! C43ck 17 0u7!!
set description=not kitty pr0n
set size=18495 bytes
set type=application/octet-stream
set class=file
create res
clear
set author=piani
set content=Just checking out the mssage board.
create message
Clients
Of the theree clients TOGoS wrote, only the first one, the Perl implementation, actually worked as a client. It was a pretty crummy server, though, since all searches were done with regexes through an SSSD file. The PHP implementation only acted as a server, and could not forward searches. It was much faster than the Perl implementation, however, since it used a MySQL backend for storing information. TOGoS found it much harder to work with PHP and MySQL, though. And for some reason he included a message board with this one, which looked suspiciously similar to the one at Figz.com (whom TOGoS got upset with when they insulted him after he gave them some tips on how to streamline their HTML). The Ruby implementation (which included its own web server) was never completed.
Some people complained about lack of XML-RPC. Others complained about lack of users. TOGoS complained about "XML-RPC sucks", and the lack of pass-by-reference in PHP. Piani seemed mildly interested in the project. And TOGoS realized that SpookShare had only been a research experiment from the beginning, and that he could reboot to Windows and just use KaZaA for all his file-sharing wants. And so the story ends.
