Doom Help Service

The Doom Help Service is a classic Doom website and former Usenet service administered by Ian Mapleson as part of the gamers.org network. It was founded in the earliest days of the community, with a copyright date beginning in 1994. It was founded on a domain at the, but moved to its present location in 1996.

Content
The Doom Help Service was one of the chief sources of playing and technical information on the games during the Usenet period of the Doom community, initially operating from the newsgroup before that was superseded by the  one. Aside from the direct help offered within that group, the website also carries a large number of FAQs and documents on the game, much of which is available for direct download as a 530 kilobyte ZIP file. Ian also offered players and modders direct assistance via email, suggested as a last resort, though according to Ian, he handled as many as 400 emails a day at the height of the site's usage, causing a controversy at his university when it was discovered that the site was using the most bandwidth out of any resource hosted there. A document outlining the program's purpose can be found here. A few documents are additionally available for Heretic and Wolfenstein 3D. The file depot offers downloads of various then-current editing utilities.

A limited amount of Ian's personal information can also be found on the site, in the form of photos and textual descriptions of his visits to id Software and various other game companies, as well as a real-life meet-up with Raphaël Quinet.