Difference between revisions of "Alive... OR ARE THEY"

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Archive Team considers these sites specifically of interest because they solicit so much content, contain so many works and projects by a wide group of people, or have the internet particularly dependent on them. Consider this a fire drill.. know what you can do to get your data off these sites and back them off for later.
Archive Team considers these sites specifically of interest because they solicit so much content, contain so many works and projects by a wide group of people, or have the internet particularly dependent on them. Consider this a fire drill.. know what you can do to get your data off these sites and back them off for later.


=== Sites ===
== Still Alive ==


* '''[[Facebook]]''' seems stable at the moment.
<!--
* '''[[Friendfeed]]''' is a happy clam.
 
* '''[[Google]]''' wants you to think they will be here forever.
Sorted alphabetically
* '''[[Twitter]]''' is tweaking away.
 
* '''[http://en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia]''' will surely be here forever and ever!
-->
* '''[[Delicious]]''' loves to change their API, which has a side effect of making it difficult to back up.
 
* '''[[whitehouse.gov]]''' is up and running for #44, but we've lost all info for #43. (See also: [http://www.kottke.org/09/01/old-whitehousegov-down-the-memory-hole kotke].) We also want to watch out for site changes / disappeared pages that were embarassing or whatnot.
=== Owned by [[Yahoo!]] Imminent Demise! ===
* '''[http://www.infoanarchy.org Infoanarchy]''' The site is functioning again. Might be worth backing up, though. For months, a simple database error that could be fixed with one command KO'd this site unexpectedly with a wealth of P2P information lost. [http://eng.anarchopedia.org/infoAnarchy]
 
* '''[[Flickr]]''' contains billions of files, hundreds millions of which are under a Creative Commons license or stored there by many museums and other cultural institutions. The site was tumblr-ised in 2013 and has been poorly functional ever since; pro users were removed, so it doesn't yet have a business model. Additionally, it's owned by [[Yahoo!]], need to say more?!
 
=== Watchlist ===
 
* '''[[Academic Earth]]''' ({{url|1=http://academicearth.org/}}) has been worryingly unloved for a while, and holds a mountain of free education that's invaluable to the world.
* '''[[Encyclopedia Astronautica]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.astronautix.com/}}) is the most comprehensive collection of the history of space travel.  '''Period.'''  Seriously, the official NASA history folks will refer you this website if they can't answer your questions.  However, Mark Wade (the sole creator/maintainer) abandoned his blog at the end of 2007, and the Encyclopedia has not been updated since May 2008, despite much happening in the space exploration world since then. A [https://archive.org/details/EncyclopediaAstronautica backup] was made of the site as of 28/01/2017.
* '''[[Angelfire]]''' has been in constant decline for many years now.
* '''[[AnimeMusicVideos.org]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.animemusicvideos.org/}}) is fine right now, but they rely on donations and host vast amounts of user-edited music videos on their server (presumably without mirrors). Hard to download as you have to be a member to get all the download links, and after downloading a handful you have to vode before you can d/l again (or you can donate which presumably gives you 1 year of free d/l access). Also, this site might be a grey area, copyright-wise, as the videos are all cut together from copyrighted material.
* '''[[BetaArchive]]''' ({{url|http://www.betaarchive.com/}}) has Kafkaesque requirements to be able to access it, and apparently refuses to be backed up, presumably so that they get more visitors. Valuable cultural library of historic software with no backups? Aargh.
* '''[[BioMedia Project]]''' ({{url|1=http://biomediaproject.com/bmp/}}) is a large archive of various BIONICLE media that has not had a notable update since 2015.
* '''[[Codecademy]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.codecademy.com/}}) has a large amount of valuable coding lessons.
* '''[[DatasheetArchive]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.datasheetarchive.com/}}) hosts over 350 million PDF datasheets for integrated circuits, some of which are very old and hard to track down otherwise. The site is slow from time to time and uses a convoluted IFRAME-based online viewer, presumably to make scraping the site harder. Nevertheless, multiple other similar sites exist, with large parts of their PDFs non-overlapping, so that at some point, all should be saved. Similar sites include http://doc.chipfind.<!-- -->ru/ (1.6m datasheets), http://www.alldatasheet.com/ (20m datasheets), http://www.datasheets.com/ (250m datasheets), http://www.datasheetcatalog.com/, http://freedatasheets.com/ and several others
* '''[[Dayviews]]''' ({{url|1=http://dayviews.com/}}), the Swedish photo diary community contains quite a bit of 00s Swedish "youth culture", but is at risk of being shutdown when you least suspect it due to its sinking user rate.
* '''[[Delicious]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.delicious.com/}}) loves to change their API, which has a side effect of making it difficult to back up.
* '''[[Elfwood]]''' has been home to tons of fantasy and sci-fi art and fiction since the late 90's, though since June 2016, plans for a "new Elfwood" have been put on hold, and as of Arpil 2017, the website is in an odd state where pages will return a status code of 504, while images will load just fine. It was last seen functioning normally in early December 2016.
* '''[[Facebook]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.facebook.com/}}) seems stable at the moment.
* '''[[FanFiction]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.fanfiction.net/}}) represents many thousands of user-generated stories, essays and huge amounts of work.
* '''[[Forrst]]''' ({{url|1=http://zurb.com/forrst}}) was shut down on April 14th, 2014, but all posts were archived by Forrst.
* '''[[FreewareFiles]]''' ({{url|1=http://freewarefiles.net/}}) is a treasure trove of free and open source completed softwares. It's been around for 20 years, but hasn't had its look updated in a long while.
* '''[[FurAffinity]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.furaffinity.net/}})
* '''[[Google]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.google.com/}}) wants you to think they will be here forever.
* '''[[h2g2]]''' ({{url|1=https://www.h2g2.com}}) was (among?) the first [https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A550955 online, collaborative encyclopaedia(s)].
* '''[[IFTTT]]''' ({{url|1=http://ifttt.com/}}) is still growing.
* '''[[Internet Archive]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.archive.org/}}) seems stable at the moment, but its [https://archive.org/~tracey/mrtg/du.html 45 petabytes] of data (as of October 2018) aren't mirrored anywhere else. The code for their system isn't open source, and generally they're a single point of failure for a large amount of the web's history. Why should there be only 1 internet archive?
** There is a second instance of the Wayback Machine at [http://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/archive/archive_web.aspx Bibliotheca Alexandrina], but it appears to have been broken since several years as of October 2018 ("The Resource you have requested is temporarily unavailable" when trying to access a snapshot as of 2018-10-03). It also hasn't been updated since 2007, i.e. all crawl data since 2008 is only available at the Internet Archive.
** More discussion at [[INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK]]
* '''[[Invisionfree]]''' ({{url|1=http://invisionfree.com/}}) is as far as I can tell not used by as many people nowadays as before, probably because other free forum hosts use better forum software like phpBB that has better layout and looks better. The copyright notice on [http://www.zifboards.com/ zIFBoards.com], which [http://invisionfree.com/ Invisionfree.com] redirects to, has not been updated since 2014.
* '''[[JanusVR]]''' is a company that aims to re-imagine the web as "rooms" interconnected with portals. These "rooms" can be hosted anywhere. Though the company and its technology are still fairly new, there are already cases of rooms with missing assets or even entire links broken, and [[ArchiveBot]]'s ability to grab these rooms is somewhat limited.
*'''[[JSFiddle]]''' ({{url|1=http://jsfiddle.net/}}) is referenced in many StackOverflow answers, as well as other forums, etc. It shows no signs of going away, but should we archive it just in case?
* '''[[Kiwi Farms]]''' ({{url|http://kiwifarms.net/}}, {{url|http://kiwifar.ms/|former alternate .ms domain}}) is a notorious forum where users mock [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lolcow "lolcows"], or people who have attracted ridicule because of their behavior or their beliefs. On January 20, 2017, the forum was shut down without a warning by its owner, but was restored three weeks later.
*'''[[Know Your Meme]]''' ({{url|1=http://knowyourmeme.com/}}) is at this point the de facto central repository for information on internet memes and culture. It is as popular as ever at the moment, but even with this popularity, former owners Rocketboom had trouble financing it. In the spring of 2011 was sold to Cheezburger Networks, a site which has been known to "reorganize" its properties, sometimes with a detrimental effect on content. Though it was quite a different story, I might remind people what happened to [[Encyclopedia Dramatica]].
* '''[[Last.fm]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.last.fm/}}) is being cloned by free software developers in the form of [http://libre.fm Libre.fm] -- they have a tool, [http://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/*checkout*/trunk/lastscrape/lastscrape.py?root=librefm Lastscrape] which can get all your listening data out into a tab delimited text file.
* '''[[Literotica.com]]''' ({{url|1=http://literotica.com/}}) Contains over 290,000 user-written stories and poems. First pass at a backup: [http://mir.cr/12CMQUTL part1.rar], [http://mir.cr/HO79CCUO part2.rar], [http://mir.cr/TOVJWQ4E part3.rar], [http://mir.cr/1SIAB4AM part4.rar] -- contains the text of all stories as of the backup date in XML format. (One page of one story is missing because it doesn't exist on the site; embedded images and audio are not included this time; non-English stories aren't labelled with their language).
* '''[[LiveJournal]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.livejournal.com/}}) fired a bunch of US-based developers, but is still serving from its new (presumably cheaper) data center in Montana.
* '''[[Mapillary]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.mapillary.com/}}) project similar to Google's Street View, but with CC BY-SA photos submitted by users. Particularly worrisome since Mapillary requires purchasing licenses to download a large number of photos, making it essentially a big silo. See more at http://blog.improve-osm.org/en/2016/11/a-glimpse-into-the-future-of-mapmaking-with-osm-2/
* '''[[Megalodon.jp]]''' ({{url|1=http://megalodon.jp/}}) is a Japanese archiving website. Outside of Japanese users, reddit users use it sometimes.
*'''[[The Mod Archive]]''' ({{url|1=http://modarchive.org/}}) One of the largest collection of music modules.
*'''[[Mod DB]]''' ({{url|1=http://moddb.com/}}) is the largest website dedicated to user generated game content, including mods (12,000) and addons (14,000) with a combined size of 4,5 TB of user-generated downloadable content.
*'''[[Moegirlpedia]]''' ({{url|https://zh.moegirl.org}}) is the biggest Chinese-language encyclopedia for popular culture.
*'''[[MUGEN Archive]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.mugenarchive.com/}}) Holds 1000's of user created addon content for the custom fighting game MUGEN. Much of the stuff uploaded here was thought lost forever. However, thanks to all the copyright infringing content and uploading a lot of content without the creators permission, the future of the site is questionable.
*'''[[nyaa]]''' ({{url|https://nyaa.si/}}) - Biggest torrent site of Japanese popular culture.
* '''[[Pastebin]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.pastebin.com/}}) is still getting filled with text.
* '''[[Pixiv]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.pixiv.net/}}) and '''[[deviantArt]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.deviantart.com/}}) are the largest Japanese and American (respectively) fanart (and valuable art in general) collections on the internet. Most of works are possibly included in [https://saucenao.com/status.html many boorus]. Someone also mentioned [http://www.minitokyo.net/ Minitokyo] around here somewhere. [[Internet Archive|IA]] has a 2008 [https://archive.org/details/mt-walls-2008-01-01 wallpaper dump] from there.
* '''[[Pouet]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.pouet.net/}}) is an important site of the demoscene. It indexes and ranks demoscene productions ('prods') and also includes a free-for-all BBS-style forum. [https://demozoo.org/ Demozoo] is a site in the same vein with a slightly different focus. They both use the same ISP iirc so if that goes down a lot of user created content is lost.
* '''[[Reddit]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.reddit.com/}}) is a content aggregator where [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Issues_relating_to_former_Digg_website many Digg users migrated in 2010]. Attracted controversy in July 2015, with accusations of [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/amageddon censorship] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_banning shadowbanning]. Stable for now, but team is small.
* '''[[SourceForge]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.sourceforge.net/}}) is a critical repository of open source code, information, and webpages. It is mirrored and maintained, but there are sure to be parts that are neither.
* '''[[The Pirate Bay]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.thepiratebay.org/}}) is one of the largest and most popular torrent search engines. It's still having persistent legal problems. The tracker went down in November 2012, but the site still serves torrents and magnet links. If a torrent is lost, it becomes impossible to connect to other computers distributing the shared files. Considering that there are links to TPB ''all over this wiki'', this site is pretty dang important. After they were raided in December 2014, a project known as [http://openbay.isohunt.to/ The Open Bay] was launched, which lets anybody host a mirror of TPB with automatic database updates, so even if TPB goes down again, temporarily or not, its database is still available.
* '''[[Tribe]]''' ({{url|1=http://tribe.net}}) hosts large amount of user-generated data, and has been having consistent uptime issues.
* '''[[Tumblr]]''' ({{url|1=http://tumblr.com}}) is a highly popular blogging platform which was bought by [[Yahoo]]! in May, 2013.
* '''[[TVTropes]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage}}) is a popular wiki dedicated to finding recurring patterns in fiction, and discussing fiction in general. No word on whether there are backups. The administrators have a tendency to delete things indiscriminately, usually to save on disk space: article edit histories are frequently purged, and old forum threads have been known to get deleted mercilessly. A [http://archive.org/details/archiveteam-tvtropes-2012-09 backup] and [https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Main_Page an alternate website] with imported content from July 2012 are available.
* '''[[Twitter]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.twitter.com/}}) is tweaking away, with a dire financial situation and [http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/06/twitter-in-meltdown-as-entire-userbase-revolts/ controversial decisions].
* '''[[Voat]]''' ({{url|1=https://voat.co/}}) is a content aggegator that gained a niche fanbase in June 2015 after a controversy on [[Reddit]]. A "Days Remaining" countdown appeared on the front page in February 2016 and [https://voat.co/v/whatever/comments/943274 has been confirmed] to be the number of startup credit days remaining, which were depleted in June 15, 2016. Voat relies on donations to run.
* '''[[WebCite]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.webcitation.org/}}) itself seems to be having trouble with funding, and is facing "possible discontinuation." As this site serves as a stable reference for fleeting Web references, it would be pretty disastrous if it went away.
* '''[[whitehouse.gov]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.whitehouse.gov/}}) is up and running for #44, <s>but we've lost all info for #43. (See also: [http://www.kottke.org/09/01/old-whitehousegov-down-the-memory-hole kottke] and [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/whitehousegov_president_web_presence.php Read Write Web].)</s> and #43 is available at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ thanks to the [http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/ephemera_vs_the_law/ Presidential Records Act]. We also want to watch out for site changes / disappeared pages that were embarrassing or whatnot.
* '''[[Wikia]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.wikia.com/}}), the for-pay arm of Wikipedia (just kidding, it's a different company, but shares a lot of people) is a repository of directed, unsubject-to-wikipolitics wikis, many of them intense and completist. It'd be bad for them to go away.
* '''[[WikiLeaks]]''' ({{url|1=http://wikileaks.org/}}) contains several thousand leaked documents from sources such as the Iraq War and the cables famously known under the label 'Cablegate'. Due to the content on the website, and that PayPal and Amazon (very) quickly dropped their hosting for them during Cablegate's opening days, it should be considered a potential target for any number of government committees for quick shutdown. They have an uncertain financial situation, and the site was inaccessible for some time in 2010.
* '''[[Wikipedia]]''' ({{url|1=http://www.wikipedia.org/}}) will surely be here forever and ever! Fortunately, we don't have to take their word for it as they offer dumps of the data minus the photos. However no-one has verified that Wikipedia can actually be restored from these dumps. If disaster strikes then we could discover a serious problem.
 
== Endangered ==
 
Did someone leave the oven on?
 
* '''[http://www.ning.com/ Ning]''' in 2010 has laid off 40% of staff and seems to be running out of money [http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/15/nings-bubble-bursts-no-more-free-networks-cuts-40-of-staff/]. There is certainly some networks worth archiving among the 2 million networks[http://blog.ning.com/2010/01/2-million-ning-networks.html] they host. Grouply[http://blog.grouply.com/grouply-welcomes-ning-networks/] and Posterous[http://blog.posterous.com/posterous-commits-to-building-a-ning-blog-imp] say they are going to offer migration tools.
* As of 2014, ScraperWiki Classic is now read-only.  But don’t worry! You can transfer this scraper to Morph.io if you want to continue editing it.
 
* '''[http://debates.oireachtas.ie/ debates.oireachtas.ie]''' on September 18th, 2012 the Houses of Oireachtas website [http://www.kildarestreet.com/statement2012/ announced] that it would no longer be updating its XML data for Irish parliamentary debates (1919-2012). Access to pre-existing data is still available, but is likely to disappear, if the current trend continues. It would be useful to at least capture the XML data that is there, while it is still available. Here's a [https://archive.org/details/debatesoireachtasie-XML WARC archive] of the XML only.
 
* '''[[Ownlog|ownlog.com]]''' - once one of the most popular and oldest blog platform in Poland seems to be dying slowly - no development and actualizations except most critical maintenance.
 
* '''[http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175 Groklaw]''' will no longer be posting new articles, "due to government monitoring of the internet, particularly e-mail." Whether or not its archives will remain online is unclear, although it does seem rather unlikely it will 100% disappear. OTOH, better safe than sorry.
 
* '''[[Seene]]''' ({{url|1=https://seene.co/u/docpop/}}) "lets you capture and share a new kind of 3D photo that brings together image, depth and movement to create a richer, more interactive experience, all on your iPhone." Unique content, but recently acquired by SnapChat - no new product updates since 2015. Likely to shut soon, unique and cool content.
 
* Strawpoll.me
 
* '''[http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ World of Spectrum]''''s current administrator announced that [http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/discussion/52892/had-enough he's ceasing to support the website and forum within 8 weeks] (as of July 3). The future of the website is uncertain.
 
* The '''Centralstation Community''' [http://community.thisiscentralstation.com/_Central-Station-v2-Q38As/blog/5449967/126249.html has closed]. The site is a UK-based social network for artists and creatives that provides hosting for content and portfolio. Users are being advised to back up their work as the new version of their platform will rely on existing media hosting sites like Flickr, Vimeo, and Soundcloud.
 
* Most of the paid staff at '''The Escapist''' [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/171005-Open-Letter-to-The-Escapist-Community has been "relieved of their duties"] as of October 20, 2017, and the future and longevity of the site is uncertain; it's currently run mostly through volunteer efforts.
 
* [[Yelp, Inc.]] lost 30% of its advertisers and people don't seem too happy about it.
 
== Alarm ==
<!--
 
If you have deadline, put it on the main deathwatch
 
-->
I smell smoke.
* YoyoGames, developer of the GameMaker application, is planning to retire the old "'''[[GameMaker Sandbox]]'''" game hosting website in favor of the "GameMaker: Player" service, by late October.<ref>http://gamemakerblog.com/2014/10/04/its-official-digital-store-will-replace-gamemaker-sandbox/</ref> [http://help.yoyogames.com/entries/101815476-GameMaker-Player-FAQs "Sandbox content will remain available for a period of time until the GameMaker: Player is fully live."]
 
* [[nokia.com]] is [http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/09/19/goodbye-nokia-com-microsoft-makes-new-home-devices-services-microsoft-com/ being destroyed by Microsoft]. [http://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/job/adktg It has been saved] by the [[ArchiveBot]].
 
* [[Yahoo!]] [http://www.yqlblog.net/blog/2013/11/11/y-ahoo-it-url-shortener-end-of-life-announcement/ retired] the y.ahoo.it [[URLTeam|URL shortener]] November 20th 2013 but the shortener is still active.
 
* CtoSims Has been infected with a Javascript that redirects to different pages, and the owner seems to have not been active for a long time. The entire site now redirects to a placeholder page that says "Coming Soon!". As of December 2016, All Downloads have been taken down as well.
 
* [[YTMND]] - supposed to be "closing down soon" in [https://gizmodo.com/who-killed-ytmnd-1785765611 2016], but still up 2 years later.
 
== See Also ==
* [[A Million Ways to Die on the Web]]
 
== References ==
 
<references/>
 
{{Navigation pager
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[[Category:Archive Team]]

Revision as of 13:23, 28 June 2019

Like many sites before them, these places indicate a sunny outlook, a clean bill of health and a total sense of "all systems go". But as we've found out from those many sites before them, fortunes can change overnight.

Archive Team considers these sites specifically of interest because they solicit so much content, contain so many works and projects by a wide group of people, or have the internet particularly dependent on them. Consider this a fire drill.. know what you can do to get your data off these sites and back them off for later.

Still Alive

Owned by Yahoo! Imminent Demise!

  • Flickr contains billions of files, hundreds millions of which are under a Creative Commons license or stored there by many museums and other cultural institutions. The site was tumblr-ised in 2013 and has been poorly functional ever since; pro users were removed, so it doesn't yet have a business model. Additionally, it's owned by Yahoo!, need to say more?!

Watchlist

Endangered

Did someone leave the oven on?

  • Ning in 2010 has laid off 40% of staff and seems to be running out of money [1]. There is certainly some networks worth archiving among the 2 million networks[2] they host. Grouply[3] and Posterous[4] say they are going to offer migration tools.
  • As of 2014, ScraperWiki Classic is now read-only. But don’t worry! You can transfer this scraper to Morph.io if you want to continue editing it.
  • debates.oireachtas.ie on September 18th, 2012 the Houses of Oireachtas website announced that it would no longer be updating its XML data for Irish parliamentary debates (1919-2012). Access to pre-existing data is still available, but is likely to disappear, if the current trend continues. It would be useful to at least capture the XML data that is there, while it is still available. Here's a WARC archive of the XML only.
  • ownlog.com - once one of the most popular and oldest blog platform in Poland seems to be dying slowly - no development and actualizations except most critical maintenance.
  • Groklaw will no longer be posting new articles, "due to government monitoring of the internet, particularly e-mail." Whether or not its archives will remain online is unclear, although it does seem rather unlikely it will 100% disappear. OTOH, better safe than sorry.
  • Seene (https://seene.co/u/docpop/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]) "lets you capture and share a new kind of 3D photo that brings together image, depth and movement to create a richer, more interactive experience, all on your iPhone." Unique content, but recently acquired by SnapChat - no new product updates since 2015. Likely to shut soon, unique and cool content.
  • Strawpoll.me
  • The Centralstation Community has closed. The site is a UK-based social network for artists and creatives that provides hosting for content and portfolio. Users are being advised to back up their work as the new version of their platform will rely on existing media hosting sites like Flickr, Vimeo, and Soundcloud.
  • Most of the paid staff at The Escapist has been "relieved of their duties" as of October 20, 2017, and the future and longevity of the site is uncertain; it's currently run mostly through volunteer efforts.
  • Yelp, Inc. lost 30% of its advertisers and people don't seem too happy about it.

Alarm

I smell smoke.

  • CtoSims Has been infected with a Javascript that redirects to different pages, and the owner seems to have not been active for a long time. The entire site now redirects to a placeholder page that says "Coming Soon!". As of December 2016, All Downloads have been taken down as well.
  • YTMND - supposed to be "closing down soon" in 2016, but still up 2 years later.

See Also

References