A couple of good examples are lifehacker.com and lifehack.org. Both sites used to have excellent content. The sites are still up and running, but the first one has turned into a collection of listicles and the second is an ad for an “AI-powered life coach”. All of that old content is gone and is only accessible through the Internet Archive.
In fact, many domains never shut down, they just change owners or change direction.
I think there should at least be a recognized way to opt-out that archive.org actually follows. For years they told people to put
User-agent: ia_archiverDisallow:
in robots.txt, but they still archived content from those sites. They refuse to publish what IP addresses they pull content down from, but that would be a trivial thing to do. They refuse to use a UserAgent that you can filter on.
If you want to be a library, be open and honest about it. There’s no need to sneak around.
A couple of good examples are lifehacker.com and lifehack.org. Both sites used to have excellent content. The sites are still up and running, but the first one has turned into a collection of listicles and the second is an ad for an “AI-powered life coach”. All of that old content is gone and is only accessible through the Internet Archive.
In fact, many domains never shut down, they just change owners or change direction.
Again, isn’t that the site’s prerogative?
I think there should at least be a recognized way to opt-out that archive.org actually follows. For years they told people to put
User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow:in robots.txt, but they still archived content from those sites. They refuse to publish what IP addresses they pull content down from, but that would be a trivial thing to do. They refuse to use a UserAgent that you can filter on.
If you want to be a library, be open and honest about it. There’s no need to sneak around.