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Comment by rustyk5 | Hacker News Reader

Hey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone forever, but it may be a little while before it reappears. There's a very good chance that it will reappear in the form of an archive of static html pages though, not a live community. So if you'd like to, this is probably a good time to mourn what it was, although in that sense K5 has clearly been over for years.

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That's great! If you need any help in this effort, please don;t hesitate to contact me. My email i sin my profile.

Thanks for creating K5 and letting it become what it had become.

I also really enjoyed your guest post to the The Awl mailing list last year. I did a double-take when I saw your name in the header. Is there anywhere we can see your writing on a regular basis nowadays?

I hold out hope that Today in Tabs will be back from its hiatus one day. Got in on it very late but my wife and I loved it.

Ah yeah, I had totally forgot about that since it disappeared!

It was better the last few years because my otherwise-marginalized point of view won out, on a level, relatively-ban-free playing field. Your weak-ass memes couldn't compete.

Consider donating it to the Internet Archive. This is precisely the kind of thing they really do a good job with, and it's worth saving.

Yeah I don't really mind continuing to host it -- in archived form it wouldn't be any burden. But I'll talk to people.

I'd vote for "both" - since I'd love you to be hosting the archive on the original domain for the moment, but I have more faith in them not Failing to Deal with Stuff than you (and were I in your shoes I'd be thinking the exact same thing about myself) - and, also, I'm kinda hoping the internet archive will outlast us both unless we get immortality soon enough.

Also, [insert gushing praise here], I loved k5 back in the day.

http://dontsuemebro.com

Del Griffin seems to be working on Scoop improving it on his Scoop site. He can run your Kuro5hin and maybe even fix the cancel button and other things. He's currently adding HTML tags and trying to fix the https links without the a href tag in autoformat.

I'll run it better. Turn it over to me. There's gold in the database that got censored on the site. I'll assume all legal liability.

Yeah Lulzara can't sue any more because he had a Vespa accident and died. So Crawford's diary on him could come back an be undeleted.

It tells the truth on technology companies and how they cheat software consulants out of money.

Hey Rusty! If you bring the site back online, we can archive it and push it into archive.org for permanent storage.

Just drop into #archiveteam on EFnet IRC and let someone know its ready for ArchiveBot to ingest when its back online.

> and it's worth saving.

That's kind of an interesting question. There's certainly some stuff there worth saving forever, but there's also stuff that's just plain bad or that's the intellectual equivalent of embarrassing childhood photos, which may not be worth saving at all.

I never was part of Usenet, but I understand a lot of people were angry at Dejanews and Google when what was once (perhaps naively) viewed as ephemeral communication was turned into a public searchable archive. At least most people on Kuro5hin used pseudonyms.

> That's kind of an interesting question. There's certainly some stuff there worth saving forever, but there's also stuff that's just plain bad or that's the intellectual equivalent of embarrassing childhood photos, which may not be worth saving at all.

That isn't your call, and is nobody's call, really. Better to preserve it all and let people decide for themselves when they look at it.

I was a user of K5 and I don't think anyone there viewed it as "ephemeral communication". If they thought so, it seems as though the joke's sort of on them, given that the site stayed operational for almost 17 years.

I can forgive that sort of attitude among the early users of Usenet, because there was a long period during which it was just technically infeasible to have a permanent archive of everything (and it's still kinda true, if you count binaries groups; most Usenet providers don't keep everything forever). But that was definitely not the case by the time K5 came around.

The site's culture, at least IMO, was that if you really embarrassed yourself your way out was by ditching your pseudonym and starting over (or by saying the dumb thing under a throwaway account to begin with, which was perhaps too easy on K5).

There's perhaps some argument to be made that forums that require real-name registration ought to allow comments to either be deleted (bad) or anonymized (probably better) on request, to allow people to move away from past statements. But I don't know if that's ever really been a reasonable expectation on a pseudonymous forum, at least of the non-toy/non-amateur variety.

K5 is blocked by robots.txt on Archive.org

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