Closing Communities: FFFFOUND vs. MLKSHK | Hacker News Reader

Closing Communities: FFFFOUND vs. MLKSHK

waxy.org

36 points_pius8 comments

I ran a large online community with tens of thousands of users that existed for nearly 19 years. When it came time to close it down, I left a notice on the site for several months before i made it read only...

then the helpful guys at archive team[1] helped me create a complete archive of the site on archive.org with their irc bot.

once that was complete, i replaced the site with a notice and linked to the archives from there.

As an aside, one of the old domains that we used for a while lapsed at some point, and some spammer put up a copy of the pages from the internet archives with ads injected into the content. That eventually went to an SEO landing page a few months later.

[1] http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

For those that don't know, Archive Team and Internet Archive are two different groups (though with an overlapping membership).

Internet Archive are a non-profit org that are legally held to high standards, as they should be. They're a very stable place to have data archived. That comes with a few limitations, like not making information available if there's any (even accidental) indication that the upstream site want it kept private - see the comments about robots.txt in tfa.

Archive Team, on the other hand, are a fairly fun and radical group that are far more loosely organised, who will archive what they can when it's needed, and horde it. Fuck your robots.txt![1]

If you can get involved in either organisation, it's highly recommended. They both have interesting challenges and solve them with neat tools.

[1] http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt

Thesixtyone is also closing in a few days and didn't give much notice. No way to export anything either. I've tried to scrape the site but considering how many days are left I can't possibly finish.

That's a site I haven't heard mentioned in quite a few years. Sad to hear it is also closing.

ask the archive team guys on irc

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

I would but honestly, there are far more important things that need their effort. t61 requires a bit of work to actually get the music. youtube-dl supports it, but only one at a time.

With stories like this, I always find it bizarre that artists/creators do not keep personal master copies of their works. I don't think it's fair to push the blame of losing the works completely to the service operators, I feel that creators also have some responsibility to employ due diligence if they want their works to be preserved.

Agreed. Putting something on the Internet makes it convenient to access, but I've never created something that I cared about that I didn't keep a local copy of. The idea actually makes me a little uncomfortable.

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