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Comment by gigel82 | Hacker News Reader

Archive.org is great; especially their archive of abandonware old games (MS-DOS, older console ROMs), some of which can be played online.

But don't find yourself actually needing to get in touch with a human there. I have a friend that inadvertently doxxed themself on a website they own; they removed the pages, added a robots.txt to disallow crawling and is trying for months to reach someone over there to just get that data removed from The Wayback Machine, to no avail.

Perhaps archive.org doesn't have a lot of staff or they simply don't care but I imagine these kinds of things happen often enough that they should at least have an automated process in place (and continuing to crawl a website that specifically forbids it through the standard robots.txt is a bit icky).

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> Archive.org is great; especially their archive of abandonware old games (MS-DOS, older console ROMs), some of which can be played online.

See: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

> But don't find yourself actually needing to get in touch with a human there. I have a friend that inadvertently doxxed themself on a website they own; they removed the pages, added a robots.txt to disallow crawling and is trying for months to reach someone over there to just get that data removed from The Wayback Machine, to no avail.

That sucks. I've always been able to get a hold of a human the few times I emailed them - but nothing due to something like this.

> Perhaps archive.org doesn't have a lot of staff or they simply don't care but I imagine these kinds of things happen often enough that they should at least have an automated process in place (and continuing to crawl a website that specifically forbids it through the standard robots.txt is a bit icky).

Also, FYI they stopped honoring robots.txt directives: https://teleread.org/2017/04/24/the-internet-archive-will-so... — so if you're a webmaster that would like to exclude your website from the internet archive, you'll have to email them directly to make that request.

>Also, FYI they stopped honoring robots.txt directives: https://teleread.org/2017/04/24/the-internet-archive-will-so... — so if you're a webmaster that would like to exclude your website from the internet archive, you'll have to email them directly to make that request.

Good. It shouldn't be as simple as "put a robots.txt on your domain" to erase the entire publicly archived history of any sites ever hosted under that domain. This happened a lot when domains would expire.

Archive.org is supposed to be an archive. Unlisting data (they don't delete stuff) goes entirely against the ideao of archiving the internet. It's because of people like him that you have to archive archive.org itself which is stupid.

Is your stance that the archive should continue to list information that can put someone’s life in imminent danger (the address of someone receiving death threats, for instance)? I would find it hard to defend such a position.

Yes they should. Information should be free. I don't like all these restrictions trying to lock it down. Anyways, someone's address is public information.

Awaiting to see how you handle the situation if your personal details are ever doxxed.

Agree in principle, but surely there are exceptions. In my friend's case they reused nicknames across hobbies and projects; potentially dangerous people got upset over whatever reason and now they're concerned a connection will be made to that personal data they once posted (including home address).

Surprisingly, both Google and Bing removed the data within 1 week of making the request.

If it was easy to remove content, there would be a lot less content. And that's usually a good thing that it isn't easy.

I've had excellent results in getting responses from info@archive.org.

(and continuing to crawl a website that specifically forbids it through the standard robots.txt is a bit icky).

I find the idea you, in control of a server, can send someone data and then demand they erase it a bit ridiculous. If you want to control distribution then control it. Require a login to access any data you don't intend to be public.

They very clearly don’t care about such matter. Or, more accurately, they specifically want to harm people who have committed the great sin of accidentally posting something.

Opinions and practices are very different across different projects in the space. Wikipedia and WP commons, for example, have detailed policies for personal data. Commons is so careful about copyright, it sometimes can’t host a file that lots of commercial publishers freely use, such as (photos of) ads or logos that lack explicit licenses.

Both approaches have their pros and cons. I can’t help but think both projects would be improved by moving a bit into the direction of the other.

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