What Happened to Archive.is? | Hacker News Reader

What Happened to Archive.is?

27 pointspaulpauper25 comments

It used to be be so fast but now it says 2000+ waiting in queue. Just another service made useless due to abuse/spammers.

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I remember reading a tweet saying never to use the .is ccTLD. The proper one has always been:

https://archive.ph/

https://archive.today/

Not sure of the reason why .IS is not recommended, probably something to do with geo-political baggage.

The reason is "muh russia altering backed up copies, non trustworthy". I don't know one way or the other, but that's the gist of it.

.is is Iceland. Why would Russia have anything to do with it?

As far as I know, the reason some people don't want to host there is that ISNIC is known to revoke domains when a site violates the law.

Makes no sense I agree but that's what I heard about a year ago.

The .is version redirects to the .ph version anyway.

According to what they've told Wikipedia, they want the links to be to archive.today (and not archive.ph even if it redirects there).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Using_archive.today#Archi...

"The owner of archive.today requests Wikipedia always use archive.today - it is a gateway that redirects to one of the final destinations (.is, .li, .fo, .ph, .vn and .md) based on load and availability. It provides archive.today flexibility to dynamically redirect traffic to other domains/servers."

So I'd go with archive.today until the site owner specifies something different. I'm not totally sure why the domain is necessary for load balancing, but if OP is having trouble with queue depth, maybe try archive.today

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#History

https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1081276424781287427

They started deprecating archive.is in 2019.

I tried to archive a page and it started after ~5 seconds, even though the queue is long (2173). They seem to have different priorities for different IPs/URLs.

While I'm sure some abuse the service, the long queue could be just a side effect of them being more popular now than they used to be. I find myself using them, archive.org, and Google cache more now because of geo blocks and/or pages that are hard to view.

The articles on archive.is also started getting peppered with ads, which is annoying and I'd think borderline illegal. It makes many articles unreadable on smaller devices.

Also on archive.ph. What's going on? I used to upvote archive.ph comments, but if all they do is replace original ads with their own, to hell with it.

i would gladly solve like 5 captchas per request to archive a site if thats what it took to combat spammers. their archiving service is invaluable

I'm having issues with archive.org today as well. Trying to archive around 600 tweets used for humanitarian purposes. I wonder if others are trying to archive tweets as well.

Noticed that too.

I've assumed that the root cause is the Russian aggression/war/invasion.

https://blog.archive.today/ is perhaps are good place to ask that question.

(I've somehow gotten the impression the person running this service is either in Russia or at least russian.)

archive.org also offers a way to save a snapshot of a page. [1] I just do not use it frequently because it takes more effort to navigate to it.

[1] https://web.archive.org/save

Archive.org is less resistant to censorship though, as they have started removing "objectionable" material from the site, as long as enough people object to it. We saw that play out during the coordinated effort to erase KiwiFarms from the Internet. An effort that not only failed, but made the site far more resilient.

From what I read, this attempt to erase history was cited by one of the financial backers who was supposedly not a fan of KF, but was less of a fan of censorship from utilities such as archive.org.

As John Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

I have seen it get bogged down and get a long queue from time to time.

The bigger issue is that it stopped being a reliable way to bypass paywalls. News outlets now seem to use a url with random characters in it (not a query parameter), so it’s unlikely the url will work.

12ft.io (or whatever it is) stopped working too. Probably to not get sued.

This whole thing feels like a sign that a new tech solution could solve this once and for all. Distributed hash tables have been a thing since the 90’s. Making it work well for bypassing paywalls would be hard to stop.

Interesting, I wonder if someone who thinks their business is being harmed by the site is filling up the queue.

The frustrating thing is that paywalls aren't really the problem. I'm more than happy to push a couple pennies your way to read a good article (probably more than you'd make in ad revenue).

The real problem is account walls. Because a good micropayment system hasn't been adopted yet, every goddamn news outlet insists that I sign up for an account, give them my credit card, and commit to a monthly payment. There's too much good content on competing outlets and platforms to deal with all that paid account management. I'll read maybe half a dozen NYT articles a year, and similar from dozens of other outlets. Let me just pay for what I want to read without signing a long term contract.

This isn't just a problem with news outlets. Every kind of digital content is like this. I don't want a dozen different paid accounts on all the different streaming services. Let me pay a quarter for each show I watch and stop this "gym economics" crap of relying on the very low use customers to subsidize the high use customers.

What if it was $5 per NYT article instead of 5c to make the economics work? Would you still do it?

May I ask what the purpose of this thought experiment is? It seems pointless to me, given you could purchase a copy of the entire NYT of that day for about the same, it would seem rather onerous to charge that much for a single digital view.

Yeah $5 is way too high. Unfortunately we have proof that 5c is too low, though. Blendle tried to make it work at (IIRC) something like 25c/article and apparently that wasn't enough (they still exist, but apparently their searching for a profitable business model). https://halcrawford.substack.com/p/micropayments-the-news-id...

Depends on the quality. $5 is getting into full ebook territory, but I've spent that much on ebooks that turned out to be garbage plenty of times.

I suppose if a singular NYT article dropped that took the effort and expense of writing a full book, and there was enough chatter about it to vouch for the quality, then sure, I would be fairly likely to pay that much, if and only if it was a one time exchange and did not require setting up a long term subscription relationship.

I happened to archive something about an hour ago, saw the “2748* in queue” message for a couple of seconds and then it started archiving the page.

tl;dr - queue position is meaningless if you don’t know the throughput

*not the exact number - it was in the 2700s, but that’s all I recall

I wouldn't be surprised if that's some form of DDOS protection - give a really high number, ask the browser to do some WASM shit, if it passes, then actually add it to the queue.

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