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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

One bad thing about old forum threads is a lot of the images are lost. Disk space and bandwidth were still expensive back then. The free image hosts mostly disappeared or started charging (so many forums have dead photobucket links).

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They also got flooded with spam and were regularly hacked.

Which really didn't matter back then. People just deleted the spam, recovered from backup, patched whatever flaw they found, and changed passwords. It wasn't the end of the world.

Lots of the forums I used to use died this way. The site owners eventually got tired of having to janny the site daily to fight an endless wave of attacks. It's all moved to reddit and discord these days.

Janny?

Janitors (shortened to "janny") are a part of 4chan's moderation team.

Seems like the slang has bled out to incorporate all types of volunteer moderators.

Ah, makes sense.

Spam did matter when it didnt stop. No one wanted to engage in a full time job of deleting bullshit. This is one of the reasons forums disappeared and people went to larger sites that tended to have much larger moderation staff

Same thing is going to happen again once imgur shuts down.

While the pictures that were actually hosted on the forum itself are usually fine.

That will be a day of days. imgur shutting down will be like someone shaking your internet Etch-A-Sketch. The internet post imgur will have a completely different vibe.

Sounds like a job for archive.org

That doesn't solve the issue of the millions of embeds and links though.

It's kind of sad that browsers still have no concept of the passage of time (except to intentionally break things for security). One of the many things that a browser focused on being a browser for hyperlinked documents could do better than our current app delivery platforms calling themselves browsers.

Why not ? (Besides that of course it would be probably easier for the Archive to deal with multimedia inside the same website.)

What do you mean why not? If a forum embeds an image from imgur and imgur ceases to exist the image stops working. It doesn't matter if archive.org has a copy, you wont be able to see it without manually going to archive.org to find every image by its former embed url (which likley isnt archived as thats a different url to the one you see on their site).

Wait, why would it be a different Uniform Resource Locator ?

Yeah, I was really impressed how they managed to get a large chunk of Xfire backed up with only 2 days warning before shutdown !

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Xfire

And that was for video too ! (Hopefully YouTube shutting down will give more warning... speaking of which, has anyone backed up Google Video before it shut down ? I have a collection of links in a forum post that would be nice to have back up and working again.)

Still, imgur is pretty big these days, this might be quite expensive (how do they stay afloat, BTW ?).

Same thing happened when gfycat spun off the adult content into redgifs. A thousand subreddits all had their content go 404.

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