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Comment by Espionage724 | Hacker News Reader

I haven't visited a CNET page in years and didn't know they were even still relevant :p

The times I have visited CNET pages in the past was to find specific information. If such information happens to be in deleted articles, that would reduce my interactions with CNET in the future.

I think they should archive the old articles or even offload them to Wayback willingly, but it's possible some of the articles they're purging aren't worthwhile. If I write up an article about a cat playing on a scratching post, there's a good chance there's nothing unique or valuable about it and it doesn't need to sit around gathering bit rot :p

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> I haven't visited a CNET page in years and didn't know they were even still relevant :p

I had the same feeling about the Verge.

It feels like going to Britannica online to read about what Encarta encyclopaedia was and why it came in something called a CD-ROM.

---

E: Awesome: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Encarta

> It feels like going to Britannica online

I’ve seen people use Britannica Online as ammunition in arguments on Wikipedia. “Britannica says/does X so Wikipedia should too”

From the article:

'Stories slated to be “deprecated” are archived using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and authors are alerted at least 10 days in advance, according to the memo.'

Offloading trash to an already strained organisation. are they donating any help or is it just taking advantage of charity?

Lmao there's no winning with you people :p

Don't worry, Wayback is capable of telling CNET where to go if they were really concerned. If anything they should be thankful for the newly-generated interest that a major company would use them instead of some randoms cherry-picking sites for arguments.

yes, this greatly legitimizes the wayback archive.

I didn't know they were strained. Probably best to block them so they don't spend resources on unimportant things. You can find a few UA strings here https://udger.com/resources/ua-list/bot-detail?bot=archive.o... Ultimately, it looks like they do respect the `archive.org_bot` string so if you want to help the strained organization, probably best to block it as well.

You can also save them some space, it appears, by uploading a file on your website asking them not to retain it and then sending an email to them. See https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/128352

For now, I just blocked the bot, but when I have some time maybe I'll ask them to delete the data.

Hopefully, with a little community effort we can reduce the strain on them so they can spend their limited resources reasonably.

You can't (currently) search the Wayback Machine, so you can only find these old articles if you know what the URL once was.

> I haven't visited a CNET page in years and didn't know they were even still relevant :p

I'm not sure that CNet is relevant. I see their headlines regularly because they're a panel on an aggregate I visit. Most of what they publish is on a level with bot-built and affiliate pages.

We just had a long run of "Best internet providers in [US city]" as if people who live there could choose more than one. Between those will be Get This Deal On HP InkJet Printers and Best Back To School VPN Deals 2023 that compares 10 different Kape offerings.

If there is a point to cnet's existence, I truly don't see it.

Article says that’s what they’re doing. It says exactly that.

Doesn’t really make things better, IMO, but they are at least doing that.

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