Alive... OR ARE THEY

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Like many sites before them, these places indicate a sunny outlook, a clean bill of health and a total sense of "all systems go". But as we've found out from those many sites before them, fortunes can change overnight.

Archive Team considers these sites specifically of interest because they solicit so much content, contain so many works and projects by a wide group of people, or have the internet particularly dependent on them. Consider this a fire drill.. know what you can do to get your data off these sites and back them off for later.

Still Alive

Owned by Yahoo! Imminent Demise!

  • Yahoo and AOL properties are being sold by Verizon to hedge fund Apollo in 2021. The news comes immediately after the closure of Yahoo! Answers and will presumably be swiftly followed by radical disruption for the sake of short-term cash milking.[1]
  • Flickr contains billions of files, hundreds millions of which are under a Creative Commons license or stored there by many museums and other cultural institutions. The site was tumblr-ised in 2013 and has been poorly functional ever since; pro users were removed, so it doesn't yet have a business model. Additionally, it's owned by Yahoo!, need to say more?!
    • Flickr was sold to SmugMug in 2018, purged the biggest non-paying and non-freely licensed accounts and switched to a more predictable subscription-based model.

Watchlist

Endangered

Did someone leave the oven on?

  • [kirbysrainbowresort.net Kirby's Rainbow Resort] is a Kirby fan site that has a significant archive of old fan works and official media that's difficult to find elsewhere. Around the beginning of 2023, the website's forums, Oekaki imageboard, news updates, and other parts of the site have unceremoniously disappeared. The rest of the site hasn't been updated since 2020.
  • Ning in 2010 has laid off 40% of staff and seems to be running out of money [1]. There is certainly some networks worth archiving among the 2 million networks[2] they host. Grouply[3] and Posterous[4] say they are going to offer migration tools.
  • As of 2014, ScraperWiki Classic is now read-only. But don’t worry! You can transfer this scraper to Morph.io if you want to continue editing it.
  • debates.oireachtas.ie on September 18th, 2012 the Houses of Oireachtas website announced that it would no longer be updating its XML data for Irish parliamentary debates (1919-2012). Access to pre-existing data is still available, but is likely to disappear, if the current trend continues. It would be useful to at least capture the XML data that is there, while it is still available. Here's a WARC archive of the XML only.
  • Groklaw will no longer be posting new articles, "due to government monitoring of the internet, particularly e-mail." Whether or not its archives will remain online is unclear, although it does seem rather unlikely it will 100% disappear. OTOH, better safe than sorry. Still up as of November 28th, 2023.
  • The Centralstation Community has closed. The site is a UK-based social network for artists and creatives that provides hosting for content and portfolio. Users are being advised to back up their work as the new version of their platform will rely on existing media hosting sites like Flickr, Vimeo, and Soundcloud. Still up as of October 11th, 2022.
  • Most of the paid staff at The Escapist has been "relieved of their duties" as of October 20, 2017, and the future and longevity of the site is uncertain; it's currently run mostly through volunteer efforts.
  • Yelp, Inc. lost 30% of its advertisers and people don't seem too happy about it.
  • Cheezburger https://www.cheezburger.com/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb], once a “network” of meme blogs but now one single centralized site, has barely been maintained by its parent company (Cracked.com) for years, with the account creation system being broken since at least 2019. A lot of old meme images (of the Impact-font/rage-face/advice-animal variety) can be found here, dating back to 2007, and it would be a loss to the unique culture of the Internet if all these were to disappear. A lot of its contemporaries (such as Lolcats.com) have been lost to domain expiries and the ensuing cyber-squatters. There are still some dedicated users posting brand-new meme material here, but some people held on to GeoCities till the bitter end as well.
  • OSDN is a hosting site for Japan, containing repositories of open-source code and web pages. However, since its acquisition by OSCHINA in 2022, the site has become very unstable, with frequent 504 errors and other issues.
  • 5ch.net 5ch (formerly 2ch), an online forum in operation since May 30, 1999, has been experiencing ongoing instability due to issues such as script-based trolling . Archived posts dating back to 1999 are currently inaccessible, with the administrators citing a physical server failure as the cause. There is no estimated timeframe for their restoration.List of archive servers
  • blog.seesaa.jp Seesaa Inc., the company operating Seesaa Blog was established in 2003 as a blog service provider. It became a subsidiary of Fan Communications in 2017 and was merged into the parent company in 2024. The company, which was in a poor financial state and operating at a loss just before the merger, also ran services like Seesaa Wiki and SS Blog (a business inherited from another company). SS Blog is scheduled to terminate service on March 31, 2025Notice of Termination of SS Blog Service
  • zakzak ZakZak, an online news site operated by Sankei Newspaper, announced that it will cease to be updated on 2024/01/31, with no mention of continued website existence.Notice of Suspension of Newspaper
  • Old websites made by Nintendo Korea old websites made by the company, such as https://www.nintendocaution.co.kr/, are in risk of getting deleted if the company decides to delete them.

Alarm

I smell smoke.

  • The Correspondent, From 30 Sep 19 to 1 Jan 21 The Correspondent published member-funded journalism about the forces that shape our world. The organization has shut down[6] and has put up a read-only archive of all publications that were previously only accessible to paying members. As keeping such an archive running will probably cost someone money it might not stay online for many more years.
  • CtoSims Has been infected with a Javascript that redirects to different pages, and the owner seems to have not been active for a long time. The entire site now redirects to a placeholder page that says "Coming Soon!". As of December 2016, All Downloads have been taken down as well.
  • Dayviews (http://dayviews.com/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]), the Swedish photo diary community contains quite a bit of 00s Swedish "youth culture". It's had "technical problems" for months now and has said that "many old photos were lost".

See Also

References