Radikal

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Radikal
Radikal-logo.gif
URL http://radikal.ru/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]
Status Offline
Archiving status Partially saved
Archiving type DPoS
Project source radikal-grab, radikal-items
Project tracker radikal
IRC channel #archiveteam-bs (on hackint)
(formerly #deradikalize (on hackint))

Radikal.ru was a Russian image and video host; it shut down on March 10 2022. According to its homepage it hosted nearly a billion image and nearly a million videos.

Grab Project

For now the project is only getting the images; of the images it is only getting those in the public "gallery" (which, as far as we can tell, excludes "private" images that can only be discovered from user pages, as well as those that cannot be discovered at all except by guessing the URL); and of the images in the public "gallery" it is not getting the full images, just the public (filenames suffixed with "t") thumbnails. This is mostly to save space. If this stage of the project finishes we may open an expanded second stage.

The radikal gallery API can be searched both by start/end date and by start/end ID (IDs are increasing in time but not sequential), but date matching has various problems (date queries do not always seem to pick up on images only a few seconds ahead of them; and the creation date of images, per the behavior of the searches, is sometimes 4 or 8 hours off from the reported); and images are not distributed evenly around the ID space, making a project that carves it up into equal-sized chunks implausible. So, this project consists of two item types: idrange, which takes a range of image IDs and grabs their metadata and the thumbnails of the images in that range; and daterange, which takes a date/time range and queues a series of idrange items for each 20-minute interval inside that range.

Playback outlook is not too good. The main site's interface works by POST, and we aren't getting the necessary requests for it to work anyway. And we aren't getting full images either, though the reason we're getting the -t thumbnails is that these may sometimes be shown on external sites as a small version, depending on what kind of embed code someone requests from Radikal. Ideally (in accessibility terms) a Wayback Machine successor would substitute the thumbnails for the full images.

Results

Near the end Radikal's image servers experienced a bout of instability; to try to get around this, failing thumbnails would first try to grab the alternate thumbnail, then complete without error if those failed as well. The site shut down some time around 4:26 PM PST on the 9th (a few hours past midnight on the 10th in Moscow and St. Petersburg). About 15.2% of the tracker items were complete, so we can assume we saved that much of the site, or perhaps slightly less due to the instability.