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

Not so alive, rather living deads (owned by Yahoo!)

  • 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?!

All the others

  • Academic Earth (http://academicearth.org/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]) has been worryingly unloved for a while, and holds a mountain of free education that's invaluable to the world.
  • Encyclopedia Astronautica is the most comprehensive collection of the history of space travel. Period. Seriously, the official NASA history folks will refer you this website if they can't answer your questions. However, Mark Wade (the sole creator/maintainer) abandoned his blog at the end of 2007, and the Encyclopedia has not been updated since May of 2008, despite much happening in the space exploration world since then.
  • Angelfire has been in constant decline for many years now.
  • AnimeMusicVideos.org (http://www.animemusicvideos.org/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]) is fine right now, but they rely on donations and host vast amounts of user-edited music videos on their server (presumably without mirrors). Hard to download as you have to be a member to get all the download links, and after downloading a handful you have to vode before you can d/l again (or you can donate which presumably gives you 1 year of free d/l access). Also, this site might be a grey area, copyright-wise, as the videos are all cut together from copyrighted material.
  • BetaArchive (http://www.betaarchive.com/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]) has Kafkaesque requirements to be able to access it, and apparently refuses to be backed up, presumably so that they get more visitors. Valuable cultural library of historic software with no backups? Aargh.
  • Codecademy (http://www.codecademy.com/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]) has a large amount of valuable coding lessons.

* cyberpunkreview.com: 80s science fiction fansite and community http://cyberpunkreview.com/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb] hasn't seen much staff activity in a long time, although the forums are going strong. UPDATE: Looking active again. Aggroskater 08:26, 19 March 2012 (EDT)

So Worried

Did someone leave the oven on?

  • FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]) has been purchased by Facebook, leaving FriendFeed users uncertain as to its future and mostly unsupported. The Twitter bridge, for instance, has not worked for years now.
  • 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.
  • Convozine hasn't been active lately. Their last reply to a support question was in 2012, their last update in the "News" section was December 2011, and their last blog post was in January 2013. (See [5] and [6].)
  • 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.
  • ownlog.com - once one of the most popular and oldest blog platform in Poland seems to be dying slowly - no development and actualizations except most critical maintenance.
  • The Grid (magazine in Toronto) printed its last issue on July 3rd 2014 (see here) not sure how long the site will stay up. Saved by ArchiveBot
  • Nakido (site) claims to be a "time capsule" that will "host your files for decades" - except it's a commercial enterprise selling premium acounts, and uses a proprietary P2P platform for delivery. What could possibly go wrong?
  • 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.
  • Strawpoll.me
  • 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.

Fire Alarm Sounds Like Whoop Whoop Whoop

I smell smoke.

  • Ovi Store's infrastructure is slowly rotting away.
  • Blip.tv will be removing accounts/videos on September 1st, 2014.

See Also

References