Alive... OR ARE THEY

From Archiveteam
Revision as of 15:45, 10 May 2022 by Aramzs (talk | contribs) (→‎Watchlist: Added Believer Magazine following recent tweet.)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

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?

  • Big Fish Games Forums - the forum was made read-only on April 30, 2018. While Big Fish Games claimed at the time that the forums will remain viewable, the site is likely to vanish in the future.
  • Identify Your Breyer Janice, the administrator and curator of this archive passed away very recently (between 8-12 June 2021), leaving the site in a state of limbo. She'd been ill for several months and was in the ICU at the time of her passing. Nobody else seems to know how to log into the web server (hosted at websitewelcome.com) so it's unknown where the backups are (if there are any) or if it's possible to download the entire site from the back-end. Thus, we don't know how long the site will be up (hosting bills are now in an indeterminent state) and the domain registration (through Tucows) will expire on 2021-10-03T23:28:16Z. Identify Your Breyer is a popular and busy community for Breyer horse collectors and modders with a great deal of information of use to the collector's community.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Seene (https://seene.co/u/docpop/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]) "lets you capture and share a new kind of 3D photo that brings together image, depth and movement to create a richer, more interactive experience, all on your iPhone." Unique content, but recently acquired by SnapChat - no new product updates since 2015. Likely to shut soon, unique and cool content.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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[5] 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.
  • YTMND - supposed to be "closing down soon" in 2016, but still up 2 years later.
  • CodePlex: Read-only archive shutdown has been announced to happen in July.

See Also

References