CuriousCat

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CuriousCat
CuriousCat logo
URL https://curiouscat.live/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb], (formerly: https://curiouscat.qa/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb], https://curiouscat.me/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb])
Status Offline
Archiving status Partially saved
Archiving type DPoS
Project source curiouscat-grab
Project tracker curiouscat2
IRC channel #curiousincidentoftheconfusedcatinthenighttime (on hackint)

CuriousCat is a question/answer hosting site for Twitter users. It shut down down on October 8, 2024, after an announcement it would shut down the 7th.[1]

2021 domain change scare

As far as we can tell, some time in the days before 2021-12-20, its primary domain curiouscat.qa entered the final stages of expiry, taking it offline, and a few days after, it was taken over by a squatter. A lack of activity on the site's Twitter account[IAWcite.todayMemWeb], which seems to have served as a de facto announcements page, suggests that, because it was losing money or for some other reason, it has effectively been abandoned by its owner (Vonvon).

Despite the domain expiration, whatever was hosting the site has stayed up, and a project was set up that intended to capture a copy of the site by overriding Wget-Lua's DNS resolution (the same trick that was used to great effect in the Blog.cz and Galerie.cz projects). Especially in light of the squatter taking over the domain, these would not have been sufficiently veracious captures to go into the Wayback Machine, but would still have kept a copy of the data somewhere.

The site returned under a new domain, curiouscat.live, on 2021-12-25, and the old primary domain curiouscat.me (which had not expired), as well as the DNS-overridden curiouscat.qa site, started redirecting to that. There has been a panic among users that the .live site is a fake run to collect Twitter credentials or accumulate access keys; for several reasons the changes seem more likely the result of incompetence than malice, but this has created a noticeable exodus of users. The grab script has been redirected to this new domain, but it not running yet. The project was put on hiatus in March 2022 with the site continuing to run under the curiouscat.live domain in the time since.

Grab

A project was written and started right on the verge of the site coming back; the data was discarded. We found an API endpoints to enumerate both users, https://curiouscat.qa/api/v2.1/get_profile_userData?userID=21384895 , right before the site came back, but didn't use it; it would've been handy if we had, since this was later taken down.

2024 grab

Based on the 2021 grab. Site was slow and gave intermittent 500s upon encountering any load of the magnitude necessary to get everything. After a few days we switched from getting all users and individual post pages to just user pages (deferring posts in case the site stayed up for long enough after the deadline); then stopped getting followers/followees list; then tried only getting one of the two API suffixes (randomly chosen by JS in normal site operation) - _ob=noregisterOrSignin2, and excluding _ob=registerOrSignin2 - but this didn't seem to cause an appreciable speed increase so it was reversed. Site shut down ca midnight UTC of the 8th, showing a Cloudflare error page.

Playback worked in Webrecorder but does not work in the WBM. If it one day does, if you try to access an item without _ob=registerOrSignin2, you have a 50% chance of getting errors, which requires you to clear your localStorage and try again. (It has been proposed that if it does start working, we make a webpage that also goes in the WBM and sets this for you). For now it will be necessary to get API requests if you want to see the site content.

Out of ca 10 million users discovered by backfeed and in the seed, we got somewhere under 8 million - exact numbers to be determined, and this may be an overcount.

External links