Radikal

Radikal
URL	http://radikal.ru/[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]
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))
Data[how to use]	archiveteam_radikal

Radikal.ru was a Russian image and video host; it shut down on 2022-03-10. According to its homepage it hosted nearly a billion images and nearly a million videos.

Grab Project

The project got only the images; of the images, it got only those in the public 'gallery' (which, as far as we could tell, excluded 'private' images that could only be discovered from user pages, as well as those that could not be discovered at all except by guessing the URL); and of the images in the public 'gallery', it got only the public thumbnails (filenames suffixed with "t"), not the full images. This was partly to save space and partly to prioritize; in the end, there was no time for subsequent archival rounds of full-size images or non-image data.

The Radikal gallery API could be searched both by start/end date and by start/end ID (with IDs increasing in time but not sequential). Date matching had various problems (date queries did not always seem to pick up on images only a few seconds ahead of them, and creation dates per search were sometimes 4 or 8 hours off from those per metadata), while images were not distributed evenly around the ID space. The project therefore consisted of two item types: idrange, which took a range of image IDs and grabbed their metadata and the thumbnails of the images in that range; and daterange, which took a date/time range and queued a series of idrange items for each 20-minute interval inside that range.

Playback will not work; the main site's interface relied on POST requests, which the Wayback Machine cannot replay and which the project did not capture. Discoverability is also poor, since it is not obvious that a lost full-size image may exist as a thumbnail. However, the archived thumbnails were one of the options Radikal offered for embed code, so they may show up in external sites.

Results

Near the end Radikal's image servers experienced a bout of instability; to try to get around this, failing thumbnail items would first try to grab the alternate thumbnail, then complete without error even if that failed. The site shut down some time around 2022-03-09 16:26 PST (UTC-8), or a few hours past midnight on the 10th in Moscow and St. Petersburg. About 15.2% of the tracker items were complete.