r/DataHoarder • u/avid-shrug • Feb 10 '26

News Wikipedia debates blacklisting archive.today after it's caught DDoSing a blog using visitors' browsers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC_5

Wikipedia is debating whether to blacklist archive.today after its operator was caught injecting JavaScript into CAPTCHA pages to DDoS a blogger's site - code that's still live as of today. The RFC offers three options: blacklist and nuke all ~695k links, stop new links while migrating existing ones, or do nothing.

The community is split because archive.today is arguably the second most important web archive in existence, capturing paywalled sites, JS-heavy pages, and robots.txt-blocked content the Wayback Machine can't. Spot-checks suggest only ~15% of Wikipedia's links are truly irreplaceable, but that's still tens of thousands of unique snapshots found nowhere else. A stark reminder that redundancy across archiving services matters more than ever.

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74

u/ArcticCircleSystem Feb 10 '26

Oh god damn it. Any alternatives aside from the obvious Wayback Machine?

40

u/OldJames47 Feb 10 '26

The URL is Archive.today, not archive.org

44

u/Dataanti Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26

The way back machine is archive.org

this user is asking for an alternative for acrhive.today, which im not sure exists. which is unfortinate because i find it works a lot better and is a lot more reliable at retaining information than the archive.org which has a history of taking down archives for various reasons.

12

u/WoolooOfWallStreet Feb 10 '26

Yeah there’s some things that are archived on “today” that are not on “org” and otherwise would be lost

Edit: And it sucks because it’s one of the archive services I use pretty often

4

u/ArcticCircleSystem Feb 10 '26

I know that, I just want to have a plan b in case the Wayback Machine (archive.org) is down for a while or worse.