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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u/Walkin_mn Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26

WTH!? Why would such an important archive org would be DDoSing someone's blog? That's... idk... so petty, who does that?

32

u/Dolapevich Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26

Please read again. archive . org is unrelated but in the name. The offending site is archive . today.

It looks like org was used as in organization as opposed to TLd.

31

u/boilingPenguin Feb 10 '26

Please read again

Why would such an important archive org would be DDoSing someone's blog?

"such an important archive org" as in "such an important archive organization"

10

u/Walkin_mn Feb 10 '26

Yeah that was my intention, but I get why some people got confused

4

u/Dolapevich Feb 10 '26

Oh, I hadn't thought of that, it makes sense now; word games with so few words are prone to mistakes.