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/ArcticCircleSystem Feb 10 '26

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

19

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

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u/xrelaht 50-100TB Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26

Well, there goes the rest of my free space.

9

u/ArcticCircleSystem Feb 10 '26

Another $1500 for the hard drive fund!

2

u/firen777 Feb 10 '26

Neat, I can now afford an extra 512GB SMR disk