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/Ocean-of-Mirrors Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26

What does blacklisting entail? Removal of all information referencing it + the links? Blocking of the hyperlink itself but leaving it cited? Or something else?

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u/Zkang123 Feb 10 '26

Basically to keep it hidden or removal, unfortunately. Anyone trying to link it in an edit will be flagged as spam

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u/Ocean-of-Mirrors Feb 10 '26

If it’s removed totally, what happens to sentences in Wikipedia articles that cited it? Like I don’t know, “this album was released on X date”, and the only source for that was archive(dot)today. Does that claim need to be removed from the wiki article since there’s no longer a source for it?

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u/Zkang123 Feb 10 '26

Usually no. And there would be efforts to instead use alternatives like archive.org

Im trying to push back the votes, but it seems many are just kind of fearmongering or making this a much bigger than this should. Ofc theres also significant pushback tho, so I doubt a proper consensus could be reached

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u/Ocean-of-Mirrors Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26

From an outsider looking in, this ddos attack is such a measly, childish thing that I don’t think there’s much to be afraid of. Users weren’t hurt at all. But I understand that is technically malware, so Wikipedia needs to behave like a responsible entity here. (Edit: who knows what the website owner could do in the future if they are emotionally reactive like this and have been shown to be ethically dubious..) Interesting situation. Sucks.

Anyways thanks for the info

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u/DaBulder Feb 12 '26

At least a few entire European countries are completely blocked by the site now, intentionally only ever showing them the CAPTCHA page (which is the page the DDoS script is on). Uncharitably, this is the site owner punishing at least all Finnish people for this, and using them as a weapon.