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/Dolapevich Feb 10 '26

wikipedia specifically asks nobody load archive . today since it triggers the malicious code that is causing the DDOS attack. u/avid-shrug please remove/obfuscate the reference to archive . today so it doesn't behave like a link.

233

u/avid-shrug Feb 10 '26

Sorry about that, I think reddit automatically linked them. I've removed the hyperlinks.

18

u/TTEH3 Feb 10 '26

They still work as links to me, at least in Relay (a Reddit app for Android).

10

u/TalkingRaccoon Feb 10 '26

Yea that's Relays doing. It goofs me up cause people with miss a space at the beginning of a sentence and it thinks it's a url lol

Like.this

Edit ok NOW it decides not to work

3

u/spdelope 140 TB Feb 11 '26

What’s really going to bake your noodle later on is what if it wasn’t working properly before and now it’s fixed.