UnseenI
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Post by UnseenI on Jan 20, 2019 18:20:34 GMT
I have started this thread to record good and bad personal experiences of using archive sites, of which the Wayback Machine is the biggest and best known. First, some basic information: The Wayback Machine’s home page is: archive.org/web/A general description can be found here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_MachineWayback has copies of around 345 billion pages! Wayback is good news for researchers but not for people who want to delete something completely from the Internet. Many content creators and posters don’t know that Wayback saves old copies of pages! On the other hand, pages will not be saved if the site owner has not made them available for crawling via their robots.txt file. Pages may also be removed by request of the owner. Note that Wayback does not save social media accounts. Of particular interest to members here: many pages are missing from ProBoards forum threads for no obvious reason. This applies to both this site and the old Conservative Conspiracy Forum, which is a big disappointment. Note also that the PB forum pages that Wayback saves are what Guests see, so the Members Boards, profiles and PMs etc. are not visible and not accessible. |
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UnseenI
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Post by UnseenI on Jan 21, 2019 8:23:28 GMT
Snapshots and the Wayback machine
The Wayback Machine takes snapshots of web pages from time to time. Snapshots in general range from 1996 to - currently - January 2019. Snapshot frequency varies enormously, from several in one day to just a few per year if that. A drawback is that if pages/information/posts are added then deleted in between snapshots, the information will not be saved. From what I can see, the number of snapshots is related to the number of times a site is accessed, which is usually but not always related to popularity and update frequency. I have seen a lot of snapshots for sites that are no longer updated; this is because people are still very interested in the old information. On the other hand, although I almost always post daily, Alternaticity has been saved only 19 times. No snapshots exist for August, September and October last year; the most recent snapshot was taken in November 2018, just after a very prolific poster decided to take a break. Lavendel, come back!
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UnseenI
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Post by UnseenI on Jan 22, 2019 8:34:57 GMT
General drawbacks of the Wayback
There are more problems with the Wayback machine than finding that it hasn’t saved something I had hoped would be in the archives.
Pages are often slow to load, which is not surprising considering how many there are; sometimes I have to hit the Reload button if a page has taken too long to respond.
Links and lists don’t always work on the saved pages; this could be connected to the way the site was set up.
Pictures sometimes vanish and videos can’t be accessed. Perhaps this is because the original link was made to something or somewhere that no longer exists.
Sometimes Wayback says it can’t find something - then the page appears.
Sometimes it jumps around and doesn’t go back to where I expected. I have to go back to the home page and start again.
Using Wayback can be confusing and time-consuming!
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UnseenI
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Post by UnseenI on Jan 26, 2019 8:24:08 GMT
Drawbacks when reading Proboards on Wayback
When reading a forum thread, NEXT doesn’t always work nor does clicking on the next page number. I sometimes have to go up to the top and hit Return or even enter the page number manually.
On occasion Wayback has found a CC forum page then when I wanted to look at it again - in the same session - it said it hadn’t saved it.
Another trap I fell into is forgetting that forum threads can be moved!
Wayback is much better than nothing, but it can be very frustrating to use.
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UnseenI
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Post by UnseenI on Jul 5, 2019 7:09:37 GMT
A few more points
The Wayback Machine takes snapshots only when it feels like it. For some reason it has not taken a copy of this site since last November, despite a lot of guest activity a few weeks ago that should have triggered it. You can’t make it backup a whole site on demand. As previously mentioned, it does not deal well with ProBoards. It often saves only the first few pages in a thread. The other pages can be saved individually by supplying the URL, but then they have to be accessed individually for viewing. Sometimes WBM later says that these pages have not been archived! I found this, but you can’t download what was never saved, you may not be able to do much with what they give you and you have to pay a subscription: websitedownloader.io/wayback-machine-downloader/Alternaticity is on Archive.is but it has only copied the front page.
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UnseenI
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Post by UnseenI on Jul 5, 2019 7:10:45 GMT
More about saving this site
ProBoards support still says that although you can change your settings to download your own posts, there is no way to download the forum. They suggest manually copying and pasting each page!
There are a few alternatives to Wayback available, but you have to pay for many of them.
There is also the problem that deliberately using a 3rd-party tool may trigger their firewall and get you banned. It is also a violation of PB’s terms of service.
Wayback finds sites all by itself so is not covered by this restriction.
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Avacyn
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Post by Avacyn on Jul 6, 2019 14:17:14 GMT
This is something that grates on me. All of the threads on here are in the hands of others. I have no way to save anything, which I desperately want to do. It also helps to stop people going elsewhere, as you cannot transfer things over to a new location. This is something I deeply disagree with.
There is also archive.is
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UnseenI
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Post by UnseenI on Jul 6, 2019 18:23:39 GMT
Yes, it seems that they don't want you to transfer all the information.
I am not too impressed with archive.is as it mostly does snapshots of the front page.
Maybe I will have another look.
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Avacyn
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Post by Avacyn on Jul 7, 2019 20:21:08 GMT
I know, and that's worrying. It really is saying we don't have ownership of the threads, or anything. Not a positive experience, to be honest.
I've never really looked at archive.is, though i know that Youtuber Styxhexenhammer666 uses it to record the articles he references.
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UnseenI
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Post by UnseenI on Jul 8, 2019 7:57:28 GMT
An annoying feature of archive.is is that if you clink on a thread, it jumps out to the original forum.
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UnseenI
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Post by UnseenI on Jul 8, 2019 18:26:27 GMT
How to get noticed by Wayback
“How can I get my site included in the Wayback Machine?
Much of our archived web data comes from our own crawls or from Alexa Internet's crawls. Neither organization has a "crawl my site now!" submission process. Internet Archive's crawls tend to find sites that are well linked from other sites. The best way to ensure that we find your web site is to make sure it is included in online directories and that similar/related sites link to you.”
Much easier said than done!
From what I have seen, Wayback was not designed to copy whole sites, just individual pages. Instead of complaining that many pages are missing, we should feel lucky to have been archived at all!
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UnseenI
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Post by UnseenI on Aug 12, 2019 7:51:31 GMT
Wayback has STILL not taken any snapshots since last November.
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UnseenI
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Post by UnseenI on Apr 2, 2020 18:24:27 GMT
From Lavendel on another thread: “archive.fo/ what do you think of this.” Unfortunately it just saves the front page on Proboards sites. Wayback has not saved anything from here since September 2019. |
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