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Abstrusegoose.com Is Gone for Good

66 points by ktosobcy ↗ HN
Probably very quirky. There was this comic ages ago Abstruse Goose, one day, also ages ago, it stopped publishing. The page was just white empty. And the other day, after years of the limbo the domain finally expired.

To all the lost digital content :-(

41 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 98.8 ms ] thread
sdwr
Aw, I loved that site, and have checked it occasionally through the years, hoping for a new comic.
NikkiA
Yes, thus is the ephemeral nature of a commercial internet, if the website owner ceases to live, or ceases to do business, eventually their registar fees will end up unpaid, and the site will vanish.

Never rely on anything on the internet being 'forever'.

hiatus
> eventually their registar fees will end up unpaid, and the site will vanish

What is the alternative you envision?

viraptor
If you care about the content, mirror it on an ipfs node so others can download it in the future.
brian_cloutier
URLs resolve not to ip addresses but to some form of static identifier such as the hash of the content. Static sites are retrieved via static identifier and are therefore incredibly easy to cache and even extremely popular sites are cheap to serve because most requests never make it to the origin server.

There is no need to visit archive.org, the internet archive can directly seed the content it deems worthy of archival. Abstrusegoose.com eventually expires and the new owner points it to new content but the old site sticks around indefinitely, it is accessible via hash for as long as someone seeds it.

olliej
In your proposed scheme of URL->hash, everyone is expected to pay a big service to host their data, so that their page is accessible to that service's users? Or what? It sounds like you're saying "use IPFS for web hosting" but that's famously slow and unreliable for anything not incredibly popular.

How do you propose a person publishes their data? They get a domain, they create their page, they hash their page, they point that domain at that hash, and then what exactly? They update their content, compute the new hash, and then wait for DNS to propagate the new change?

I'm serious here, I'm trying to work out how what you're suggesting would work for the standard use cases of websites, and I'm trying to work out how if it does work for the standard use cases it solves any of the problems that archive.org has to manage, or any of the features people use archive.org for?

People don't use archive.org to ask "where did this content get published?" (e.g I have a hash of the page content) they say "what was the content at this location+time?". Definitionally they do not have the content, so they do not have the hash. They have the location, but you've just said the location is just the hash of the content. If you're saying the location of the document is the full url, not just the domain (the only part that involves machine addresses), then what is the hash for?

Finally, if the location is based on hash, you don't only break any content that is not 100% static, you break encrypted content, because definitionally encrypted content is not static.

NikkiA
You're still thinking in terms of paying for hosting, ie a commercial web, you cannot solve this problem by everything remaining a commercial entity, since payment for services rendered must cease at some point; you're just trying to bandaid over the problem.
hiatus
> You're still thinking in terms of paying for hosting, ie a commercial web

Hosting and serving content has a cost though.

olliej
Systems like you're describing, exist, and the fundamental problem is that they are not even semi-permanent archives.

For something to exist, someone has to host it, and the way you get something hosted is to pay for it (either paying someone to be a host, or paying for hardware and connectivity). Once you stop paying those costs you're reliant on other people choosing to keep your data around, just as archive.org does. If no one chooses to, the fact that you had a pile of random hashes scattered into the resource naming/identification scheme does not matter. Sure nodes would cache commonly accessed data, but the moment it stops being frequently used it starts getting pushed out of those caches to hold the new popular stuff. If you are hosting it yourself, or paying someone else to host it, once it drops off the "being popular" wagon its persistence is limited to whenever the next cache flush occurs.

So in exchange for content being harder to update, the routing performance being lower, making cryptography impossible, not working for dynamic content, and making censorship much easier, you have not solved the problem that archive.org already attempts to solve. Nothing in your scheme would obviate the need for scraping and separately archiving, nothing ensures content remains once no one is paying to ensure hosting.

blipvert
Stating facts does not require some kind of counter narrative.

Eventually you will die: What is the alternative that you envision?

thfuran
The oceans slowly filling up with the elderly? Eventually some people would complain that the policy of dumping the infirm into the ocean is contributing to rising sea levels, but many would insist that that's flatly impossible, and debate would rage for decades.
hiatus
Death is a part ot life, and I wasn't the one suggesting to transform the entire internet.
pvaldes
Culturally, Historically, or Aesthetically Significant Webpages
TriangleEdge
I loved these comics. I related to a lot of them. My favorite was the comic about sorting Skittles by color. I think you can still find the comics on the internet archive. Anyone have insight to what happened to the author?
LorenDB
This has me worried about http://hackles.org/. It's still running, but with no new content since 2004.
ongy
If you haven't heard yet, now's the time to mourn bash.org :(
I_Am_Nous
I love Hackles! In ~2009 I emailed Drake, the author, and asked if he had any kind of hint for what Hackles saw at the end, but nah...his girlfriend Jen did the painting and layout for the comics and they were broken up when I emailed him, and he had no plans to continue the comic in any form. We got to talk about Linux during the exchange, I was happy he replied :)
genericone
Whatever it is, its down now with "This page can't be displayed".
forgotpwd16
Yeah, noticed it after someone linked a comic at IA. Anyone happen to have a full archive and can share? Could go through IA but expect someone has already done it.
MattPalmer1086
Ah sad. Hadn't been an update for ages, but it was very good.
yongjik
Reminds me of when the xkcd forum went down - I never registered or commented, but it had threads for every xkcd comic, plus other geek discussions, some of which were quite funny. I spent hours reading them.

And then one day there was a banner speaking of a very serious security breach, the forum was down, and that was it.

Good things don't last. :/

nine_k
Good things last if somebody makes an effort to let them continue.

This as well may be you, dear reader.

If you see any content you seem to care about, make a local copy. Yours may happen to be the only remaining some time in the future.