Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links (arstechnica.com)
Related:
Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 - Feb 2026 (168 comments)
Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 - Jan 2026 (69 comments)
55 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 63.6 ms ] threadOh? Do tell!
Oh good. That's definitely a reasonable thing to do or think.
The raw sociopathy of some people. Getting doxxed isn't good, but this response is unhinged.
With this said, I also disagree with turning everyone that uses archive[.]today into a botnet that DDoS sites. Changing the content of archived pages also raises questions about the authenticity of what we're reading.
The site behaves as if it was infected by some malware and the archived pages can't be trusted. I can see why Wikipedia made this decision.
mroe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perma.cc
They bypass the rendering issues by "altering" the webpages. It's not uncommon to archive a page, and see nothing because of the paywalls; but then later on, the same page is silently fixed. They have a Tumblr where you can ask them questions; at one point, it's been quite common for everyone to ask them to fix random specific pages, which they did promptly.
Honestly, you cannot archive a modern page, unless you alter it. Yet they're now being attacked under the pretence of "altering" webpages, but that's never been a secret, and it's technologically impossible to archive without altering.
From hero to a Kremlin troll in five seconds.
That effort appears to have gone nowhere, so now suddenly archive.today commits reputational suicide? I don't suppose someone could look deeper into this please?
Every Reddit archived page used to have a Reddit username in the top right, but then it disappeared. "Fair enough," I thought. "They want to hide their Reddit username now."
The problem is, they did it retroactively too, removing the username from past captures.
You can see on old Reddit captures where the normal archived page has no username, but when you switch the tab to the Screenshot of the archive it is still there. The screenshot is the original capture and the username has now been removed for the normal webpage version.
When I noticed it, it seemed like such a minor change, but with these latest revelations, it doesn't seem so minor anymore.
How does the tech behind archive.today work in detail? Is there any information out there that goes beyond the Google AI search reply or this HN thread [2]?
[1] https://algustionesa.com/the-takedown-campaign-against-archi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816427
There is so much is archived there, to lose it all would be a tragedy.
https://archive-is.tumblr.com/post/806832066465497088/ladies...
https://archive-is.tumblr.com/post/807584470961111040/it-see...
Hardly possible for Wikimedia to provide a service like archive.today given the legal trouble of the latter.
Strangely naive.
Ultimately, what we all use it for is pretty straight-forward, and it seems like by now we should've arrived at having approximately one best implementation, which could be used both for personal archiving and for iternet-facing instances (perhaps even distributed). But I don't know if we have.