Is there a way I can "revive" it from archive.org in a more or less automated fashion? Have you ever encountered anything like it? I am familiar with web scraping, but archive.org has its peculiarities.
I really, really love the content on it.
It's a very niche site, but I would love for it to live on.
Buying a domain name does not award you ownership of the content it previously hosted. If you have not come to some agreement with the previous owner, you should not proceed.
I recently learned CGTalk was completely shut down and ALL the information shared over the pass 20 years are gone. It never received the attention like DPreview. There are plenty of other examples where forum owner no longer wants the burden of owning it.
It really is a sad state of things.
Is there a site or exchange somewhere where owner could sell their site or at least put up a whole archive as asset?
1. Collect a list of archived URLs (via archive.org’s CDX endpoints). 2. Download each page and all related assets. 3. Rewrite all links that currently point to `web.archive.org` so they point to your domain or your local file paths.
The tricky part is the Wayback Machine’s directory structure—every file is wrapped in these time-stamped URLs. You’ll need to remove those prefixes, leaving just the original directory layout. There’s no perfect, purely automated solution, because sometimes assets are missing or broken. Be prepared for some manual cleanup.
Beyond that, the process is basically: gather everything, clean up links, restore the original hierarchy, and then host it on your server. Tools exist that partially automate this (for example, some people have written scripts to do the CDX fetching and rewriting), but if you’re comfortable with web scraping logic, you can handle it with a few careful passes. In the end, you’ll have a mostly faithful static snapshot of the old site running under your revived domain.
I scraped its contents (blog posts, pages, etcetera) with Python's beautifulsoup and redid its styling "by hand", which was not something otherworldy (the site was from line 2010 or so) and had the chance to put some improvements.
The thing with the scraping was that the connection was lost after a while and it was reaaaaaaaaaally sloooooooooow so I had to keep a register on memory of what was the last successful scraped post/page/whatever and, if something happened, restart from it as a starting point.
Got pennies for it, mostly because I lowballed myself, but got to learn a thing or two.
Anyways there are tools out there. I haven’t used them
But a tool like https://www6.waybackmachinedownloader.com/website-downloader...
Or
https://websitedownloader.com/
Should do the trick. Depending on the size of the site a small cost is involved.
They can even package them into unusable files.
Yes.
https://superuser.com/questions/828907/how-to-download-a-web...
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Restoring
which mentions
https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader
and also this tip:
> This is undocumented, but if you retrieve a page with id_ after the datecode, you will get the unmodified original document without all the Wayback scripts, header stuff, and link rewriting. This is useful when restoring one page at a time or when writing a tool to retrieve a site:
> http://web.archive.org/web/20051001001126id_/http://www.arch...
From the downloader's issues, you may or may not need to use this forked version if you encounter some errors:
https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader/issue...
1) Download HTTrack if its a large websit with alot of pages 2) Download Search and Replace program, theres many of them. 3) The search and replace program allows you to remove the appended web archive url from the pages in bulk. 4. Upload to your host. 5. Run the site through a bulk link checker, that test for broken links. There is plenty of them online.
None of my ire is directed at you, as I don't assume you knew any of this. I just wanted to let you know, in case you were mislead as to what the site does by its ad copy.
It's not.
They don't say that the site and all the services they offer are free and open-source, they say that the Archivarix CMS is free and open-source (GNU GPLv3), which it is...
> as you don't even download/run the software yourself
You can download the CMS.
> but as there's no way to self-host this, let alone download it and/or run it, for free or otherwise
Again yes you can both download it and self-host the CMS
> I think it's safe to avoid this scammy site.
It's scammy because they're not offering everything for free and open-source even though they never said they would?
I stand by what I said, as the Internet Archive feature, which is the entire point of OP’s post, is not free on their platform. The CMS is not relevant to this discussion.
It’s scammy because the kind of people who would use this wouldn’t know how many files are in the backup because they are likely no/low-context users who are likely not familiar with concepts like “average or expected number of files on a website.” The pricing is usurious and exploitative due to the pricing model being per file versus by file size for example.
It's not, you're claiming they said something they didn't.
> and doesn’t make sense given the context of ‘bagpuss’s comment. That ‘bagpuss was vague about what they said was free doesn’t change the context of the discussion.
I don't care about bagpuss's comment, they don't represent Archivarix as far as I can tell.
You said the site is misrepresenting itself, it's not.
You said the site is claiming things they haven't.
You called the site "scammy" based on something that they never even claimed.
> It’s scammy because the kind of people who would use this wouldn’t know how many files are in the backup
Archive.org tells you how many URLs are saved.
Example: https://web.archive.org/details/https://sweetcode.io
2109+4716+595+732+562+90+28+1+9+1 = 8843 unique URLs.
First file is free. First 1000 files are $0.01 each. Additional thousands are $1 per thousand.
So the price would be $17.84
I do feel that the site misrepresents the value proposition of the Internet Archive backup/restore service, because the site’s value proposition is convenience for users who don’t know that there are actually free, actually open source ways to backup and restore content from Internet Archive, and that site isn’t it. They’re banking on users not knowing any better in that case, which isn’t unethical per se, buyer beware etc, but it’s shady.
That above combined with the pricing model makes it scammy because you have to spend a minimum of $10 in crypto or other non-reversible payment for something that should not cost the user anything, as the Internet Archive is bearing the lion’s share of the costs. And if it doesn’t do what you needed, you’ve already paid in worthless credits.
https://archivarix.com/en/tutorial/#list-3
> Second example: the big site contains 25,520 files. From this quantity you can deduct 1 because they will be free of charge. So we have 25,519 paid files. First thousand will cost $10, and the rest 24,519 costs only $1 per thousand, therefore $24.519 . Full price for the big site recovery is $34.52!!!
$34.52 is not a reasonable price for this by any means.
That said, I make no claims about the site being respondent to OP’s request, as I’m not OP. I simply rejected the claims brought by ‘bagpuss.
What I'm saying is YOU said THE SITE was misrepresenting itself when THE SITE isn't. It would've been BAGPUSS that was misrepresenting THE SITE if anyone.
> for something that should not cost the user anything, as the Internet Archive is bearing the lion’s share of the costs.
It's still costing Archivarix money to run the service, yes you are paying for convenience, I see nothing wrong with that whatsoever.
Ideally the Internet Archive should provide an easy way to download sites but they don't.
> $34.52 is not a reasonable price for this by any means.
Why is it not reasonable? They spent time developing this service and it costs money to run, if you want to save money then yeah you can recover it yourself with some open-source software like wayback-machine-downloader, but some people just want to recover sites without having to bother with any of that.
Both of these things can be true, that ‘bagpuss was misrepresenting the site, and the site is intentionally vague as to what is free and what isn’t so as to muddy the waters and paint themselves as saviors and good people for being open source while overcharging for a product to the degree that the site misrepresents itself, and I believe that they both are true.
> Ideally the Internet Archive should provide an easy way to download sites but they don't.
I agree, but that’s not really relevant to our discussion or to ‘bagpuss’s claims.
And if IA did provide an easy way to do that, the site linked would be an even worse deal.
The site is misrepresenting itself as being worth paying for at any price.
Furthermore, you can download an entire site using your web browser ‘Save page as’ -> ‘web page, complete’ dialog in conjunction with the undocumented trick:
> This is undocumented, but if you retrieve a page with id_ after the datecode, you will get the unmodified original document without all the Wayback scripts, header stuff, and link rewriting.
Seems pretty easy to me, but only if you know how. Which is the only reason anyone would use that site - they simply don’t know how bad a deal the site is, or they have more dollars than sense.
It's not? It says the CMS is free and open-source and they have prices listed for the paid services they provide.
> and paint themselves as saviors and good people for being open source while overcharging for a product to the degree that the site misrepresents itself, and I believe that they both are true.
Simply saying that something is open-source is you painting yourself as a "savior"?
> And if IA did provide an easy way to do that, the site linked would be an even worse deal.
Obviously, if they did provide it then there would be no reason at all to pay.
> Furthermore, you can download an entire site using your web browser ‘Save page as’ -> ‘web page, complete’ dialog in conjunction with the undocumented trick:
No, not an entire site, just the current HTML document and the accompanying files for it (e.g. scripts, images, etc.) If you want to sit for hours manually doing that for thousands of pages then feel free.
> It's not? It says the CMS is free and open-source and they have prices listed for the paid services they provide.
You brought up the CMS. I didn’t. I don’t have any point to defend regarding it. ‘bagpuss was wrong about what they said about the site, and I replied to that.
> Simply saying that something is open-source is you painting yourself as a "savior"?
It’s called marketing.
Are you unfamiliar with what scammy means? The site feels scammy to me. So I said so. I don’t think you can demonstrate that I don’t believe it’s scammy, and you haven’t convinced me either.
> Obviously, if they did provide it then there would be no reason at all to pay.
I don’t have any reason to pay either. ‘bagpuss can defend the scammy site, but I won’t so I agree there’s no reason to pay, for different reasons.
> No, not an entire site, just the current HTML document and the accompanying files for it (e.g. scripts, images, etc.) If you want to sit for hours manually doing that for thousands of pages then feel free.
I have no reason to believe a scammy site will do any better than that either. You haven’t demonstrated that the site even works, and their marketing doesn’t inspire confidence.
As I didn’t introduce the site, I’m not beholden to supporting it or not. Take ‘bagpuss to task if anyone.
I don’t think you know what you’re even arguing about or for because none of your arguments or claims even go anywhere, they all revolve around this scammy site that you didn’t even bring up. Nothing about your argument makes sense.
That you haven’t made any effort to correct ‘bagpuss by replying to them directly is curious.
Nope.
> You brought up the CMS. I didn’t.
Yes, again, it was to explain to you that they only say that the CMS is free, not the services because you said:
> This site is misrepresenting itself as open source and free, while simultaneously having an affiliate program and pricing page, which, as I've said, isn't free
They only said their CMS was open-source and free, not any of their other services.
> I don’t think you know what you’re even arguing about or for because none of your arguments or claims even go anywhere
I was correcting you because you said things that just aren't true:
> This site is misrepresenting itself as open source and free, while simultaneously having an affiliate program and pricing page, which, as I've said, isn't free. It's unverifiable whether or not it's open source, as you don't even download/run the software yourself: it's a web app, which is beside the point, as web apps could also be open source, but as there's no way to self-host this, let alone download it and/or run it, for free or otherwise. I think it's safe to avoid this scammy site.
Which is just not accurate at all, as I've already explained several times. You can dislike the site all you want but you don't need to slander them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42291616
Per ‘bagpuss, the backup was free when they used it, and they were referring to the backup, not the CMS.
So, I would argue you were mistaken.
posters, enhance your calm
- bagpuss, fat furry cat puss
I appreciate your feedback. Not sure why ‘KomoD is defending the site, but at least you understand that it’s relevant whether it’s free or not.
I pulled each page off internet archive, saved it as an archive; then did some minor tidying up, setting viewports for mobile, updating the linkback html snippet to go to my url instead of the old dead one, changing the snippet to not suggest hotloading the link image, crop the dead url out of the link image, pngcrush the images, put it on cheap hosting for static pages.
I did a bit of poking around trying to find a way to contact the owner, but had no luck. If they come back and want it down, I'll take it down. Copyright notices are intact. I'm clearly violating the author's copyrights, and I accept that.
I'm looking at combining several old message boards into something useful, and I'd like to be proactive regarding copyright. My approach so far:
- I'm assuming that everyone owns their own post/comment.
- I'm assuming that submitting content meant they intended to grant rights to community members.
- I'm assuming that work done in support of the original community would be welcomed by members.
- And I'm assuming this all changes if I want money.
So I'm preserving attributions when I can, but treat content like it's CC or similar as long as I'm operating within the original authors area of concern. Anything that actually gets released will be as open as possible... and probably start with telling you how to download files. Entirely walling off my code makes sense but then it is no longer a fun little project, it is a framework.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ask+hn+resurrect+site+archive
Very odd.
Even the times of the comments have changed, this is what the post looked like yesterday:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241205054108/https://news.ycom...
To avoid a dupe, this mechanism post-dates the original post.
For anyone who may be curious, wayback machine has an archive: fuckthesouth.com
> HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.
Available on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.
Depending on the site you would use different tools, for eg for MediWiki/DokuWiki sites you would import the latest database dump on archive.org.
I have used wayback-machine-downloader before for completely static sites before:
wget --mirror --convert-links --page-requisites --no-parent URL