Annoyingly, the archive went down the very day I was trying to research this super obscure game from the 2000s and I had to wait AGES for the resources on there to come back up. And then once I did they weren't even helpful and I needed to do things that I COULD have done while the archive was down.
I feel it's worth nothing though that not everything is back up, not even just as a read only state. Things like gifcities for example are still broken and infinitely load (which is something I NEED TO USE FOR SOMETHING I WAS PLANNING because I need some delicious crusty gifs that can only come from there). And this shouldn't require needing to write anything, considering it should just be pulling gifs with their respective links up. So it theoretically should work. Maybe they just didn't switch out the keys for that one yet (I heard there were issues post hacking where their Zendesk acct immidiately got hacked as soon as they came back up because of that reason). But still, rather bothersome. Edit: As of Nov 4th, 2024, Gifcities and saving pages are back.
Has made me realize though, as yall have said that like, we should have more archives and such for things. It kind of made me think like "Omg if I loose like, Toyhouse, half of the art of my characters would be gone. And its only run by one person and they're incredibly reclusive, so you'd never get it back. Oh god..." so I've started working on my own solution for my own website to solve that issue so I could back up all of the pretty pictures I and others have made of my children to somewhere safe, where I can control it properly. And I of course was already a data hoarder, but now I am planning on publishing some of my hoardings (when I gather them all up of course because theyre all over the place).
It seems they got hacked again...
Thankfully the data is still apparently safe, but I think we need to seriously consider decentralising archives to avoid disaster...
Fediverse archive service??? I mean Mastodon servers already take a RIDICULOUS ton of storage and energy for what they are so it wouldn't be too different. Although, I think the defederation part of it might be an issue (ie cant access information because one archive doesn't like the other archive would be a bit mmmmm). But something
like the fediverse, where multiple services/instances are all linked together and indiependantly hosted so that if one goes down, the others can pick up the slack, not everything is gone, and all of their smaller storages can link up into one BIG storage space.