[HN Gopher] Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing ...
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Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links
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)
Author : nobody9999
Score : 200 points
Date : 2026-02-20 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| chrisjj wrote:
| > an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses
| can be replaced.
|
| Oh? Do tell!
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >> an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its
| uses can be replaced.
|
| >Oh? Do tell!
|
| They do. In the very next paragraph in fact:
| The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when
| the original source is still online and has identical
| content; replace the archive link so it points to a
| different archive site, like the Internet Archive,
| Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; or "change the original source to
| something that doesn't need an archive (e.g., a source
| that was printed on paper)
| chrisjj wrote:
| Well, that's an odd idea of "can be replaced".
|
| > editors can remove Archive.today links when the original
| source is still online and has identical content
|
| Hopeless. Just begs for alteration.
|
| > a different archive site, like the Internet Archive,
|
| Hopeless. It allows archive tampering by the page's own JS
| and archive deletion by the domain owner.
|
| > Ghostarchive, or Megalodon
|
| Hopeless. Coverage is insignificant.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| I just quoted the _very next paragraph_ after the sentence
| you quoted and asked for clarification.
|
| I did so. You're welcome.
|
| As for the rest, take it up with Jimmy Wiles, not me.
| mikehotel wrote:
| aka Jimbo Wales
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| > archive.today
|
| Hopeless. Caught tampering the archive.
|
| The whole situation is not great.
| that_lurker wrote:
| I would be suprised if archive.today had something that was not
| in the wayback machine
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Accounts to bypass paywalls? The audacity to do it?
| that_lurker wrote:
| Oh yeah those where a thing. As a public organization they
| can't really do that.
|
| I personally just don't use websites that paywall important
| information.
| bombcar wrote:
| Wayback machine removes archives upon request, so there's
| definitely stuff they don't make publicly available (they may
| still have it).
| chrisjj wrote:
| Archive.today has just about everything the archived site
| doesn't want archived. Archive.org doesn't, because it lets
| sites delete archives.
| zahlman wrote:
| Trying to search the Wayback machine almost always gives me
| their made-up 498 error, and when I do get a result the
| interface for scrolling through dates is janky at best.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I will no longer donate to Wikipedia as long as this is policy.
| jraph wrote:
| Why? The decision seems reasonable at first sight.
| chrisjj wrote:
| Second sight is advisable in such cases. Fact is, archives
| are essential to WP integrity and there's no credible
| alternative to this one.
|
| I see WP is not proposing to run its own.
| mook wrote:
| Wouldn't it be precisely because archives are important
| that using something known to modify the contents would be
| avoided?
| esseph wrote:
| > something known to modify the contents would be
| avoided?
|
| Like Wikipedia?
| chrisjj wrote:
| Obviously not, since archive.org is encouraged.
| that_lurker wrote:
| The operators() of archive.today (and the other domains)
| are doing shadey things and the links are not working so
| why keep the site around as for example Internet archives
| waybackmachine works as alternative to it.
| chrisjj wrote:
| What archive.today links are not working?
|
| > Internet archives wayback machine works as alternative
| to it.
|
| It is appalling insecure. It lets archives be altered by
| page JS and deleted by the page domain owner.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Fact is, archives are essential to WP integrity and
| there 's no credible alternative to this one._
|
| Yes, they are essentional, and that was the main reason for
| not blacklisting Archive.today. But Archive.today has shown
| they do not actually provide such a service:
|
| > _"If this is true it essentially forces our hand,
| archive.today would have to go," another editor replied.
| "The argument for allowing it has been verifiability, but
| that of course rests upon the fact the archives are
| accurate, and the counter to people saying the website
| cannot be trusted for that has been that there is no record
| of archived websites themselves being tampered with. If
| that is no longer the case then the stated reason for the
| website being reliable for accurate snapshots of sources
| would no longer be valid."_
|
| How can you trust that the page that Archive.today serves
| you is _an actual archive_ at this point?
| chrisjj wrote:
| > If ... If ...
|
| Oh dear.
|
| > How can you trust that the page that Archive.today
| serves you is an actual archive at this point?
|
| Because no-one shown evidence that it isn't.
| rufo wrote:
| The quote uses ifs because it was written before this was
| verified, but the Wikipedia thread in question has links
| to evidence of tampering occurring.
| chrisjj wrote:
| Lets see them, then.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| Did you not read the article? They not only directed a DDOS
| against a blogger who crossed them, but altered their own
| archived snapshots to amplify a smear against them. That
| completely destroys their trustworthiness and credibility
| as a source of truth.
| chrisjj wrote:
| Sure I read it. But I don't believe everything I read on
| the internet.
| huslage wrote:
| What exactly is credible about archive.today if they are
| willing to change the archive to meet some desire of the
| leadership? That's not credible in the least.
| chrisjj wrote:
| A lot more credible than archive.org that lets archives
| be changed and deleted by the archive targets.
|
| What's your better idea?
| Larrikin wrote:
| About how much had you previously donated over the years?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >In emails sent to Patokallio after the DDoS began, "Nora" from
| Archive.today threatened to create a public association between
| Patokallio's name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with
| Patokallio's name.
|
| 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.
| ouhamouch wrote:
| That was private negotiations, btw, not public statements.
|
| In response to J.P's blog already framed AT as project grown
| from a carding forum + pushed his speculations onto
| ArsTechnica, whose parent company just destroyed 12ft and is on
| to a new victim. The story is full of untold conflicts of
| interests covered with soap opera around DDoS.
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on your point?
| ouhamouch wrote:
| The fight is not about where it is shown and not about
| what, not about "links in Wikipedia", but about whether
| News Inc will be able to kill AT, as they did with 12FT.
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| What is News Inc? Are they a funder of Wikipedia(I think
| Wikipedia didn't have a parent company so they're not
| owners)?
| ouhamouch wrote:
| They are owner of ArsTechnica which wrote 3rd (or 4th?)
| article on AT in a row painting it in certain colors.
|
| The article about FBI subpoena that pulled J.P's
| speculations out of the closet was also in ArsTechnica
| and by the same author, and that same article explicitly
| mentioned how they are happy with 12ft down
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| ... Ars is owned by Conde Nast?
| MBCook wrote:
| Why does it matter it was a private communications?
|
| It's still a threat isn't it?
| jMyles wrote:
| It's a reminder how fragile and tenuous are the connections
| between our browser/client outlays, our societal perceptions of
| online norms, and our laws.
|
| We live at a moment where it's trivially easy to frame
| possession of an unsavory (or even illegal) number on another
| person's storage media, without that person even realizing (and
| possibly, with some WebRTC craftiness and social engineering,
| even get them to pass on the taboo payload to others).
| oytis wrote:
| I mean, the admin of archive.today might face jail time if
| deanonymised, kind of understandable he's nervous. Meanwhile
| for Patokallio it's just curiosity and clicks
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| I don't see the point in doxing anyone, especially those
| providing a useful service for the average internet user. Just
| because you can put some info together, it doesn't mean you
| should.
|
| 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.
| jMyles wrote:
| > Changing the content of archived pages also raises questions
| about the authenticity of what we're reading.
|
| This is absolutely the buried lede of this whole saga, and
| needs to be the focus of conversation in the coming age.
| jsheard wrote:
| It's also kind of ironic that a site whose whole premise is to
| preserve pages forever, whether the people involved like it or
| not, is seeking to take down another site because they are
| involved and don't like it. Live by the sword, etc.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Did they actually run the DDoS via a script or was this a case
| of inserting a link and many users clicked it? They are
| substantially different IMO
| dunder_cat wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 has the
| earliest writeup that I know of. It was running it via a
| script and intentionally using cache busting techniques to
| try to increase load on the hosted wordpress infrastructure.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Thank you this is exactly the information I was looking
| for.
|
| "You found the smoking gun!"
| jsheard wrote:
| > It was running
|
| It still is, uBlocks default lists are killing the script
| now but if it's allowed to load then it still tries to
| hammer the other blog.
| dunder_cat wrote:
| Ah good to know. My pi-hole actually was blocking the
| blog itself since the ublock site list made its way into
| one of the blocklists I use. But I've been just avoiding
| links as much as possible because I didn't want to
| contribute.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Given the site is hosted on wordpress.com, who don't charge
| for bandwidth, it seems to have been completely
| ineffective.
| Hamuko wrote:
| The speculation that I saw was that they'd try to get
| Wordpress.com to boot him off for being a burden on the
| overall infrastructure.
| chrisjj wrote:
| As if Wordpress.com was that dumb...
| hexagonwin wrote:
| they silently ran the DDoS script on their captcha page
| (which is frequently shown to visitors, even when simply
| viewing and not archiving a new page)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Previously Related:
|
| _Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog?_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805
| input_sh wrote:
| I know I'm arguing with a bot that nobody monitors, but it's
| already in the fucking post.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Anyone has a short summary as to who and why Archive.today acted
| via DDos? Isn't that something done by malicious actors? Or did
| others misuse Archive.today?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| If you read the linked article it is discussed
| RupertSalt wrote:
| "Non-paywalled" ad-free link to archive:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
| basch wrote:
| It seems a lot of people havent heard of it, but I think its
| worth plugging https://perma.cc/ which is really the appropriate
| tool for something like Wikipedia to be using to archive pages.
|
| mroe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perma.cc
| ronsor wrote:
| It costs money beyond 10 links, which means either a paid
| subscription or institutional affiliation. This is problematic
| for an encyclopedia anyone can edit, like Wikipedia.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Wikimedia could pay, they have an endowment of ~$144M [1] (as
| of June 30, 2024). Perma.cc has Archive.org and Cloudflare as
| supporting partners, and their mission is aligned with
| Wikimedia [2]. It is a natural complementary fit in the
| preservation ecosystem. You have to pay for DOIs too, for
| comparison [3] (starting at $275/year and $1/identifier [4]
| [5]).
|
| With all of this context shared, the Internet Archive is
| likely meeting this need without issue, to the best of my
| knowledge.
|
| [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment
|
| [2] https://perma.cc/about ("Perma.cc was built by Harvard's
| Library Innovation Lab and is backed by the power of
| libraries. We're both in the forever business: libraries
| already look after physical and digital materials -- now we
| can do the same for links.")
|
| [3] https://community.crossref.org/t/how-to-get-doi-for-our-
| jour...
|
| [4] https://www.crossref.org/fees/#annual-membership-fees
|
| [5] https://www.crossref.org/fees/#content-registration-fees
|
| (no affiliation with any entity in scope for this thread)
| RupertSalt wrote:
| If the WMF had a dollar for every proposal to spend
| Endowment-derived funds, their Endowment would double and
| they could hire one additional grant-writer
| nine_k wrote:
| If the endowment is invested so that it brings very
| conservative 3% a year, it means that it brings $4.32M a
| year. By doubling that, rather many grant writers could
| be hired.
| ouhamouch wrote:
| There are dozen of commercial/enterprise solutions:
| https://www.g2.com/products/pagefreezer/competitors/alternat...
|
| also the oldest of that kind and rarely mention free
| https://www.freezepage.com
| culi wrote:
| The 3 listed alternatives there seem to have nothing to do
| with digital archiving. Here's a better alternative to g2
| that doesn't login-wall you:
|
| https://alternativeto.net/software/freezepage/
| jsheard wrote:
| Does Wikipedia really need to outsource this? They already do
| basically everything else in-house, even running their own CDN
| on bare metal, I'm sure they could spin up an archiver which
| could be implicitly trusted. Bypassing paywalls would be
| playing with fire though.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Archive.org is the archiver, rotted links are replaced by
| Archive.org links with a bot.
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InternetArchiveBot
|
| https://github.com/internetarchive/internetarchivebot
| jsheard wrote:
| Yeah for historical links it makes sense to fall back on
| IAs existing archives, but going forward Wikipedia could
| take their own snapshots of cited pages and substitute them
| in if/when the original rots. It would be more reliable
| than hoping IA grabbed it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Not opposed, Wikimedia tech folks are very accessible in
| my experience, ask them to make a GET or POST to
| https://web.archive.org/save whenever a link is added via
| the Wiki editing mechanism. Easy peasy. Example CLI tools
| are https://github.com/palewire/savepagenow and
| https://github.com/akamhy/waybackpy
|
| Shortcut is to consume the Wikimedia changelog firehose
| and make these http requests yourself, performing a CDX
| lookup request to see if a recent snapshot was already
| taken before issuing a capture request (to be polite to
| the capture worker queue).
| jsheard wrote:
| I didn't know you can just ask IA to grab a page before
| their crawler gets to it. In that case yeah it would make
| sense for Wikipedia to ping them automatically.
| RupertSalt wrote:
| Spammers and pirates just got super excited at that plan!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| There are various systems in place to defend against
| them, I recommend against this, poor form against a
| public good is not welcome.
| ferngodfather wrote:
| Why wouldn't Wikipedia just capture and host this
| themselves? Surely it makes more sense to DIY than to
| rely on a third party.
| huslage wrote:
| Why would they need to own the archive at all? The
| archive.org infrastructure is built to do this work
| already. It's outside of WMF's remit to internally
| archive all of the data it has links to.
| Gander5739 wrote:
| This already happens. Every link added to Wikipedia is
| automatically archived on the wayback machine.
| RupertSalt wrote:
| [citation needed]
| tl2do wrote:
| Why not show both? Wikipedia could display archive links
| alongside original sources, clearly labeled so readers know which
| is which. This preserves access when originals disappear while
| keeping the primary source as the main reference.
| bawolff wrote:
| The objection is to this specific archieve service not
| archiving in general.
| ranger207 wrote:
| They generally do. Random example, citation 349 on the page of
| George Washington: ""A Brief History of GW"[link]. GW
| Libraries. Archived[link] from the original on September 14,
| 2019. Retrieved August 19, 2019."
| Gander5739 wrote:
| This will always be done unless the original url is marked as
| dead or similar.
| paganel wrote:
| At this point Archive.today provides a better service (all things
| considered) compared to Wikipedia, at least when it comes to
| current affairs.
| xurukefi wrote:
| Kinda off-topic, but has anyone figured out how archive.today
| manages to bypass paywalls so reliably? I've seen people claiming
| that they have a bunch of paid accounts that they use to fetch
| the pages, which is, of course, ridiculous. I figured that they
| have found an (automated) way to imitate Googlebot _really_ well.
| tonymet wrote:
| I'm an outsider with experience building crawlers. You can get
| pretty far with residential proxies and browser fingerprint
| optimization. Most of the b-tier publishers use RBC and
| heuristics that can be "worked around" with moderate effort.
| quietsegfault wrote:
| .. but what about subscription only, paywalled sources?
| tonymet wrote:
| many publisher's offer "first one's free".
|
| For those that don't , I would guess archive.today is using
| malware to piggyback off of subscriptions.
| elzbardico wrote:
| > which is, of course, ridiculous.
|
| Why? in the world of web scrapping this is pretty common.
| xurukefi wrote:
| Because it works too reliably. Imagine what that would
| entail. Managing thousands of accounts. You would need to
| ensure to strip the account details form archived peages
| _perfectly_. Every time the website changes its code even
| slightly you are at risk of losing one of your accounts. It
| would constantly break and would be an absolute nightmare to
| maintain. I 've personally never encountered such a failure
| on a paywalled news article. archive.today managed to give me
| a non-paywalled clean version every single time.
|
| Maybe they use accounts for some special sites. But there is
| definetly some automated generic magic happening that manages
| to bypass paywalls of news outlets. Probably something
| Googlebot related, because those websites usually give Google
| their news pages without a paywall, probably for SEO reasons.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Using two or more accounts could help you automatically
| strip account details.
| xurukefi wrote:
| That's actually a really neat idea.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I've seen people claiming that they have a bunch of paid
| accounts that they use to fetch the pages, which is, of course,
| ridiculous.
|
| The curious part is that they allow web scraping arbitrary
| pages on demand. So if a publisher could put in a lot of
| arbitrary requests to archive their own pages and see them all
| coming from a single account or small subset of accounts.
|
| I hope they haven't been stealing cookies from actual users
| through a botnet or something.
| xurukefi wrote:
| Exactly. If I was an admin of a popular news website I would
| try to archive some articles and look at the access logs in
| the backend. This cannot be too hard to figure out.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's not reliable, in the sense that there are many paywalled
| sites that it's unable to archive.
| xurukefi wrote:
| But it is reliable in the sense that if it works for a site,
| then it usually never fails.
| jsheard wrote:
| > I figured that they have found an (automated) way to imitate
| Googlebot _really_ well.
|
| If a site (or the WAF in front of it) knows what it's doing
| then you'll never be able to pass as Googlebot, period, because
| the canonical verification method is a DNS lookup dance which
| can only succeed if the request came from one of Googlebots
| dedicated IP addresses. Bingbot is the same.
| xurukefi wrote:
| There are ways to work around this. I've just tested this:
| I've used the URL inspection tool of Google Search Console to
| fetch a URL from my website, which I've configured to
| redirect to a paywalled news article. Turns out the crawler
| follows that redirect and gives me the full source code of
| the redirected web site, without any paywall.
|
| That's maybe a bit insane to automate at the scale of
| archive.today, but I figure they do something along the lines
| of this. It's a perfect imitation of Googlebot because it is
| literally Googlebot.
| jsheard wrote:
| I'd file that under "doesn't know what they're doing"
| because the search console uses a totally different user-
| agent (Google-InspectionTool) and the site is blindly
| treating it the same as Googlebot :P
|
| Presumably they are just matching on *Google* and calling
| it a day.
| xurukefi wrote:
| Sure, but maybe there are other ways to control Googlebot
| in a similar fashion. Maybe even with a pristine looking
| User-Agent header.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > which I've configured to redirect to a paywalled news
| article.
|
| Which specific site with a paywall?
| anilakar wrote:
| > If you want to pretend this never happened - delete your old
| article and post the new one you have promised. And I will not
| write "an OSINT investigation" on your Nazi grandfather
|
| From hero to a Kremlin troll in five seconds.
| rdiddly wrote:
| So toward the end of last year, the FBI was after archive.today,
| presumably either for keeping track of things the current
| administration doesn't want tracked, or maybe for the paywall
| thing (on behalf of rich donors/IP owners).
| https://gizmodo.com/the-fbi-is-trying-to-unmask-the-registra...
|
| 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?
| ndiddy wrote:
| The archive.today operator claims on his blog that this was
| nothing major: https://lj.rossia.org/users/archive_today/
|
| > Regarding the FBI's request, my understanding is that they
| were seeking some form of offline action from us -- anything
| from a witness statement ("Yes, this page was saved at such-
| and-such a time, and no one has accessed or modified it since")
| to operational work involving a specific group of users. These
| users are not necessarily associates of Epstein; among our
| users who are particularly wary of the FBI, there are also less
| frequently mentioned groups, such as environmental activists or
| right-to-repair advocates.
|
| > Since no one was physically present in the United States at
| that time, however, the matter did not progress further.
|
| > You already know who turned this request into a full-blown
| panic about "the FBI accusing the archive and preparing to
| confiscate everything."
|
| Not sure who he's talking about there.
| bjourne wrote:
| FYI, archive.today is NOT the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine.
| casey2 wrote:
| Anecdotally I generally see archive.is/archive.today links
| floating around "stochastic terrorist" sites and other hate
| cults.
| ChocMontePy wrote:
| I noticed last year that some archived pages are getting altered.
|
| 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.
| wuschel wrote:
| There is an post describing the possibility of an organised
| campaign against archive.today [1] https://algustionesa.com/the-
| takedown-campaign-against-archi...
|
| 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
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| After reading that link, that seems extremely likely to me.
|
| If true, it could/would mean that someone tried to take
| archive.today offline recently by planting CSAM and trying to
| get them shut down. And after that failed, now are trying
| getting them to DDOS to get them shut down.
|
| Otherwise to me, none of this makes sense to me.
|
| The timing, especially after reading that prior article seems
| very suspicious.
|
| Again all I can do is speculate with the above, I have no
| factual knowledge - but at least to me, that makes sense.
| karel-3d wrote:
| Archive.is is now publishing really weird posts on their Tumblr
| blog, related to the whole thing
|
| https://archive-is.tumblr.com/post/806832066465497088/ladies...
|
| https://archive-is.tumblr.com/post/807584470961111040/it-see...
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