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I ran a large online community with tens of thousands of users that existed for nearly 19 years. When it came time to close it down, I left a notice on the site for several months before i made it read only...

then the helpful guys at archive team[1] helped me create a complete archive of the site on archive.org with their irc bot.

once that was complete, i replaced the site with a notice and linked to the archives from there.

As an aside, one of the old domains that we used for a while lapsed at some point, and some spammer put up a copy of the pages from the internet archives with ads injected into the content. That eventually went to an SEO landing page a few months later.

[1] http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

discuss

abstractbeliefs|8 years ago

For those that don't know, Archive Team and Internet Archive are two different groups (though with an overlapping membership).

Internet Archive are a non-profit org that are legally held to high standards, as they should be. They're a very stable place to have data archived. That comes with a few limitations, like not making information available if there's any (even accidental) indication that the upstream site want it kept private - see the comments about robots.txt in tfa.

Archive Team, on the other hand, are a fairly fun and radical group that are far more loosely organised, who will archive what they can when it's needed, and horde it. Fuck your robots.txt![1]

If you can get involved in either organisation, it's highly recommended. They both have interesting challenges and solve them with neat tools.

[1] http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt