[ChocMontePy]

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.

[palmotea]

> When I noticed it, it seemed like such a minor change, but with these latest revelations, it doesn't seem so minor anymore.

That doesn't seem nefarious, though. It makes sense they wouldn't want to reveal whatever accounts they use to bypass blocks, and the logged-in account isn't really meaningful content to an archive consumer.

Now, if they were changing the content of a reddit post or comment, that would be an entirely different matter.

[TehCorwiz]

If it's not nefarious why isn't it documented as part of their policies? They're not tracking those changes and making clear it was anonymization, why not? If they're not tracking and publishing changes to the documents what's to say they haven't edited other things? The short answer is that without another archived copy we just don't know and that's what's making people uncomfortable. They also injected malicious JS into the site. What's to stop them from doing that again? Trust and transparency are the name of the game with libraries. I could care less about the who they are, but their actions as steward of a collection for posterity fail to encourage my trust.

[zymhan]

Editing what is billed as an archive defeats the purpose of an "archive".