Wikipedia Sucks!

Over the last few years, there has been a change in how the Wayback Machine is viewed, one inspired by the general political mood. What had long been a useful tool when you came across broken links online is now, more than ever before, seen as an arbiter of the truth and a bulwark against erasing history.

That archive sites are trusted to show the digital trail and origin of content is not just a must-use tool for journalists, but effective for just about anyone trying to track down vanishing web pages. With that in mind, that the Internet Archive doesn’t really fight takedown requests becomes a problem. That’s not the only recourse: When a site admin elects to block the Wayback crawler using a robots.txt file, the crawling doesn’t just stop. Instead, the Wayback Machine’s entire history of a given site is removed from public view.

suckadmin wrote:Hmm sounds more like the robot.txt file is one way to get the pee out of part of the ocean.

Tuba (mythology): a notorious joke article that lasted from May until December 2006. The only remaining full copy of it is found on the Internet Archive, recorded shortly before the WMF enabled robots.txt and blocked all such external archiving. WorldWizzy also captured a copy. The December 2006 AFD is quite difficult to find. It reveals that the creator of this extremely long and stupid joke article was "Yeanold Viskersenn", aka Richard Symonds.