He is actually showcasing a very nice technique to get around paywalls: turn off JS. Often enough that’s enough to get around the paywall. I believe the archives also disable JS when grabbing the content.
Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
171–180 of 262 posts
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#172This is a bad idea... In the worst case one might write a cool article and get two hits, one noticing it exists, and the other from the archive service. After that it might go viral, but the author may have given up by then. The author is losing out on inbound links so google thinks their site is irrelevant and gives it a bad pagerank. All you need to do is get archive.org to take a copy at the time, you can always a…
Google shouldn't be the center of the Web. They could also easily determine where the archive link is pointing to and not penalize. But I guess making sure we align with Google's incentives is more important than just using the Web.
Every search engine uses the number of backlinks as one of the key factors in influencing search rank; it's a fundamental KPI when it comes to understanding whether a link is credible.
What is true for Google in this regard is also true of Bing, DDG and Yandex.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#173WayBackMachine is slow (slower than many bloated websites). So it’s not a good enough experience for the person clicking on that link.
Secondly, I personally don’t like the fact that WayBackMachine doesn’t provide an easy way to get content removed and to stop indexing and caching content (the only way I know is to email them, with delayed responses or responses that don’t help). It’s far easier to get content de-indexed in the major search engines. I know that the team running it have some reasons to archive anything and everything (as) permanently (as possible), but it doesn’t serve everybody’s needs.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#174has waybackmachine stopped retroactively applying robots?
if not link to that are one misconfiguration or one parked domain from being wiped.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#175He is actually showcasing a very nice technique to get around paywalls: turn off JS. Often enough that’s enough to get around the paywall. I believe the archives also disable JS when grabbing the content.
That is changing. I've noticed over the past couple of years that sites that could be accessed with JS turned off are now showing a "Please enable Javascript to continue" (Quora) or just hiding the content entirely (Business Insider).
I'm sure there are other examples as well.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#176Just FYI, archive.org is banned in a few countries, including the UAE, where I cannot open any links from there.
Huh I wonder if they are also blocking mirrors. Also, in countries with restrictions to internet access you probably want to make using TOR a general habit.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. That requires access to all sites. I wasn't comfortable adding another addon with that permission. The permission is just for a simple reason and should be off by default. It is so you can right click a link on any page and select 'archive' from the menu. Small function, but requires access to all sites.
The source is available if you want to know what's going on with those permissions: https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback-machine-chrome
Thanks. I already knew that. I'm familiar with the dev's extensions. Clear Browsing Data and Captcha Buster and very useful.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#178You can create a bookmark in Firefox to save a link quickly. Bookmark Location- https://web.archive.org/save/%s Keyword - save So searching 'save https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406193 ' archives this post. You can use any Keyword instead of 'save'. You can also search with https://web.archive.org/*/%s
Does that `save` keyword work? The problem is %s gets escaped, so Firefox generates this URL, which seems to be invalid: https://web.archive.org/save/https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator....
Uppercase %S for unescaped, e.g.:
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#179I once discovered an information leak of German public broadcasting organization ARD which leaked real mobile numbers on their CI/CD page where they showed the business card designs (lol).
All records of this page on Archive.org were deleted after a couple of days, a twitter account posting the details with a screenshot and link was reported and my account temporarily suspended.
I assume it must be very easy to remove inconvenient content from archive.org.
(in German) https://blog.rolandmoriz.de/2019/04/25/sind-die-leute-von-de...
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#180It's probably better to link to both. If a site corrects a story, you readers will want to see the correction, but if the page disappears, it's good to have the backup.