> Here’s what’s going on. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we’ve put protections in place to keep the service running.
I'm pretty certain this is scrapers that are trying to workaround blocks on accessing original sites by hitting the Wayback Machine copy instead. Appalling behavior.
In addition to the load it puts on this vital non-profit piece of Internet infrastructure, we've also already seen some sites opt out of the Wayback Machine to prevent their content from being scraped via this alternative route.
I run some small websites, including a tiny forum that’s been a goldmine for scrapers. I had to significantly tweak some firewall rules and configuration after scrapers behind residential proxies suddenly accounted for over 99% of requests.
However, I also relaxed rules for automated traffic that was well-behaved, and I went out of my way to ensure that the Wayback Machine was able to hit everything. I should kick a small donation their way. They provide an incredibly valuable service and I love the benefit that I get from them just for personal side projects.
How do you separate the Wayback Machine from malicious bots that pretend to be the Wayback Machine? Are you whitelisting their IP blocks?
Because I get a ton of scraper requests that forge Googlebot, Bing, and Yandex user-agents that are totally not coming from their IP ranges. In fact, sometimes they all come from the same IP...
They have their own ASN, which I’ve explicitly allowed requests from.
https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/7941
TIL they have their own ASN. This is helpful, thanks.
I thought at least google (and possibly others) provided a way to verify the user agent?
Sorry, not following. I thought the user agent is a string that the caller can set to anything. There is no immediate, reliable way to tell whether the string is correct.
Yeah, a real browser would produce certain patterns and never certain others. So in some cases one could clearly say it's not a human using a browser. But a scraper could also make efforts to mimic human browsing. Mostly the frequency of requests can tell with high probability tell it's not human. But such algorithms might occasionally give false positives for real users, exactly like it has obviously happened for the archive.
What google service are you referring to? Not sure whether the archove uses any of Google's tracking. I have pretty strong blocking of trackers and ads. But the archive works for me.
Google's scraper bot at least used to be behind IPs that you could identify via reverse-then-forward DNS. Not sure if that is still up to date, though.
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2006/09/how-to-ver...
Yep, verifying the IPs is still the way to go. You often see websites that do it wrong when you set your user agent to Google Bot and they give you a different version of the page without validating that.
Kudos on that. I don't know what site you're hosting, but I appreciate knowing that it is there
This is the way to go! Cut the cat and mouse, win win ish.
This is absolutely something that's happening. There are even paid scraper API's that offer "Wayback Machine fallback" as a feature.
It's an open secret that you can often circumvent paywalls by searching Wayback.
One site was doing that which archive in their name but wasn't apart of archive.org
archive.is or archive.today?
Why being shy in the era of stealing AI?
archive.today uses clients to perform DDoS, I would not recommend using their site.
Let's all just believe this baseless assertion shall we.
You have to include more than that, this isn't common knowledge.
Sure it is! This has been going on for years and global attention was gained at the beginning of this one.[0]
Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links (arstechnica.com) 616 points by nobody9999 6 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 368 comments
0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006
It's been posted multiple times of the last few months as they were removed from wikipedia and cloudflare. [1] [2] [3]
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474255
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...> for those without a search engine.
Only some of them, it is not universal.
"often"
Every single paid article linked on HN has the way back machine link as the very first comment.
The links are usually to Archive.today (aka archive.ph and a bunch of other domains), not Wayback Machine (which is run by Internet Archive).
Correct:Also, archive.* has actively edited archived sites to promote their agenda. Why folks continue to use them confuses me. One would think the big wikipedia purge would curb such behavior.
> Why folks continue to use them
Because there's no working alternative.
> Why folks continue to use them confuses me.
I use them. I haven't ever heard mention that the content is edited. Do you have a source?
See
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-might-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...?
Besides tampering with content, the site was also using visitors to DDOS a blog that mentioned the owner of archive.today.
[dead]
See the "Background" section of the Wikipedia RFC on banning archive.today links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
They bulk replaced one string (a name) with another one across many archived pages, and added malicious code to all archive pages that would rapidly send requests to gyrovague.com in an attempt to DDOS them.
Just out of curiosity, how do we know that what is in the Wikipedia comments is accurate? I have no skin in the game. I was just wondering. Anybody can post anything on Wikipedia comments. I find it odd that Ars Technica would use that as a source. Maybe it's fine for gossip and speculation but it shouldn't be in Ars Technica then.
There is a megalodon.jp archive of an archive.today page that shows the edits: https://megalodon.jp/2026-0219-1654-07/https://archive.ph:44...
There's also a bunch of previous hackernews discussions about it:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474255
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805
And you obviously have no reason to believe me, but I was following this when it was happening at the start of this year and can confirm that the DDoS script and archive text replacements really did happen.
Because a lot of us watched the drama unfold in real time.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
> Why folks continue to use them confuses me.
Seems like the “confused” is disingenuous when not paying for content you read is a clear motivation.
Convenience as a higher order motivator than disgust at the bad behavior of archive.{today,ph,...} mentioned elsewhere, I think is the point of the comment to which you replied.
Ironically, your framing of the situation is infinitely more disingenuous to push a personal agenda versus anything the archive.today guy did.
ehh it's a distinction without a difference. The point is that alternative links are available to circumvent paid access for anyone that wants them.
That isn’t the point being discussed. The point being discussed is that it’s bad form to abuse a service (archive.org) that is provided for free, for the public good in order to run commercial scraping operations.
It's bad form to scrape the scrapers?
Yes, arguably, and for reasons I already gave. I’d genuinely spend a bit more time reading and thinking rather than replying. Your replies are pithy but you’re missing details and frankly making cognitive mistakes. (Apologies if this seems harsh, I don’t mean it as an insult, but this thread has blown up entirely unnecessarily- and yes, I know I’m not helping either!)
You seem to think that scraping websites "for the public good" is somehow different than scraping websites for any other reason.
The end result is exactly the same.
It is different, precisely because the end result is not the same - one broadly benefits the public while the other doesn't.
Substitute almost any disruptive public service to see the issue with your line of reasoning. For example - you seem to think that [ bulldozing private property ] to "construct an emergency fire break" is somehow different than [ bulldozing private property ] for any other reason.
Never mind that the sort of scraping being objected to is actually harmful to service health while what the wayback machine does is almost entirely unnoticeable.
The minuscule traffic generated by the wayback machine, which serves to preserve the content for years to come, is completely incomparable to the scrapers that hammer every single href linked on a website.
You missed the XCancel flamewar yesterday. The consensus is we should be allowed to scrape data and bypass login walls if we dislike the site owner, or feel we are owed free access by arbitrary criteria, it's sort of an unwritten rule. Unless of course it's Google or Meta properties we're talking about because that might impact RSUs.
They're different sites, with different goals, run by different people.
That provide the same functional service....
Hence, distinction without a difference.
Given that the root of the discussion is about Internet Archive being hit with huge traffic and not the functionalities provided by Wayback Machine, it very much is a distinction with a difference.
Bot traffic or human traffic doesn't matter. The goal is to read websites without having your own access.
So Internet Archive, Archive.today, Archive.ph, etc. are all just means to the same end.
I suspect you may be conflating two different things.
Archive.org exists to preserve historical snapshots of the public parts of websites, and not to bypass subscriptions or pay walls.
Internet Archive's traffic may not matter to you, but that's the main topic of this discussion, regardless of what you care or use website archival tools for.
I think you have the wrong impression of the Internet Archive.
The internet archive is not designed to circumvent anything. It is not designed to "grant access without having your own access".
They are 2 different services, run by different people, one goes out of their way to bypass paywalls while the other doesn't, one is banned by Wikipedia and the other isn't, etc.
I think it's a distinction worth making.
Not to mention that the Wayback Machine itself isn't exactly a good tool to bypass paywalls as most paid sites don't let them archive paywalled content anyway.
Yeah, you're mistaken. One archives web pages, the other maintains a list of paid-access accounts and fetches information from behind paywalls as a service.
Exactly this
archive.org is the more straight-laced archive that doesn't circumvent sites that try to block it, and removes content they deem 'problematic' even if not illegal or requested by the site owner.
Meanwhile archive.today/ph/is/etc is the guerrilla alternative run by a die-hard datahoarder that seeks to archive the information itself, bypassing whatever blockers/login pages/whathaveyou to achieve the result.
It's nice to have both options. When I archive a site, I usually use both for added resiliency.
We used to always "scrape" the wayback machine for any sort of news article we actually paid to consume. I was absolutely shocked by major news sites making very important edits to an article without any sort of editorial notice!
Sadly this sort of thing is probably not really possible anymore, but I can't really blame anyone for making this sort of decision. I can't imagine how much more traffic they get now vs 2021 when we were doing this.
What if they charged money? Is it something you'd pay for?
I was thinking the same thing... paid access for high volume users or scrapers could actually help fund the non-profit. Maybe let website owners decide which scrapers are allowed to use their content, or allow them to get paid for use of it. If news and other sites were getting paid, maybe they could go back to optimizing for good content instead of clicks.
They already provide this service at https://archive-it.org/archive-it/ though for some reason they don't seem to publicize it. Some info at https://help.archive.org/help/archive-it-information/ as well.
I think that would get into murky water really quickly with the rights holders (/content creators) not exactly being thrilled the Wayback Machine is essentially monetizing their IP behind their back.
It wouldn't be behind their back, like I said, "Maybe let website owners decide which scrapers are allowed to use their content, or allow them to get paid for use of it."
Interesting, in all the years I have never noticed that IP has 2 meanings (well probably more...) Yeah, I am an engineer and usually try to avoid the legal BS. Although I hate that AI has made stealing legal if you are big enough.
If the money was guaranteed to only be used to pay the costs, there probably wouldn't be any problems
No. What happened to their remote library scheme? They did not make if for profit, but still...
I'd pay for it, but only if they implemented the changes the community of users have been requesting for years.
No matter what they did, you'd have a new excuse for why you won't pay.
Ah, the old ad hominem attack. How refreshing.
But anyway, no, I wouldn't keep finding reasons. I donate to them every year already. Somebody asked if I would be willing to pay and my answer was "yes, but".
It would need to be improved because certain aspects of it suck right now, not only the error this post is about. They only need go as far as their forums and github repos to see the community feedback.
Is it really an ad hom if he doesn't know the hom?
Their reply is 100% based on the content of your post.
If you make up a person to insult then yeah it's still ad hominem.
If you're donating, then you are evidently willing to pay without any "buts". So aren't you arguing against your own actions?
Not at all. I donate to Internet Archive, but we're talking here about paying for unobstructed access to but one part of their service: Wayback Machine. Two different things.
I mean we already paid for the article from the source itself. I guess I'd expect a better "diff" source from them, but if they dont even update the article itself, i guess i wouldn't expect a paid service to have those updates either?
ah, i think i misunderstood your original post. if you mean the wayback-machine/arkive, then I suspect it'd be hard to justify? You are essentially paying a third-party source to validate that diffs didn't go through on the source material.
with llms, at some point it probably becomes easier to use your paid api connection to manage your own cached version yourself?
I wonder if there would be concern on their part about appearing to be a company that was basically offering paywall circumvention as a product.
It wouldnt be a paywall, more like an option for companies to not pay scrappers. At least the payment deviates to the source.
Just yesterday from my one of my sessions with Sol:
> Hacker News and the Rails forum are blocking the text fetcher, so I'm using the browser workflow to inspect the pages directly
As it should.
Unfortunately I sometimes have to browbeat Claude into acting like an agent of the user is supposed to. Usually it works, though last time it refused to recognize my moral argument (on the grounds that it's not bound to my interests exclusively and needs to protect the interests of its maker too).
Do you think there should be a way for a site to tell an agent it isn't allowed access? I'm not sure where I land on this exactly tbh, so no judgment cast.
robots.txt?
Has it been settled whether robots.txt applies to user-driven chat sessions and if things like the crawl delay should be applied to say an end-user, an ip address, a harness provider, etc? My understanding is robots.txt is more for training exclusions, but less so for agent work.
robots.txt was only intended to help search index crawlers not get stuck in endless crawl loops for badly designed websites.
What you suggest is explicitly not a purpose of robots.txt per RFC9309[1]:
"These rules are not a form of access authorization."
HTTP 429 and HTTP 403 are what servers are meant to return to clients to slow them down or tell them to stop doing something without having first gained authorisation.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9309#section-1
robots.txt applies (or should, in my opinion) to anything that automatically follows a link. Basically any software that is not a human-controlled web browser or single-shot curl command. Everything else: robot.
AI bros think they should be exempt from robots.txt. Administrators of big services beg to differ. No solid consensus has arisen. I bet it's gonna take a lawsuit or two to see how it shakes out.
From the start, robots.txt has always been an indicator of a site's preference with no actual legal significance.
wget ignores robots.txt outside of recursive mode. I think it's correct to do so, and I think an AI loading a handful of pages in response to a command should be about the same.
If a new directive was introduced that allows for an explicit setting in robots.txt, do you think the bros would follow it anyway? Something like `ALLOW AGENTS` or `DISALLOW AGENTS`
The "Bros"? Maybe.
I wouldn't want them to. The whole point of using agents to do stuff on the web for me, is for them to do the stuff on the web for me.
This is the reverse of "do not track" case. It'll not be effective because every service will set it to DISALLOW by default anyway, because it costs them nothing, and for most services, it actually is what they want anyway - most of businesses on the web are making money on wasting people's time, and for that, they need to force themselves on people; end-user automation defeats that, so they actively fight it (and complain a lot).
I want agents to be able to act on my behalf, that’s the entire point. An agent should be able to do anything I can do sitting at my browser.
I suspect most people would be ok with this if they could only do it at the rate and frequency you yourself can do it. The problem is largely one of scale.
Is scale what we're discussing though?
e.g. a prompt of "fetch <article URL> and summarise it for me" is very close to what a human would be doing with a web browser, and doesn't seem to involve any kind of scaling issue.
Sure, but all the time I'll ask Claude a question, and then I'll see it fetch 5-10 different URLs to come up with answer. I certainly would not be fetching those URLs at that rate if I were doing it myself. I would probably be visiting those pages, one by one, over the span of 10-20 minutes.
That's the scale argument.
As would I when researching anything myself. I'll do a web search, and if I see some highly relevant results, I'll middle-click them so they open in a new tab, and I'll easily do 5+ at a time, before then going to read the first one.
Same with browsing HN, btw. I have a row of 9 HN tabs open, all of them opened at the same time, as I scrolled the front page and middle-clicked on thread link to anything interesting.
It’s easy to write instructions that have the agent check once every fifteen minutes, or even once an hour, in perpetuity, which never sleeps. And people do write such instructions. A human can’t do that by hand for very long.
The problem is that it is hard to distinguish your one off (which seems perfectly fine) from the tidal wave of bad actors.
Then make agent friendly content. Take the text and make a markdown version.
People doing this say it makes things worse because then the bots download both.
Because not enough people do this earnestly, and many more do it maliciously (bot endpoints that lie, or provide significantly less information than people endpoints) or put it behind a business contract (yes, APIs), so the bots or agents can't trust it in general.
Also let's not forget that innocent sites suffering from floods of scrapers are actually the minority here - this is just a special case; the main reason for the tension is simply that most websites and businesses on-line rely on users wasting their time, and cannot abide any form of end-user automation. Their business plans hinge on their ability to force themselves on you.
Not to mention that it solves none of the rate issues. If the scrapers are hitting your site 10,000 times a day, adding markdown isn’t going to change that at all.
Technically, even your browser is an agent. It says it in the HTTP: User-Agent. So is cURL. Every application the user runs is acting on the user's behalf.
Dunno why the downvotes. I feel that is reasonable as well. Owners that block that stuff are doing so only to their detriment.
I've personally been using the Wayback Machine more often because I increasingly find myself being blocked from websites who are trying to keep out scrapers even though I'm just a regular person with JS disabled (along with a bunch of other stuff)
Sites are getting too overzealous with blocking IMO. I got blocked for several hours by huggingface simply because my download didn't complete and I had to retry. It gave me error 429, suggested I login, and the login page wouldn't load because error 429.
A popular tech news site blocked my phone because of Apple Private Relay. That didn't last long because their traffic fell off a cliff when that happened.
Many sites are throwing more captchas at the problem, without understanding that captchas don't actually help with LLMs, they just hinder normal users and primitive scripts. LLMs solve captchas just fine.
Some big sites have put up improved paywalls. I'm fine with subscribing to a quality site, however, WSJ and all the other big media sites routinely spit out regurgitated garbage that can be had for free elsewhere (and due to political spin, their garbage is less valuable than the free versions of said content).
Some folks are declaring the internet dead. I wouldn't go that far, however, I will say that a reckoning is going to happen, especially when advertisers figure out that most ads served on basically every website are no longer viewed by humans.
I wonder if the entire internet is going to slowly move behind logins and allow lists for specific trusted crawlers at some point.
Open access doesn't seem sustainable.
But I might just grumpy about spending another hour this week adjusting rules to prevent bots.
Rather than logins or regional filters, how about they just be a content provider to local libraries and perhaps use an app like Libby.
Nearly every time a link is posted to HN to a site behind some form of wall, a high voted comment on the post will be a link to an archive site bypassing the owners wall. Bot owners are not the only ones routinely circumventing the choices of content owners.
Do they offer bulk torrent downloads as an alternative?
Once upon a time some people explored backing up the Internet Archive.
However, that experiment ended. They mention there were some learnings and they then say:
> The Internet Archive continues to explore methods and code to decentralize the collection, to have a mirror running in various ways - these include IPFS, FileCoin, and others. The INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK project also added general mirroring and tracking code to a number of projects that are still in use.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK
I would really like to know if any sort of thing like that is still ongoing and if it’s accessible to people in general. Would be nice to mirror some data from IA to my local drives, for example via BitTorrent or IPFS, to have it for offline exploration and personal archive.
I know that individual items have torrents. And I’ve downloaded a few that way but always it ends up only using the “web seed” (i.e. the BitTorrent client is retrieving the files from IA via HTTP) because there are no one seeding some random single item I found. Plus, those torrents are unreliable sometimes because they include meta data files that were since updated but the torrent was not updated and so the web seed is giving the updated files that don’t match what the torrent says their hashes should be. So then you have to jump through some extra hoops to fix that and then resume the download, and all the while the HTTP connections to IA servers time out because their servers are overloaded. So when I say I wonder about possibilities of using BitTorrent I mean to retrieve whole collections of many items instead of individual ones, and with actual other peers instead of just having it put load on IA HTTP servers.
The internet archive's decentralization project is paused as far as I can tell. They have too many things to do and too little funding to do it all. Their current strategy seems to be establishing new legal entities outside the us like in Canada and Switzerland, but they don't accept web traffic even though they hold full copies of the internet archive. There used to be a full copy in Egypt at the library of Alexandria and another in the Netherlands. Not sure if they're still in use, but they did accept web traffic. They hold a decentralized web camp every year in the middle of a forest
The Internet Archive's torrents are a sick joke. I've yet to find one that actually manages to complete. They always get stuck at 90-something percent but that final blocks always fail verification and get retried, fail, and the process repeats forever. Because they're web seeds they're hitting IA infrastructure and not offloading to a real swarm. So their broken torrents are just screwing themselves.
I would love to be able to download every page of a given domain as an archive, and I'd pay to do this.
They provide a free cli tool to do this.
isn't that what wget -m does? what is there to pay for?
You'd pay the domain owner for it? How much?
You might be right but -- why would they have watied until these recent weeks?
What sites would they be targeting? Generic "just give me anything"? Whenever I check regular sites on IA, the coverage is spotty -- they'll have the homepage and a few important pages, but it quickly fizzles out.
Very understandable, you can't store all 15000 pages of any random website and update them etc etc, but that makes them pretty useless for indirect scraping because you usually don't want a tiny taste, you want everything.
[flagged]
> I'm pretty certain this is scrapers that are trying to workaround blocks on accessing original sites by hitting the Wayback Machine copy instead. Appalling behavior.
Appalling, yes. But also expected. I'm surprised they haven't been the target of scrapers for years. But sites putting their content behind login walls and other anti-bot mechanisms has certainly exacerbated this. But again, this isn't at all a surprising progression.
> we've also already seen some sites opt out of the Wayback Machine to prevent their content from being scraped via this alternative route.
To be fair, another big motivation was likely users on sites like HN using archive.org (and similar sites) to get around their paywalls. In fact, I'd be surprised if this wasn't a big motivator.
Again, it sucks, but it's not at all surprising to see it progress like this. I wouldn't be surprised to see similar blocks on other archive sites eventually.
My use of wayback has skyrocketed recently due to anti-bot measures.
I often cannot get past captchas, and archive.org is one of the fallbacks I try.
However, archive.is, etc are more reliable.
I wish the internet archive acted more like a library system, where multiple organizations could mirror the content.
They are a big single point of failure, and I’m shocked Trump/SCOTUS haven’t intentionally burnt the archives down yet.
It is. They will most likely eventually need to move to a walled model for Wayback due to scraper aggressiveness (like Reddit deprecating anonymous old.reddit.com), or behind Cloudflare for aggressive bot and scraping protection. Hard to defend against abuse of a public resource when its intent is public access with as little restriction as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
(no affiliation)
Reddit has no excuses for the anonymous old.reddit.com removal; they're simply greedy.
On the other hand, the Internet Archive is a non-profit offering a free public resource.
Examples provided as technical examples, strong feelings are out of scope for this thread.
As someone who operates a large non-profit public data driven website, I have some VERY strong feelings about scrapers. We looked into various commercial solutions (Datadome, HUMAN) and based on our traffic estimates from logs we'd be looking at at least 250k/yr for bot mitigation. Anubis is offering a temporary reprieve, but after reading the recent kernel.org article [0] it's increasingly clear that this is a temporary bandaid.
The cheapest solution is to require a login and rate limit by API key. I also have strong feelings about the tragedy of the commons.
[0] https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/creepy-crawlies
I say put your data up in torrents, host a few KB of plain HTML linking to them, and let decentralisation do the rest.
No strong feelings here is what I meant. Certainly, that energy is best directed into aggressive countermeasures and defense in depth of public goods.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Perhaps it would be sensible for the wayback machine to not show paywalled articles for the first, say, 3 months.
Nah, there's actual value in hitting historical versions and with agents the gap between "how long has this product been offered by this company" and "I should go to wayback machine and do a binary search to find the earliest snapshot that contains this product offering " has closed.
I say name and shame!