<story><title>Donate to the Internet Archive</title><url>https://archive.org/donate/index.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chroma</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve donated to the Internet Archive and I&amp;#x27;m a big fan of Jason Scott, but the Internet Archive &lt;i&gt;is not an archive&lt;/i&gt;. Any site on it can go down without warning, thanks to the fact that they apply current robots.txt rules to past archives. Once a domain squatter or regretful admin forbids archivebot (or crawlers in general), archive.org&amp;#x27;s copy goes down.&lt;p&gt;This has ruined many supposedly permanent links. The infamous &amp;quot;She&amp;#x27;s a Flight Risk&amp;quot; blog from a decade ago is down.[1] My first website is missing. Even public domain stuff like NASA&amp;#x27;s report on nuclear propulsion is gone.[2]&lt;p&gt;With just a small rule change (obey robots.txt at the time of crawling), they could eliminate the risk of a page disappearing. Instead, we&amp;#x27;re stuck with a slower version of the link rot we&amp;#x27;re used to. It doesn&amp;#x27;t stop me from supporting them, but it&amp;#x27;s incredibly frustrating.&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.aflightrisk.blogspot.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;*&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.aflightrisk.blogspo...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20121029225832/http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19770085619_1977085619.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20121029225832&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ntrs.nasa.g...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Donate to the Internet Archive</title><url>https://archive.org/donate/index.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>benbreen</author><text>Archive.org has been an absolute godsend for historians and others who use rare books. Case in point: when I was doing PhD research in Lisbon three years ago, I had to search several rare book shops and ended up paying 80 euros for a very rare 19th century Portuguese book I needed for my research. Here it is on archive.org in multiple editions, all text-searchable: &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/search.php?query=duarte%20ribeiro%20de%20macedo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.org&amp;#x2F;search.php?query=duarte%20ribeiro%20de%2...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>