The Guardian: Preserving our digital content is vital. But paying $38,000 for the privilege is not. “Storing online data in perpetuity is not just about photos and texts but thoughts and ideas. Platforms such as WordPress are starting to act, but it must be at a realistic price.”
MuckRock: Here’s why MuckRock and POGO had to archive FOIAonline. “… while the decommissioning of FOIAonline has been in the works for several years, it still remains unclear when the public can expect access to these records to be restored by government agencies, if ever. In the interim, POGO and MuckRock have partnered to host a publicly available archive of nearly 34,000 documents captured before FOIAonline was shuttered.”
The Verge: Discogs’ vibrant vinyl community is shattering. “The site has become a central part of the music internet, surviving through physical music media’s replacement by MP3s and then streaming — and rebounding as interest in vinyl, CDs, and tapes did throughout the 2010s. But sellers who use the platform say the site’s old tech has started to wear on them, and new fees and restrictions have made it harder to do business. Changes within the company are threatening to turn a bastion for vinyl fans, record stores, and anyone who cares about music into just another dysfunctional website — and dismantle a singular record of music history, even if just by pushing the sellers and users who have created that record away.”
Chortle: Velvet Onion vanishes. “Alternative comedy website The Velvet Onion has disappeared from the internet. The site covered the scene from 2010 to 2018 – but now even the cost of maintaining its archive as a permanent presence has proved too much for founder Didymus Holmes.”
Spotlight PA: Pennsylvania removes email database of public employees. “Pennsylvania officials have removed a searchable, online database of state employee emails, narrowing the ways the public can reach the people who work for commonwealth agencies. The state Office of Administration, which oversees cybersecurity for state government agencies, took down the directory in May because it posed a security risk, said communications director Dan Egan.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Missouri health agency quietly scrubbed sexual health, LGBTQ resources from website. “As Missouri lawmakers were considering the most anti-LGBTQ bills of any state, the state health department quietly scrubbed youth sexual health and LGBTQ resources from its website. Lisa Cox, the spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, emailed the agency’s website team in late January directing the removal of links from the website’s adolescent and teen health information page.”
The Verge: X says it’s fixed the bug that broke links and images in pre-December 2014 tweets. “There are no details mentioned in the post about what the bug was, when it started happening, or why it will take an unspecified amount of time to resolve. In looking up the problem, we learned that changes by Twitter in 2016 used metadata on tweets posted from December 2014 going forward to fill in additional data from linked webpages and allow attachments that didn’t eat up a tweet’s character count, and it was only earlier posts that were hit by the bug.”
The Verge: X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014. “Ellen’s famous ‘most retweeted’ selfie from the 2014 Oscars has had its image restored, but most old tweets have broken short links instead of the media or links that should be there.”
Video Game History Foundation: The Game Availability Study, Explained. “Today, the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network published a major new study which shows that 87 percent of classic games released in the United States are out of print. The results are striking, and it proves that we need to rethink the commercial marketplace’s role in game preservation. It’s a big study, and to help you digest it, we wrote this guide explaining the main points: Why we did it, how we did it, what we found, and why it matters.”
Engadget: Reddit is removing years of chats and messages. “If you have fond memories of chatting with Reddit friends, you might want to check your archives. Reddit has confirmed user reports that it’s removing all chats and messages from before 2023. As the social site explained in June, it’s moving to a new chat architecture and believes pulling older messages will enable a ‘smooth and quick transition’ to the new architecture.”
Coda: In Hong Kong, a digital memorial of the Tiananmen Square massacre disappears. “On Tuesday, I decided to go back and look at Weiboscope, a gripping digital archive of photos, art and messages censored on social media in China for their connection with the 1989 democracy movement. But all I found was a blank page. Weiboscope — a joint project of the University of Hong Kong and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab — still has a domain, but the archive itself is gone.”
Hold the Front Page: Editor calls for regional daily’s archive to go back online. “An editor whose newspaper’s archive disappeared from the web without explanation two months ago has called for it to go back online. Eastern Daily Press editor Richard Porritt has told readers he is ‘pushing’ for a revival of the Local Recall project, which was launched by Archant with Google funding in 2020 but went offline earlier this year.”
Keen Gamer: The Art Of Abandonware Preservation. “Despite video gaming’s relative youth compared to other media, many games have already been lost to time. Around the world, archivists have been striving to record and preserve such abandonware and return it to the players. We spoke with some of the people involved to find out just what it takes to save a lost game and why such archives are so important.”
Ars Technica: Google’s new “inactive account” policy won’t delete years of YouTube videos. “A day later, Google now says there will be no digital burning of Alexandria. YouTube’s creator liaison, Rene Ritchie, clarified on Twitter that Google has ‘no plans to delete accounts with YT videos.'” I have no evidence for my suspicion that this policy is a poorly-planned plan to save money.
Reuters: Google to delete inactive accounts starting December. “Alphabet Inc’s Google on Tuesday said it would delete accounts that had remained unused for two years starting December, in a bid to prevent security threats including hacks.”
