
The Eye – Open Directory Data Archive - lelf
https://the-eye.eu/
======
nektro
:D

Very cool to see one of my internet homes here. I'm one of the mods/devs here
and would love to highlight some of our recent datasets as well try my best to
answer any questions! We're very active in the r/DataHoarders community on
Reddit and regularly help out in the efforts to save large sites from
disappearing offline as well as helping ease the distribution of hot content.

\-
[https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/exdka0//](https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/exdka0//)
The Coronavirus Papers

\-
[https://old.reddit.com/r/HofellerDocuments/comments/enj8f0//](https://old.reddit.com/r/HofellerDocuments/comments/enj8f0//)
The Hofeller Files

\-
[https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/comments/cy8jry//](https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/comments/cy8jry//)
eXoDOS v4.0

\- [https://the-eye.eu/public/Games/Flashpoint_7.1_Ultimate.7z](https://the-
eye.eu/public/Games/Flashpoint_7.1_Ultimate.7z) Mirror of
[https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/](https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/)

\- [https://searchin.the-eye.eu/](https://searchin.the-eye.eu/) Full-text
search of a few of datasets

\- [https://discord.gg/the-eye](https://discord.gg/the-eye) Our wonderful
community on Discord

~~~
covertlibrarian
Related article discussing the coronavirus papers:
[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3b3v5/archivists-are-
byp...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3b3v5/archivists-are-bypassing-
paywalls-to-share-studies-about-coronaviruses)

------
Jenz
Sounds awesome! But,

> community driven platform dedicated to the archiving and long-term
> preservation of any and all data

> We pay $650/month to cover all of our services ([...]) and are entirely
> community funded.

This sounds optimistic. What reason is there to think the community will
continue the financial support in the long-term?

~~~
luch
I know a good amount a professionals using it to dig olders builds of
software. The Eye is actually better than Microsoft (at least for people
without a msdn account) at archiving VS installers, Windows isos, etc.

~~~
_Archivist
As you brought this up I should mention we're currently moving those
collections to faster storage and they will be available again later in the
week. MSDN is still our most popular content by volume, crazy how much
attention it's seen over the years.

------
gen_greyface
[https://parazite.the-eye.eu/](https://parazite.the-eye.eu/)

Hmmmmmmmmm

~~~
tsukurimashou
what is this?

EDIT: nvm after scrolling a bit I see now

------
rafaelvasco
This site is a treasure box :3

------
lubujackson
After a brief poke, this seems like some highfalutin language around a random
collection of pirated files, like an old FTP server from 1990... with the same
"bandwidth exceeded" errors.

~~~
nektro
Which files did you experience an error? While we do rate limit the amount of
parallel incoming connections, many of our directories have no bandwith limits
and the site is hosted colo on a 10gbps line. You can also view our current
traffic at [https://the-eye.eu/traffic/](https://the-eye.eu/traffic/).

------
chabad360
What makes this different from the Internet Archive?

~~~
nektro
Our work works in parallel the Internet Archive. Preservation is all about
storing content in multiple locations and we regularly hand off content to IA,
as well as host it ourselves, when saving and sharing content.

------
bluedays
This is going to sound like I am trying to throw shade but I really am not. I
joined this community a few months back hoping to contribute, but despite
numerous offers for help I was turned down nearly every time. There isn’t
really any leveraging of the community within the discord or reddit or really
anything that I can see. I rarely saw the administrators ask for any help for
archiving purposes, and most of the data that is added to the community has no
rhyme or reason but largely seems to be at the whim of the administrators.

The-Eye was fulfilling a niche for me and that was comic book archival. It
seems the comic book industry at large has no regard for preserving comic
books, and I found that The-Eye had a large collection of comic books.
Disappointingly I found that I already had access to the majority of these
comics and actually thought I could contribute. However, there doesn’t seem to
be any easy way to add content but rather that the only thing a normal users
can do is download content, so I couldn’t contribute anything.

What I have found though, is that there is a concerted effort to gather
donations from the community. There were several occasions where there were
multiple announcements daily on the discord asking for donations, or if users
wanted to join one of the private sites they wanted, and even asking for
people to show at the store.

Data archival is actually a big interest to me, especially in an error when
content on the web is here one day or gone the next. There is probably more
data lost in a day than was created in multiple decades in earlier centuries.
I just don’t see the-eye actually as a entity that is actually arching
anything, but rather that their interest largely lies in providing just enough
data so that it can either be paywalled, or users can give donations.

Don’t take my word for it though, just spend some time on their website and
you can see that they have numerous calls to action for a user to donate, but
nearly nothing on their site which asks for a user to contribute actual
content. If the user base that you are trying to cultivate is those who
contribute content it stands to reason that uploading content would be
trivial. Contrast that to imgur, however, which has an upload button displayed
very prominently on their front page and you can see where their priorities
lie. I know this may seem like comparing apples to oranges as one could make
an argument for “quality” or data curation but even when you start searching
the site more in depth there is a FAQ wherein the question is asked “How can I
contribute?” and they ask you to donate rather than to upload.

I’m not trying to claim that I understand their model, but rather to relay
that from my observations it doesn’t seem like they are really interested in
users contributing anything.

As a disclaimer, the final straw for me was when I offered books that were
behind a “library” on the OpenLibrary. I had written a scraper for the site,
as there were numerous items which were now public domain but you had to
borrow the books which essentially was a weird form of DRM. When I asked if I
could upload them to the-eye the response was “why would you want to do that?”
And it wasn’t until I had gotten angry, and honestly over reacted, that they
claimed that there was no space on their servers for users to contribute. I
left the community, and have not since been back. That was a couple of months
ago. I have a friend who has claimed that there have been some changes made
since then... But that seems to be hearsay, so I am not sure how much value I
place on that.

However, there is a silver lining... I do agree that there is an awesome
community on the discord, and in the communities. I think that if you are
looking for a bunch of like minded individuals who are easy to talk to, and
fun to be around that you couldn’t do much better than to join the Discord and
chat with the people who are there. If you value nothing else then this site
is absolutely essential and I think that everyone should consider joining.

~~~
covertlibrarian
Seconding the library genesis recommendation. There's a lot of people now
mirroring those files, and uploading there will make those books easier to
find for a wider audience than just the eye.

~~~
_Archivist
You may want to read this article...

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa7jxb/archivists-are-
try...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa7jxb/archivists-are-trying-to-
make-sure-a-pirate-bay-of-science-never-goes-down)

We (the-eye, like minds on reddit) are making sure libgen stays available.
Further reading in a sub reddit I moderate here...

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library_genesis_project_update_25_million_books/)

