
Closing Communities: FFFFOUND vs. MLKSHK - _pius
http://waxy.org/2017/04/closing-communities-ffffound-vs-mlkshk/
======
AdrianRossouw
I ran a large online community with tens of thousands of users that existed
for nearly 19 years. When it came time to close it down, I left a notice on
the site for several months before i made it read only...

then the helpful guys at archive team[1] helped me create a complete archive
of the site on archive.org with their irc bot.

once that was complete, i replaced the site with a notice and linked to the
archives from there.

As an aside, one of the old domains that we used for a while lapsed at some
point, and some spammer put up a copy of the pages from the internet archives
with ads injected into the content. That eventually went to an SEO landing
page a few months later.

[1]
[http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page)

~~~
abstractbeliefs
For those that don't know, Archive Team and Internet Archive are two different
groups (though with an overlapping membership).

Internet Archive are a non-profit org that are legally held to high standards,
as they should be. They're a very stable place to have data archived. That
comes with a few limitations, like not making information available if there's
any (even accidental) indication that the upstream site want it kept private -
see the comments about robots.txt in tfa.

Archive Team, on the other hand, are a fairly fun and radical group that are
far more loosely organised, who will archive what they can when it's needed,
and horde it. Fuck your robots.txt![1]

If you can get involved in either organisation, it's highly recommended. They
both have interesting challenges and solve them with neat tools.

[1]
[http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt)

------
dawnerd
Thesixtyone is also closing in a few days and didn't give much notice. No way
to export anything either. I've tried to scrape the site but considering how
many days are left I can't possibly finish.

~~~
zokier
With stories like this, I always find it bizarre that artists/creators do not
keep personal master copies of their works. I don't think it's fair to push
the blame of losing the works completely to the service operators, I feel that
creators also have some responsibility to employ due diligence _if_ they want
their works to be preserved.

~~~
khedoros1
Agreed. Putting something on the Internet makes it convenient to access, but
I've never created something that I cared about that I didn't keep a local
copy of. The idea actually makes me a little uncomfortable.

