That is certainly a feat, but I think the more impressive part of this project is funding the web domain and server for 15 years!
In another recent HN article concerning the "screenshot all the things" guy, someone mentioned that they continually run across bookmarks they've saved from interesting sites only two or three years old that now 404--not to mention links from blog posts more than a year or two old.
[Which brings to mind StackExchange. (Socially) enforcing that users copy an answer's text from an external website for future posterity is brilliant.]
>In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al. (2005) discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse (Spinellis, 2003, Lawrence et al., 2001). Nelson and Allen (2002) examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.
>Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; the Internet Archive has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).
In another recent HN article concerning the "screenshot all the things" guy, someone mentioned that they continually run across bookmarks they've saved from interesting sites only two or three years old that now 404--not to mention links from blog posts more than a year or two old.
[Which brings to mind StackExchange. (Socially) enforcing that users copy an answer's text from an external website for future posterity is brilliant.]