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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Got any examples of these alternative archives?

This is the main one https://archive.is/

From the FAQ, they do not respect robots.txt since they only archive on request by a user and they do not remove archives unless they contain illegal content.

HN commenters like to use archive.is but I always wonder if people are aware that archive.is is (a) blocked in some countries^1 and (b) may block access to itself in a country if it feels threatened.^2

There is also the issue of EDNS subnet.^3 archive.is tries to require it; it wants to know what location a request is coming from. In addition to EDNS, archive.is inserts the IP address and geolocation of the incoming request into the HTML of the returned page as a tracking pixel.^4

Thus archive.is does some things archive.org does not do besides just ignoring robots.txt

One of the things archive.org does that archive.is does not do is that archive.org inserts an HTTP response header intended to disable Chrome FLoC.^5 I add this header for all sites in a local proxy; however I do not see many sites adding it as a courtesy. Thanks archive.org for doing that.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.is

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3e29vm/arch...

3. https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-does-...

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27498902

5. permissions-policy: interest-cohort=()

A couple of pointers to the wider world of web archiving:

https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-...

https://github.com/iipc/awesome-web-archiving

There’s archive.is but I get the sense that the major use case for that is getting around paywalls as opposed to permanently archiving a page - indeed, since they host content that the site owner probably doesn’t want them to, it would stand to reason the service would not be likely to stand the yet of time. But I could be wrong.

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