Some of you may be aware of the Wayback Machine, which is an archive of web sites going back as far as 1996. It can take quite a while for the Wayback Machine to get around to archiving a new site, and indexed pages don't always appear in the archive for a few months. Some sites are archived far more often than others, and new sites are generally on the low end of that. For example, this forum appears in the archive only once so far, on March 24, 2015, which was just a couple of months after the forum came online. They have probably archived it since then, but newer ones aren't appearing in the archive yet. I thought of it today because I noticed that one of the spiders was indexing the forum. So if you are ever interested in what a web site looked like in the past, use the Wayback Machine. In fact, after someone has taken a site down, you can still find it in the Wayback Machine, although not every page of every site is included. Until or unless this forum becomes widely popular, you probably wouldn't be able to access every page of discussions. But the Wayback Machine is just part of a much larger Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is an online library of books, movies, software, music, and even vintage PC games.
That sounds like it'll be kind of fun! I'm going to have to look up some of the originals I played around with.
Yep, was aware of this, but I really love it when people spread the word around! I think that this site is very valuable, as it allows us to preserve the very history of the Internet, so that we can look back at pages from the past and be amazed at how far we've come. I think that future generations will be amazed by how primitive the first websites were!
It's sad that while technology is advanced at giant steps, archive.org seemed to be doing it backwards in some way. Yes, it's still possible to find many pages archived in there, but some others are merely linked and while their robot seems to crawl the site, it is not retrieving all the graphics and elements. If the site crawled still exists and has such elements still on the server whatever this site is hosted, then you will see the page as it was, but if those elements are not yet on the remote server or the site doesn't longer exist, pages appear broken or a message pop ups saying they cannot display the past story of the site but only as it is today, giving you the option to retrieve so it can be archived starting on that day. Besides of this, the search function oftentimes is lagging, not just now but since several years go, but in the positive side is the fact that you can always trace the story of the site back, even if this story not necessary starts by the time a website was started, but from the time it was first visited by archive.org Another good thing the Internet Archive has is that, if they retrieved the files, you can still download software that is not longer available in the original website, or that went from freeware to shareware or only-paid software. Of course, the archive file might be an older version, but usually as functional or even more than the actual version of a software piece. Curious fact, first coming online in 1996, the Internet Archive, archived history begins the next year, check it out, https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://archive.org
Since I first posted this, the Wayback Machine archive of the Seniors Only Club includes several copies of the forum. Although it has archived us only once so far this year (today, probably triggered when I did a search for it there), it has been through here nearly every month, and usually a few times a month. Usually, it takes a few months for spidered content to appear in the archive so, in another couple of months, we'll probably find that it has archived us earlier this year, as well. It doesn't necessarily include every page of a site, though. The more popular a site is, the more likely it is to archive more pages of it, however. You can also enter in a web address for a page that you might want to cite later, and it will maintain an archive of that page as it is at the time. This can come in handy when you have reason to think that the site might be changed after you have cited it. Another interesting purpose for the Wayback Machine is that, if you can remember the web address, you can even view sites that are no longer online or pages that have been taken down. When I ran a newspaper, I used that more than once to show that people involved in stories that I was writing had changed their website pages, trying to rewrite history, but were caught up in the Wayback Machine. In one case, we had a town councilor who was voting to give money to a company that he had an interest in. Before the vote came up, the company changed the page that listed its board of directors, removing his name, but there it was in the Wayback Machine.
This is the first archive of the Seniors Only Club forum, archived not long after the forum began. We had 31 members and, if you click into the member list, you'll find that a few of us are still here.
Out of curiosity what is the intention or point if any site holding on to these posts? Their purpose is for what, I guess is my question.
The objective is to archive the Internet so that anyone can see what was available online at any given time. It's a form of an ongoing history project. There is no specific intention to archive a forum, but a forum is a website, like any other, and the Wayback Machine archives websites. The Internet Archive also archives publicly available software, books, music, and other stuff.
Here's a Wayback archive of a forum that I ran a decade or so ago -- Wayback archive of the Katahdin Commons
Here's the archive of web directory review site that I ran, as well as a directory of directories site.
The classic radio part of the internet archive is fantastic. I’m especially fond of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (mostly the episodes starring the great Bob Bailey.