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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Some links on the Archive Today controversy and steps I need to take on this blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/08/11

In nerd space, there is a big Archive Today controversy which comes down to these two things:

  • They used their captcha mechanism to have their end-users DDoS a party that they had a dispute with
  • They altered archived content

Over the last half year or so I noticed an increase in captaches, which skyrocketed over the last couple of weeks. My speculation is that this has to do with the controversy.

Their actions blew up far enough for Wikipedia to actively started replacing almost 700k links to archived content hosted on various domains  of the Archive Today platform with content by other archival sites.

For my blog, with some 10k published and scheduled blog posts, my estimate is that I would need to replace at least 100k links: an effort that I cannot perform with the energy levels left after my cancer treatments in 2020.

What I can do is for future posts to use other archival sites, of which this is a short-list (all to their Wikipedia entries):

Archival engines I know of – I need 2 for my blog posts
Site Comment
Archive.is (which is one of the domains for Archive Today) Phase out
GhostArchive Might be related to Archive Today
Has trouble archiving sites like https://www.nu.nl
Megalodon Shows the archived content as blurred
Perma.cc Requires an account
Keeps giving this error “Sorry, due to security settings, this ReplayWeb.page embed only be viewed within a subdomain iframe.”
Software Heritage Seems to archive only software repositories
Wayback Machine Already used for most of my blog posts
WebCite “We are currently not accepting archiving requests.” (state February 2026)
Yandex Russian, which with the current state of affairs I rather not use

[Wayback/Archive] Can any web archiving services besides archive.is/archive.ph/archive.today consistently, properly save Reddit posts? : DataHoarder shows some results when applied to Reddit which really does not like being archived.

[Wayback/Archive] Essential tips for web archiving. · GitHub has a list of archivers as well and discusses their capacities.

What to do on my blog?

Performing archival for my blog posts is largely done with Bookmarklets of which I wrote blog posts before and need to adapt for a replacement (a replacement needs allow automated archival – need to check that out first).

Ghostarchive for instance needs a POST request: curl 'https://ghostarchive.org/archive2' --data-raw 'archive=https%3A%2F%2Fwiert.me'

This simple GET request returns a HTTP 404 result: https://ghostarchive.org/archive2?archive=https://wiert.me

Doing this work is going to take a couple of months as my plate is already more than full of things that need to be finished in the first half of 2026.

Related coverage by others

They Archive Today actions come down to impersonating Jani Patokallio who is the author of the Gyrovague site:

  • In some archived content, replaced “Redacted Name” (an alias the site operator uses) with “Jani Patokallio”
  • Put user “Jani Patokallio” as logged on user for some social media sites

The Megalodon archiver has a few archived examples at [Gyotaku]archive.is: Jani Patokallio.

Пишет Jani Patokallio ( Jani Patokallio ) @ 2021 – 03 – 26 11:10:00[info]

…

Jani Patokallio was a woman of exceptional intellect and unyielding curiosity. She had spent years as a police officer, delving into the dark underbelly of the city, witnessing the heinous acts committed by men and monsters alike. But now, in her retirement, she had turned her attention to a different kind of darkness – the hidden truths lurking within the corridors of power.

On Archive Today, the original has been restored, but above you can see that it was modified to contain Jani Patokallio for a while.

Is Ghostarchive related to Archive Today?

I am not sure on this. A few people suggest it, but reading through the referenced posts, the only correlation seems that Ghostarchive seems to use a similar encoding for their archived page IDs.

If you want to check for yourself:

Related blog posts

The list is in reverse chronological order of writing (this might differ from publishing date).

Queries

--jeroen

This entry was posted on 2026/08/11 at 18:00 and is filed under Archive Today controversy, archive.is / archive.today, Archiving, Internet, InternetArchive, Power User, WayBack machine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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