Some random thoughts about this thrown in this discussion:
-I believe hosting old sites on any hosting company today is impossible: for security reasons a lot of older things/versions are not allowed or available, and even is something works today it's certain that support will be dropped in the (near) future.
-Even if somehow an old site is made available, it'll be a security hell and probably compromised very soon.
-Assuming there are enough resources magically to maintain it, if for example the forum software is upgraded to the current version then it won't be the preserved old site anymore.
-Getting the site locally/offline has its own difficulties: first you need to get the actual site and then you need to have all the different server resources for it to operate. One site uses database x version y, the other database abc version d.e. One site has php code version... etc

I wish some "VM for sites" or a "Docker with sites containers" existed that could wrap a whole site and it's dependencies and make it run in a frozen/read only state, but I'm afraid the number and diversity of technologies is just too big

remember when imdb shut down the message boards? there was a fuss, lots of petitions (made no difference). 'trolls' was given as the reason, i suspect cost and possible legal issues were the actual (somewhat related) reason. What happened after? Lots of attempts to set up the "new forum" by disparate groups, most failed - but moviechat seemed to manage it and last Imdb forums were very active

However when sites are no longer updated and forums have slowed to a crawl any attempt to "keep it going" is unlikely to work. i like archive too, i don't think it can exist forever, the costs must be huge and there is constant sniping at it from those who don't want you to freely access things.

It's possible that #1 or #2 may work, but honestly i suspect #3 is more realistic. Putting resources online means doing things and paying for things and you may stumble into both legal and security problems with old sites too. It's those costs and required work that eventually kill off websites.

So much has been lost already: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2338264/new-r … e-internet.html

It's going to happen at an accelerated rate now that being a website means just feeding an LLM, what's in it for the website creators?

Why would you ever want to run the original hosting web server and database? Any kind of dynamic site is going to be a magnet for hackers and as identified require ongoing maintenance. Not to mention future platform and compatability issues... so the only sustainable long term solution is static snapshots of the web servers responses sent to the browser, like what archive.org does - as imperfect as that process currently is.

However I refer you to my post on resurrecting the alexstjohn.com site https://www.rogueone.uk/Resurrecting_www.alexstjohn.com.html which involved converting absolute URL's to relative and some automated and manual editing of the site pages to get some of the basic functionality working. Search will never work though. All in all quite a lot of effort for just one small Wordpress site. Could you imagine extending that to larger and more complex sites?

The content of the web is, and always will be, horribly transient - even within a large well resourced site during future rebrands or technology changes with older content not being migrated etc. These days if I find something interesting and potentially more at risk of disappearing due to its very specialised subject matter or hosting (e.g. obvious personal website/server) then space permitting I'll try to mirror it locally because who knows if it'll still be accessible even tomorrow, never mind in a few years time when I probably next get around to referring to it. Surely I'm not alone in doing this, but that's more likley to be for smaller sites and not larger sites or forums.

Funny thing is Vogons*exists because of other sites closing down.

The Vogons forum was somewhat created to fill the gap when VDMSound closed then Quest Studios not long after. (this is why they are often mentioned)
Vogons drivers was created in response to one of the large hardware manufactures removing drivers, Intel maybe?
Vogons Wiki I think did exist beforehand but really kicked off when Wikipedia removed the EAX game list from their site and the community.

Archive.org does an amazing job of an impossible task, and agree would be really cool to archive some of the above sites whole but realistically it'll never happen for a number of reasons.
This is why I keep offline copies of both information and files. That I have full control over, and can always upload somewhere if ever needed.

This issue is not just tied to computing, but to modern culture as a whole. As we currently stand, we will likely lose almost all modern culture that is published digitally, because preservation is hard. Rights management, the ability to edit our own histories, changing laws, and corporate profit all conspire against it.

In the old days, things got printed in a book. Books burn, and are thrown away and lost, but often enough, a book ignored for several hundred years actually is still readable. Putting a digital storage device of any sort on a shelf and expecting it to be readable in 300 years is of course absurd. The longest lasting digital archive media that we currently possess in large quantity is half-inch tape (IBM 726 in 1952), and that is becoming more and more expensive, not less, since fewer and fewer companies archive to tape every year.

To overcome this will take a societal movement, of which Internet Archive, and other similar organizations, are a part. Right-to-repair, music, film, and video games preservation groups are critical, in that they both preserve and fight to change attitudes around preservation. Changes in law, and public interest in preservation are also critical.

- Alex

ajacocks wrote on 2025-10-13, 18:24:

To overcome this will take a societal movement, of which Internet Archive, and other similar organizations, are a part. Right-to-repair, music, film, and video games preservation groups are critical, in that they both preserve and fight to change attitudes around preservation. Changes in law, and public interest in preservation are also critical.

Yes, and to some extent such movements gain some limited power or influence. If you're in the middle of it then the movement probably feels enormous... until you check in to some mainstream interest - celeb fandom, tiktok virals, aaa games and generally getting angry online - and then you realise its tiny, a glass of water against a waterfall

new generations of masses are being 'trained', well getting used to, the idea that nothing is permanent, nothing is owned and nothing needs preserving

And now generative AI means search is LLMs, and the motivation to create freely available content is reduced everywhere. why bother, the only visitor will be a scraper. The knock on effect is less and less actual 'www' users over time, less money to make, more paywalls with smaller subsets of divided people, and with that - the eventual disappearance of it all, include archives. well, i hope not - but sometimes difficult to feel optimistic!

Yes, the scope of the problem is much wider than tech/computing.

Music geeks and musicians may remember a website named RockDetector, a relatively early victim of this phenomenon. Throughout the '00s it was an an absolute gold mine of information on rock/metal/punk musicians and bands - biographies, discographies, detailed histories, member associations, family trees, and whatnot. This was all original research compiled by a single music journalist, Garry Sharpe-Young, who had been at it for decades upon decades and was a one-man fountain of knowledge - none of it was copied from other online sources, and many of the details were literally not available anywhere else.

The problem was how the content was organized (or rather wasn't). Navigation was wonky, and there was no interface to actually *browse* artist entries - you absolutely had to use the search form. The URL hierarchy was country and hometown first, and the artist name last, but you couldn't browse by location either. So there was no way to find a particular entry through a URL you didn't already have, and the site contents could never be crawled, archived or indexed in the usual way (by following links that generate GET requests).

At some point it was rebranded to 'MusicMight' along with a major update to the website, but the navigation and organization issues were never fixed (on the contrary, I seem to remember them getting even more broken). A couple of years after that, Garry passed away... and it didn't take long before the whole thing simply vanished, with everything gone in a puff of smoke.

Of course, because most of the URLs could only ever be accessed via the search form, very few of them ever made it to the Wayback Machine. And the ones that did were the least-valuable ones (the absolute 'biggest names', which happened to be featured on the homepage, and are popular enough for most of the information to be available elsewhere). The piles of piles of information truly unique to the site are now irretrievably lost.

So whenever an important website goes tits-up without being archived, I'm like "another one pulls a RockDetector". I still don't know if there even *is* an effective way to archive and preserve sites like that.

VileR wrote on 2025-10-14, 13:45:

Yes, the scope of the problem is much wider than tech/computing. […]
Show full quote

Yes, the scope of the problem is much wider than tech/computing.

Music geeks and musicians may remember a website named RockDetector, a relatively early victim of this phenomenon. Throughout the '00s it was an an absolute gold mine of information on rock/metal/punk musicians and bands - biographies, discographies, detailed histories, member associations, family trees, and whatnot. This was all original research compiled by a single music journalist, Garry Sharpe-Young, who had been at it for decades upon decades and was a one-man fountain of knowledge - none of it was copied from other online sources, and many of the details were literally not available anywhere else.

The problem was how the content was organized (or rather wasn't). Navigation was wonky, and there was no interface to actually *browse* artist entries - you absolutely had to use the search form. The URL hierarchy was country and hometown first, and the artist name last, but you couldn't browse by location either. So there was no way to find a particular entry through a URL you didn't already have, and the site contents could never be crawled, archived or indexed in the usual way (by following links that generate GET requests).

At some point it was rebranded to 'MusicMight' along with a major update to the website, but the navigation and organization issues were never fixed (on the contrary, I seem to remember them getting even more broken). A couple of years after that, Garry passed away... and it didn't take long before the whole thing simply vanished, with everything gone in a puff of smoke.

Of course, because most of the URLs could only ever be accessed via the search form, very few of them ever made it to the Wayback Machine. And the ones that did were the least-valuable ones (the absolute 'biggest names', which happened to be featured on the homepage, and are popular enough for most of the information to be available elsewhere). The piles of piles of information truly unique to the site are now irretrievably lost.

So whenever an important website goes tits-up without being archived, I'm like "another one pulls a RockDetector". I still don't know if there even *is* an effective way to archive and preserve sites like that.

Oof... yeah, that's very sad.

Reminds me of another non-tech related one that at first glance doesn't seem like a big issue but was actually quite a loss. http://www.club-mst3k.com/ was a site for fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and it was mainly used for finding links to watch the episodes, seeing the user ratings (laughs) on episodes to pick out the best ones and finding other information about the show. However, it also had various fan contributed content and a forum\comment section for each episode... and this wasn't a trivial amount of content since the site was around, I believe, since either the late 90s or the early 2000s.

The site just vanished in 2022. Of course, links to watch the shows have popped up elsewhere and archive.org has the website itself available, but the forums\comments are gone. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal either, but it was 20+ years of often very insightful information from people that were obviously huge fans of B-movies and knew things about the movies, actors and directors that have mostly been lost to time. The comments often answered all sorts of questions one might have after watching a confusingly bad movie (why did they do this??), to the point that it massively enhanced the experience. Also, for a show based almost entirely on saying funny things about movies, the comments section was PURE GOLD for hilarious comments that either riff on things that the makers of the show missed, or that explain the really really obscure references the show made (of which there were many).

Finally, the very nature of the show tends to resonate with nostalgic types that are interested in goofy and obscure pop-culture things from the past, making the loss of 20 years of "stuff" related to the topic sting a bit more.

All in all, a HUGE loss to the community for a show that has upwards of 350 hours of episodes filled with obscure references and other things that benefit from discussion.

Another good example of this is the "FilePlanet Save" archive. Everything was mirrored before the original site and its subdomains went into the sunset in 2012. Unfortunately, it's very hard to navigate the data since it is in large globs on Archive.org, but there is a rough index of the files at least. You have to know what you are looking for or you will be spending a lot of time hunting otherwise. At least the data was saved regardless.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-12, 01:35:

iXBT Labs (which is still online but almost all of the images and charts are gone)

That's the english version, all old materials are still there on the main russian site. So nothing is lost. Although a bunch of stuff was done via flash and stuck forever there, so it's not accessible via modern browser.

liqmat wrote on 2025-10-14, 15:59:

Another good example of this is the "FilePlanet Save" archive. Everything was mirrored before the original site and its subdomains went into the sunset in 2012. Unfortunately, it's very hard to navigate the data since it is in large globs on Archive.org, but there is a rough index of the files at least. You have to know what you are looking for or you will be spending a lot of time hunting otherwise. At least the data was saved regardless.

Oh, that's a good one! Yeah, Fileplanet was an integral part of my life for many years, heh. I had no idea that anyone had archived it.

Man... it definitely seems like we could use some kind of VM for running old websites as someone mentioned earlier.

It's such a frustrating thing though. If we had the chance to preserve or copy spoken conversations, letters, books, art, etc. throughout the years, I feel like it'd be a no-brainer. "Yes, absolutely, preserve that so it isn't lost to time." ... and here we are in the digital age when we can literally copy things a hundred times over with little effort, and we are still losing tens of thousands of hours of people's passion and hard work to such earth shattering problems as "The ads aren't bringing in enough money to pay for the hosting, so I have to shut it down."

I bet if someone paid for a small team of people to track down website owners\hosts and figure out ways to preserve lost websites it would actual get done. Even if the data doesn't get put online immediately and needs sanitized for personal info, at least it'd be with people intent on preserving it rather than sitting somewhere in a server rack or in a tote in a basement, on a hard drive that is going to be scrapped eventually.

I suppose people are aware of this:

https://netpreserve.org/web-archiving/tools-and-software/

In many cases, people who were responsible for or owned old websites/community forums are not reachable anymore, or content was made offline by the company operating it.

The lesson here is if you know of such a website/forums currently online, back it up yourself before it vanishes, even if said website keeps being updated after your backup's date, it's still useful.

lolo799 wrote on Yesterday, 10:06:

The lesson here is if you know of such a website/forums currently online, back it up yourself before it vanishes, even if said website keeps being updated after your backup's date, it's still useful.

Unfortunately in practice you can't always backup a site you don't own. Think of the simple example of a forum + a database, how would you get it? So such an effort cannot be a "community" effort, not even wayback machine has archived those.

konc wrote on Yesterday, 10:23:

Unfortunately in practice you can't always backup a site you don't own. Think of the simple example of a forum + a database, how would you get it? So such an effort cannot be a "community" effort, not even wayback machine has archived those.

As hornet1990 wrote earlier, you end up with a static backup, server dependant functions won't work but every linked item will be saved, it's better than nothing.

Individual sites going down are bad enough, but then there are situations like providers closing like AOL Hometown, Geocities, and others from back in the day where hundreds, thousands even of hobby pages just get axed and very few re-establish elsewhere. Dynamic DNS service and Image service shutdowns do their own damage too. The next one to worry about is Wordpress I think, I think there are some sites where the dependency might not be obvious that will cease to work if that goes down also.

Not sure if there are Vogon interest sites that are in this next class, but there's "lights on, nobody home" zombie sites that were useful when their info was somewhat current, like TVFool.com which let you find out where all your local FTA TV signals were. But the admin went AWOL over a decade ago and new channel assignments and transmitter positions and strengths are not updated. It's kinda sorta useful still in that the transmitters that were there in 2012 are probably still mostly in service, but what is on them might vary greatly.

Not just tech.
In the early days of the net many woodworkers interested in hand tools started to organize and discuss. On mailing lists and on Usenet. When web browsers started, many started personal web sites.

Woodworking was all hand tools once. When industrialization got going you had sawmills that were water and wind powered. Eventually you had whole factories with machines that made things.
Hand tools persisted with the handyman and there were things that needed to be done on site. In the 40s and 50s, portable power tools started to get used. They required less skill to produce the same amount of work. In some cases more work (pneumatic nail guns are not always faster than a hammers for framing crews, even today).

Professional woodworkers moved away from hand tools. Hobbiests also moved towards machines. By the 70s, there was little demand for hand tools and most companies stopped making them. The knowledge of how to use and make them and why they were made that way faded.

With the email lists, hobbiests started researching and sharing knowledge. They talked to people that had trained professionally before the power tool transition. And they put it in books, in scholarly or hobby journals, on personal web sites and later in forums.

Many of these users have passed away or have moved on. One woodworker had his business burn down in the paradise fire and its website is gone along with research that was made available. Some sites are continued as a memorial, but for how long? Some of this information is endangered again because it never made it into books or journals. I hope enough enthusiasts keep it going.

It's not just us computer geeks

What is it about the old sites that keeps us wanting to preserve them? Is it the information they contained and content like benchmark charts? Or is it nostalgia?

I'm sure there is enough old hardware among tech enthusiasts like ourselves that we can recreate the benchmarks. But without a central place to keep them, it would just be scattered among many forum posts or youtube videos. And it would not have the same article content, presented as if the hardware was just released, diving into all sorts of technical info that was cutting edge at the time.

tbuskey wrote on Yesterday, 23:12:

Not just tech. In the early days of the net many woodworkers interested in hand tools started to organize and discuss. On maili […]
Show full quote

Not just tech.
In the early days of the net many woodworkers interested in hand tools started to organize and discuss. On mailing lists and on Usenet. When web browsers started, many started personal web sites.
..
It's not just us computer geeks

you're right - i've known various old places on line that have gone - all kinds of interests. the 'www' as it was called is old enough for a number of people to have died and their content go too.

Regarding hand tools - while i have some power tools (old ones, but then hey were on vogons so its ok 😀 ) - i also use hand tools and try to maintain at least some modest ability. I'd never get a job a a carpenter but i can at least repair some things and construct something sturdy enough to use - such skills at low levels can be regained quickly. i'd imagine in a world robbed of tech it would only be a decade before various people, through sheer practice, become master craftsmen in their fields again, but the higher up the tech chain you go the harder it becomes to recapture anything lost

pixel_workbench wrote on Today, 16:14:

What is it about the old sites that keeps us wanting to preserve them? Is it the information they contained and content like benchmark charts? Or is it nostalgia?

I'm sure there is enough old hardware among tech enthusiasts like ourselves that we can recreate the benchmarks. But without a central place to keep them, it would just be scattered among many forum posts or youtube videos. And it would not have the same article content, presented as if the hardware was just released, diving into all sorts of technical info that was cutting edge at the time.

i think you answer it here.

It is the information - but its also so the presentation

and some nostalgia, just seeing old things can grant a wave of nostalgia and appreciation for all things, at least i find that