Using the Internet Archive effectively

Tired of “losing” your favorite gaming site or any site that you just love to frequent for that matter. By using the Internet Archive’s “Save Page Now” feature to save snapshots of those sites you can help keep them “alive” for your future use. It used to take 6 months before the page would actually show in the archive database but now you can check right after you save it and see if it was actually saved. If you get a group together you can pool your efforts to save just about everything from a site for future use.

  1. Go to the Wayback website: Internet Archive: Wayback Machine
  2. Paste the URL of the page you want to archive into the Save Page Now box (at the bottom-right).
  3. Click on the Save Page button (or press enter).
  4. Wait while the page is being crawled. Once the archiving process is complete, the URL of the archived page appears.

Not every link or page on a site will be able to be archived but most sites allow spiders to crawl most of their content so it will show up in search engines. This can also be used as a tool for Administrators to see if they are allowing the things they don’t care are Archived to be Archived and stop spiders from Archiving things they don’t want to be Archived by changing their forums robot.txt permissions.

Wheels

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Nice!

https://web.archive.org/web/20050315035601/http://www.mudspike.com/

Still waiting for those Jane’s F/A-18 Training AARs @BeachAV8R :wink:

We also used to have a forum made up mainly of dried saliva and masking tape:

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Now I’m sad. Poor Blooze. o7

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Just a quick reminder that the great site you lost may have some or most of it still available at the Internet Archive. You can even help things along if you use their “Save Page Now” feature.

Wheels

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I just had an incredible sunday morning coffee and a trip down memory lane, thanks to this thread…

I was a member of SimHQ since Crimson started the place, and became a Contributing Editor and admin there, back in the last millennium.
Needless to say, that site has meant a lot to me and was my virtual home for many years. I won’t go into why I left it, but let’s just say it was no longer the site Crim started…
I was by no means the most active contributor there, but I wrote some articles that I’m proud of. Articles that have been lost in HDD failures and are no longer accesible from the site.
Imagine my delight when I was able to find several of them via the wayback site!!

This is, I believe, the first TrackIR review, written for flightsimming.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020220124547/http://www.simhq.com/simhq3/hardware/reviews/trackir/

Or the CH Yoke review I did in flightschool…

https://web.archive.org/web/20000609214914/http://www.simhq.com/simhq3/hardware/reviews/ch_yoke/ch_yoke.shtml

The X-Plane 5.40 review, where I state I hate unfinished software…! :smile:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020220150841/http://www.simhq.com/simhq3/sims/reviews/xplane/

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You ain’t kiddin’. I was never active over there until Longbow 2 had a brief resurgence in '05-'07, playing with a lot of big names at the time. It seems so surreal to think I played LB2 with PositiveG back then; it’s hard to fathom just how much changed in a comparatively short period of time.

The internet Archive is like stepping back in time, looking through a prism to see how things were.

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Glad I was able to help you relives some old memories Troll. :sunglasses:

Wheels

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@Troll, unfortunately SimHQ spiraled into a cesspool of negativity and vitriol on the DCS sub forum. Spoiled by a small group of malcontents who would gang up on anyone who had anything positive to say about DCS and Eagle Dynamics. It didn’t help that the moderator for that part of the site was more than happy to let that go on (I suspect because he had himself been banned from the ED forums). It all added up to a very toxic environment. So after 15 years of active membership, I walked away.

Mudspike rocks. That is all I have to say about that… :wink:

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Ah, back when they still had articles. It’s like remembering back when MTV showed music videos.

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I remember the positive sides of SimHQ, from the glory days.
I suggest we all try to do that, in the spirit of the thread…

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Wow…the e-mail link is still valid on that page…haha… And those Longbow 2 AARs were fun stuff.