Wayback Machine is a GREAT tool. It just has a few issues. The number one issue is that it isn’t great at crawling. Normal HTML sites are no problem but more complex sites like forums and especially blogs are hard for it to navigate. It tends to get only very small pieces of LiveJournal for example. The entire official Sims 3 forum from 2009-2017(?) is just gone because Wayback wasn’t able to access it.
As I’ve talked about over the past few years, I’m trying to archive a lot of CC with Archive.org. This works well for most older sites but not so well with newer ones. Plus, I’m focusing on custom content more than webpages and stories.
Stories, that people put hours and hours into, legacies, forum posts, pictures, blog posts, all things that are just TOO numerous for me to even make a dent in on my own.
Buuuut, if I could get a bunch of simmers who were actively viewing blogs and downloading content and reading forum posts to archive every post they viewed that could do something!
Wayback Machine Auto-Archiver is a bot that archives all PUBLIC webpages that you visit to the wayback machine. Think of it as a bot that follows you around taking a shot of every blog you visit. Obviously, this isn’t just for Sims content but it would certainly help the community who may go looking for the content that you archived after it’s LONG gone from the internet.
The auto-archiver is a simple extension. If you’re running Chrome or Edge you simply install it like any other extension and then you surf the web like always.
The more simmers who use it, the more content gets archived. Also, it’s entirely anonymous. If you’re a lurker and you’ve never made or posted anyway, think of this as a way to give back!
Just an update: The auto-archiver WILL download custom content under certain circumstances. It always grabs pages but if custom content is deliberately hard to reach (such as behind adfly or TSRs timer, automatic archiver won’t grab it) It DOES seem to grab MTS downloads (which are archived under skuld.modthesims.com) but if content is behind a login page it won’t necessarily get it. (Sometimes it will sometimes it won’t. It depends on how the website it set up, I guess?)
As it turns out, Mediafire content CAN be archived by this so if you visit a Mediafire page it will grab what’s there, but Mediafire uses hundreds of subdomains. It seems hit or miss. If you want to mirror content you can use the direct crawler available through Internet Archive. On the bottom right of this page, enter your URL if you’re unsure if a page you’re viewing will be grabbed by autoarchiver.
Again, PLEASE reblog this so more people see it. Having people automatically archive their own webpages and sim related content they view will be incredibly helpful in helping us preserve the community’s hard work!
