
Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community, group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.
The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.
This collection contains the output of many Archive Team projects, both ongoing and completed. Thanks to the generous providing of disk space by the Internet Archive, multi-terabyte datasets can be made available, as well as in use by the Wayback Machine, providing a path back to lost websites and work.
Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections, the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into the stacks to see what you may find.
The Archive Team Panic Downloads are full pulldowns of currently extant websites, meant to serve as emergency backups for needed sites that are in danger of closing, or which will be missed dearly if suddenly lost due to hard drive crashes or server failures.
Currently almost all functionality is locked behind a login. It might be interesting to have a way for non-users to participate in chat and maybe even play media, just by picking a username, similar to sites like cytube.
I think one possible direction here is to create a kind of temporary account when folks pick a username. This account would only have the
guestrole. It could later be "upgraded" to a proper account.There are some important things to think about there.
An alternative direction is to not have guest accounts, but have full accounts created using WebAuthn. For privacy reasons, it would have to be clear to users that they are creating a permanent account, so it would probably be a little less smooth than the guest account route. But, it would not require an email and password.
If we take the second approach, we have to make sure that users can add multiple login methods down the line. This is already a useful feature now that we have email/password login and social logins, but since WebAuthn is tied to the browser, it would be extra important for users who may have multiple devices or use different browsers on different systems.