Passively Saving The Old Forum Using the Wayback Machine

Community Related
1

Disclaimer: I am naive to web technologies and the Wayback machine. Please feel free to correct, critique, and improve my proposal.
Please forgive my grammar
This is a re-posting. I had previously posted it in the wrong category

TLDR

Given that the old forum will only be available

The idea is to have it so that whenever we visit the old forum, the page we are on gets automatically archived.

My Suggestion

The Wayback machine has a Chrome extension that automatically detects if the page has been archived. It can also be set up to automatically archive a page not previously archived.

This is the link to the featured Wayback Machine extension

I am proposing a relatively passive way of archiving the old forum pages that will only involve:

  • Installing a different browser from your primary one (Optional)

  • Making a free archive.org account (Optional)

  • Installing an official Chrome extension.

  • Browsing/interacting with the old forum.

Installing another Browser

I suggest that you download another Chromium-based browser.

This will ideally be where you browse the old forum and where you set up the Wayback extension.

I imagine that this will protect your privacy by having the archiving done on a browser you don’t use as your primary.

I personally use the Vivaldi browser because of its nested tree feature making it an amazing tool for research, especially when it involves opening multiple tabs. It can also save all the tabs opened as a session that can be opened whenever I want.

Making a free archive.org account

This will offer you the option of saving Outlinks.

Setting up the ‘Wayback Machine’ extension.

  1. Select the extensions icon then select the ‘Wayback Machine’ icon.

    WbM 2 click

    The icon informs you if it is currently archiving, if the page has been successfully archived, and how many times the page has been archived previously so you could also pin it if you want to.

  2. This is the first thing you will see. After reading, select ‘Accept and Enable’

WbM landing page 1
WbM landing page 11256×871 173 KB

  1. This is what it looks like when not logged in and when logged in.

WbM 3 without log in WbM 4 with log in

  1. I would recommend logging in so as to get the ability to check the ‘Outlinks’ options.
    The way I understand it is that this option saves more of the webpage by crawling some of the links.

WbM 5 Outlinks clicked

  1. This is what the general setting looks like

WbM 6 General settings

  1. Check the ‘Auto Save Pages’. This is what will set it up so as to automatically archive the forums whenever you visit it

WbM 7 Auto save desc

  1. You have the option of setting it up so as to not archive what has already been archived.

WbM 8 Auto save duration

  1. In the Context settings select the ‘Wayback Machine Count’ if you so please.

WbM 9 context settings

Miscellenious

Here is an amazing video breaking down the extension and other Wayback features in a more detailed way.

For example;

bulk archive
bulk archive1148×634 298 KB

Craig Silverman’s workshop on Wayback Machine

Challenges

  • The archived pages do not link to each other, thus this archiving process doesn’t create a coherent/navigatable website.

  • The archived pages do not appear on ‘My Web Archives’

Thank you for taking the time to read this suggestion.

3 Likes
2

♥♥

3

This is an incredibly important topic that doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves.

Due to the current geopolitical situation and the resulting… “difficulties”, shall we say, in accessing military archives, the information about certain topics contained in the old forum might be pretty much all we will get access to during our lifetimes.

4

Just saw this and I’m going to bump this again because it’s very important.

2 Likes
5

People, We all need to do this.

1 Like