@Camazotz || Journal Entry
Masiel U

ARCHIVE EVERYTHING
20 Mar 2024, 01:50 AM

earlier this year, VCL, an ancient furry archive shut down, if it weren’t for someone who saw this coming and archived ,,, the archive themselves, it all would be lost forever by now 🧍‍♂️

Comments (7)

Posted: Wednesday, 20 March, 2024 @ 06:37 AM

Good grief, VCL was one of my entry points to furry art online. It was so old it was still metering searches even around 2010, so it was pretty easily eclipsed by later sites. I'm kinda surprised it survived this long: last I'd looked it seemed abandoned.

VCL was definitely of a time, but I'm pleasantly surprised to find artists I first encountered there that are still alive on DA. No luck luring 'em here yet though. :P

Anyway, this got me poking around WikiFur and... someone needs to update Side 7's page. XD

Posted: Wednesday, 20 March, 2024 @ 12:21 PM

@Dionysus: Woah, that is way out of date. Funny thing is, I never set up this page. I had forgotten it existed! So, I will definitely need to go update that.

Posted: Wednesday, 20 March, 2024 @ 10:25 PM

@BadKarma: Most of the wikis I've been involved with are/were for insular projects so we were self-curating by necessity, but I often get curious how frequently bigshot creators manage their own fandom. ;p

Posted: Wednesday, 20 March, 2024 @ 12:22 PM

Yeah, definitely archive everything. Do not rely on web sites to always be there and hold your stuff. I generally keep 2-3 copies of important stuff: one local copy, one copy in cloud storage, and if it's posted to a site, a third copy on that site.

Posted: Wednesday, 20 March, 2024 @ 10:49 PM

@BadKarma: My DYOS stuff alone is stored in 3+ separate locations, though not necessarily to the same integrity. I literally have backups of backups. ||||||:^{3> (Which reminds me, I still need to finish the index of all the broken pages at large...)

But yeah, as someone who's worked in archiving, I really oughta join archive.org. I'd mentioned to Masiel before that the phantom memories of DeviantArt pieces and YT videos now unpersoned continue to ritually haunt me. (dA is the worst because the spider crawls often failed to probe the nest: they'll save the work's gallery page, but not always the actual image.) As I've said on a few occasions, something that immediately alarmed me about B*zzly was that its JavaScript design obstructed Wayback snapshots of meaningful data. Given everything we've seen, it's basically a coin-toss whether that was down to accident or intent. :/

Posted: Thursday, 21 March, 2024 @ 01:40 AM

@Thorvald: have you tried archive.today? i’ve seen it archive some pages like buzzly better than the waybackmachine, it also takes literal screenshots of the pages

Posted: Thursday, 21 March, 2024 @ 09:01 PM

@Camazotz: Vaguely familiar, but based on where I'd see it, for the longest time I associated it with Internet drama hit squads. :P

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