Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today after alleged DDoS attack

Wikipedia editors decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that they said had been linked more than 695,000 times across the online encyclopedia.

Archive.today – which also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph – is perhaps most widely used to access content that is otherwise inaccessible through a paywall. This also makes it useful as a source for Wikipedia citations.

However, according to the Wikipedia discussion page on the topic, “there is consensus to stop archive.today immediately, and add it to the spam blacklist as soon as possible.” […] And remove all links to it immediately. (Ars Technica first reported the decision.)

The discussion page says Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013, only to be removed from the blacklist in 2016.

Why reverse course again? Because, as the discussion page says, “Wikipedia should not point its readers toward a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack.” In addition, “evidence was presented that the operators of archive.today changed the content of the archived pages, making them unreliable.”

The DDoS attack in question was allegedly directed at blogger Jani Patocaliou. Patokallio wrote that starting on January 11, users who loaded the archive’s CAPTCHA page downloaded and executed a JavaScript that sent a search request to his Gyrovague blog, in an apparent attempt to get Patokallio’s attention and increase his hosting bill.

Back in 2023, Patocallio published a blog post about Archive.today, whose ownership he described as a “mystery.” Although he could not track down a specific owner, he concluded that the site was likely “a one-person labor of love, run by a Russian of great talent with access to Europe.”

Recently, Patocallio said the webmaster at Archive.today asked him to remove the post for two or three months.

“I don’t mind this post, but the problem is: journalists from major media outlets (Heise, Verge, etc.) pick out just a few words from your blog, then build completely different narratives so that your post is the only source that can be cited; then they cite each other and produce a poor result to present to a wide audience,” the webmaster said, according to emails shared by Patocallio.

After he refused to remove the post, the site’s moderator responded with an “increasing series of agitated threats,” Patocallio said.

Wikipedia editors also pointed to web page screenshots at Archive.today that appeared to have been edited to include Patocallio’s name – hence the concern that it had become “unreliable” as an archive.

Wikipedia’s guidelines now call for editors to remove links to Archive.today and related sites, and replace them with links to the original source or to other archives such as the Wayback Machine.

In a blog post linked to Archive.today, the site’s ostensible owner wrote that Archive.today’s value to Wikipedia “is not about the paywall” but rather “the ability to get rid of copyright issues.” They later wrote that things went “very well” and said they would “reduce the scope of DDoS attacks.”

“Why didn’t you write about such events earlier, newspaper people?” They said. “I don’t expect you to write anything good, because then who will read you, but there was a lot of drama, wasn’t there? Because there was no unsub to poke you?”