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Internet Archive Needs Donations, Has Matching Donor
The Internet Archive curates an astounding collection (actually, a collection of collections) of online resources, from historically significant to modern but obscure. Storing, serving and organizing more than 10 petabytes isn't cheap, despite their ongoing efforts to innovate on that front. An anonymous reader writes "An anonymous donor is matching $3 for every $1 given (up to $450,000) until December 31. One petabyte has been paid for so far and the archive is looking at getting three more. 'These massive servers are the backbone of the Archive, and critical to our continued growth. To all of you who've contributed to our fundraising drive, thanks from all of us here at the Internet Archive. '"
Here's the link to donate just in case the editor's oversite would be enough to disuade you.
Should we support them despite their unwillingness to keep records for websites which later-on put a robots.txt on their domain?
I can understand recently archived material being removed, but when someone buys a domain down the line and puts a robots.txt on their new site, it removes ALL OF THE PAST MATERIAL! And it seems that Archive.org tends to ignore the problem.
I wonder where the national support is. They're basically doing the job of the Library of Congress, the British Library etc., in terms of being a record keeper of published material. You'd think those organisations (and there must be dozens and dozens of them throughout the world; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit) could each chip in a few thousand dollars a year, wouldn't you?
And they accept Bitcoin ( http://archive.org/about/faqs.php#311 ). They've received 686btc so far( http://blockchain.info/address/17gN64BPHtxi4mEM3qWrxdwhieUvRq8R2r ). Not bad.
I was recently involved in producing a feature length creative commons film. we wanted to make it available as a http download (as well as bittorrent and streaming via youtube). we used internet archive. its been downloaded over 25k times from them. finding a commercial host that could manage that would have cost a fair bit of money (which we don't have). so thanks archive.org, hope my donation helps.
Really? Did you just call a guy who ACTUALLY donated a cheapskate?
Compare how often you use your mobile data plan and/or ISP to how often you use archive.org's services. I use my ISP every single day, for hours, and couldn't get a lot of my work done without them. I still gripe about how much I'm forced to pay them, too! By comparison, I've maybe looked for one site (which wasn't there) on archive.org in the last year or two.
They need $150,000 in donations. At BenJeremy's $5 level, they'd only need 30,000 donors. Just gonna guess his donation will come in well above the median for users of the site.
Might I suggest that you are a cheapskate.
$25/annum = 7 cents ($0.07) per day.
How much do you pay for your mobile data plan and/or ISP?
So, it would have been better for me to look at the $25 level, say "too much" and walk away without donating anything? At least people wouldn't berate me.
I have to wonder how many people looked at that $25 level and said, "too much" - probably a lot of money walked away from that page. People willing to donate $25 will pay $25. They don't need a minimum suggested level.
As for your math, I've used the archives fewer times than I can count on my fingers.... I don't use it every day. It's faulty logic to calculate what this sort of service is worth to an individual... even individuals use the archives differently, some to dig up old content from a site they might have once gone to, others use it to recover content they once had on their own sites; the latter might be inclined to (and should) give more - I'm not in that group.
Many things on /. are worthy of debate and lead to much trolling. This isn't. This is a Good Thing. I'm throwing in a couple bucks and anyone old enough to remember what a phone call and how pagers work should too.
Amazon payments charges:
Transactions greater than or equal to $10.00: 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. So a $25 donation yields $23.97 to archive.org, or 95 cents on the dollar.
Transactions less than or equal to $9.99: 5.0% + $0.05 per transaction. So a $5 donation yields $4.70, or 94 cents on the dollar.
Now, they are most likely using Amazon's volume payment system, so are paying between 2.2 and 2.5% + $0.30 per transaction, but only for transactions greater than $9.99. Let's assume the lower rate (although it's calculated as a 3-month average, so I doubt they're eligible). Now a $25 donation yields $24.15, or 96 cents on the dollar. It's just not as cost-effective for them to solicit tiny donations (btw, PayPal's rates are similar).
As to the worth of the service, whether you use it or not, archive.org is still there 24/7/365. Would you prefer to submit your query and then wait 72 hours for the results?
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
...until they actually make their archives downloadable to the general public. Their TOS expressly prohibits downloading from the site, which makes their archive useless to the masses. And don't tell me about Warrick...I'm well aware of it, as well as the fact that they haven't been accepting submissions for months.
Here's the relevant cite from the FAQ:
Can people download sites from the Wayback?
Our terms of use specify that users of the Wayback Machine are not to copy data from the collection. If there are special circumstances that you think the Archive should consider, please contact info at archive dot org.