It all started when this came across my Twitter feed:<\/p>\n
A Zerg rush on Yahoo? \u00a0Say what? \u00a0I had visited textfiles.com<\/a>, an archive of hacker lore, in the past and knew that Jason Scott did interesting things, but had no idea what he was up to now.<\/p>\n It didn’t take much poking around to figure out what’s up. \u00a0Yahoo has announced that their Message Boards<\/a> service is being discontinued at the end of the month. \u00a0Of course, there’s no lack of options for places on the web for folks to talk, although I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that there are a few niche communities on the boards that will have to scramble to find a new home. \u00a0What can’t be replaced, of course, are the past discussions — and those were made by the users of the service, not by Yahoo. \u00a0So far, it doesn’t sound like Yahoo is interested in providing an archive.<\/p>\n That’s where the Archive Team<\/a> comes in. \u00a0From their homepage:<\/p>\n Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions – and done our best to save the history before it’s lost forever.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Sometimes they’ve been able to save the content of a service that’s going dark just by asking for a copy. \u00a0Often, however, it has been necessary to crawl the website before the clock runs out.<\/p>\n That’s where the crowdsourcing comes in: by downloading a virtual machine, you too can have your computer become a “Warrior<\/a>” and use some of its bandwidth to crawl dying websites, then send the data back to the Archive Team’s archive. \u00a0From there, the data gets collocated and sent to a variety of places, including the Internet Archive.<\/p>\n![\"@textfiles](\"https:\/\/galencharlton.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/zerg2-1024x256.png\" "\\"@textfiles")
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