The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

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[–] 43 points 7 months ago

From Wikipedia

As of 13:27, 19 February 2026 (UTC), the owners are now batch-replacing certain names in archived pages with the real name of the gyrovague.com webmaster as a form of harassment.

The top piece of evidence (not in any special order) was redacted due to "revealing personal information".

Other subsequent pieces of evidence were retained but names were replaced with abbreviations

I have another evidence of tampering: this is a Megalodon archive of a archive.ph archive of a post. The original post is now dead. Patokallio mentions this post in his blog – he would surely mention if the post mentioned him, in the way the archived version does. He quoted the original [N.P.] was a woman[...], while the archive.ph reads Jani Patokallio was a woman[...]

Another example:

Sometime today, Archive.today replaced the name with the equivalent amount of spaces (only where N...'s name used to be). Ironically, "Jani Patokallio" is of the same length as "N...".

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  • [–] 42 points 7 months ago (10 children)

    Should I stop using archive.ph then? I mostly used it because it's a lot faster than archive.org, which is a bit clunkier to use.

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  • [–] [S] 22 points 7 months ago

    Well, for accessing paywalled articles .org is no replacement for .ph/.today, sadly. But it's advisable to use it as little as possible, it seems using visitors for DDoS'ing the blog is still going on.

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    GhostArchive came up in discussions.

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  • [–] 23 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    The problem that web.archive.org and ghostarchive.org both have is that they regularly fail to archive content

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Understandable. Archive.today is really good at getting website content, but their methods are proprietary and a little dubious.

    If you just want to save things locally, I believe Single File is really good. It downloads the page that you see on your browser, as you see it.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Also, as the name indicates, it downloads the page as a single file. Obviously, it doesn't help for archiving the page for other people, though.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Couldn't you host it somewhere yourself? I guess there's a question of trust there, but trust is the reason Wikipedia has decided to stop using archive.today

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  • [–] 19 points 7 months ago

    When I said that Wikipedia should take it seriously and rip off the bandaid as quick as possible when the DDoS's started, a few didn't believe me when I said there was no reason to trust the content anymore if archive[.]today decided malicious activity using their traffic was okay. The owner's ehtics (or lack thereof) showed that nothing stopped them from maliciously altering the content either, making any reason to hang on to the archive site null and void.

    To those people doubting my perspective: Called it.

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