This change only affects our email subscriptions; our RSS feed will continue to be provided by Feedburner.

One change we’ll be making is about our news reports. When we first started back in January we were afraid that we would struggle to find noteworthy stories frequently. As such we’d decided to report what had happened over the previous week on Monday. Now, 5 months in, we’ve come to see that we can now switch to a more frequent schedule. So from this week henceforth, or unofficially since last week, we’ll no longer be doing weekly summaries. Instead, we’ll now be doing sporadic updates throughout the week, as news reaches us.

Secondly, for the latter half of this year, we’ll be diverting out attention to a specific issue. With Adobe (and pretty much all modern browsers) discontinuing Flash Player by the end of the year, we’re going to be prioritizing news on archival/preservational efforts on Flash. You can expect us to share a whole lot more updates and guides on BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint.

Last but not least, I’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to RetroRomper, who had been serving as a consultant, benefactor and most importantly a candid friend to all of us here at DataHorde. Following his resignation due to personal reasons, we all hope that he will now be able to find some peace of mind. Even during his last week with us, he’s offered us invaluable advice to help keep the site going and growing. We shall strive to take this to heart, and carry on the torch he’s helped us ignite.

We apologize for the hiatus, and hope to continue updates starting tomorrow.

Bit of a quick announcement. Due to being locked out of our original submissions address we’ve decided to start a new one:

datahordesubmissions AT gmail DOT com

So go ahead, feel free to submit any projects you’re involved in or websites you know to be shutting down and the like so we can cover them here.

Okay, let’s get to the point. I’m writing this article because we could use a few more writers. If you have a story near and dear to your hearts, we’d like to hear it!

Do note that our focus is on archival and preservation. So a story about some YouTube video will probably get rejected, unless it involves having six channels on a flash drive somewhere. Submissions go to submissions.datahorde (at) gmail.com. Your submissions would be much appreciated!

– glmdgrielson

They’ve helped us set this whole thing up and they’re good people! So uh, yeah, they’re the new overlords partners!

From one of the staff members themselves:

Gaming Alexandria is a community, website, and team that does everything it can to provide historical context to the cultural medium of video games. As a Staff member there, I’m really glad to have stumbled upon and given a pedestal to the folks at Datahorde.

Why? Because they’re providing a passionate, motivated, and needed resource for preservation news and insights. I’m beyond excited to see what they end up creating with their new space!

– glmdgrielson

Earlier last year, I realised that YouTube was about to delete all of their annotations. That would mean that many videos would loose important information and other videos would loose their interactivity.

After making efforts to make people archive as many annotations as possible with the help of screen recorders, a YouTube user contacted me.

Eventually I found myself on a Discord server with people dedicated to archiving annotations before the deadline (the right way, by saving the annotation codes rather than simply recording the screen).

This experience taught me the importance of archiving. Without it, some (possibly important) information could be lost forever. And this is why I am here today. I am here to help in the process of archiving content to avoid losing any data that we might regret not having in the future.

Also seeing the decline of Adobe Flash player is also very sad to me. I, like many of you, grew up playing Flash games on sites. Luckily many teams of archivists are already working on saving as many games before it’s too late. Without them, where would the Flash games be after the Flash websites remove the games due to incompatibility? Memories would be lost. Games would never be played again. Also kudos to Newgrounds for creating the Newgrounds player, which would give the user the ability to play Flash content again on their platform!

That’s it for now. I am not the best at writing; I hope my introduction wasn’t too bad.

See you soon.

I’m the mad programer, though I do go by many names online. As one of the founders of the blog I might as well give you all a short backstory…

As seems to be the case for most us founders, my story too begins on YouTube. Let’s all go back to the start of the last decade… So there I was reading through comments about how in a little game called Pokemon Platinum there was a glitch that made the game time count up to 998 hours and 59 minutes before immediately jumping to 999 hours 59 minutes and staying there forever. Someone mentioned how there was a video for it but the uploader had privated (later delisted? and even later yet reintroduced) it. On that momentous occasion I was introduced to the waybackmachine, a website that could send me way back and see websites and videos from the past. Since this was long before the fear of online immortality really hit companies, videos from the time period (circa 2010) still work although they require flash (which might not work for much longer). If you were to try a more recent video, it’ll probably just catch the related videos and comment section if you’re lucky.

After that I went about my life… Looking for something to do on long school bus trips I began binge-reading Wikipedia. Obscure movies, weird art movements, random villages, a whole bunch of history and languages… You’d think someone who’d gotten so involved in the website would have started contributing but if anything this period made me into a wiki-skeptic. For one reason or another I felt that if I were to contribute it would either be insignificant as I wouldn’t have too much to contribute outside of Wikipedia, and even that would be challenged by other users who had this same website as their primary source. This was my second encounter with the waybackmachine. Skimming through the references on Wiki pages I discovered many interesting websites, some of which were now offline. To keep them alive people would link to screenshots on the waybackmachine. I’m not sure if I discovered the trove that was archive.org from these citations or from messing around the waybackmachine, but either way I’d found myself a new library where I didn’t feel any such social alienation. The next thing I knew I was picking up old books from the 18th-19th century that time had long forgotten.

Yes, archive.org had now become my new pastime, but still I was merely a reader. I wasn’t doing much to contribute, maybe except for a handful of times that I’d archived a page or two I wanted to keep on life-support. Mine was a slow descent down the rabbit hole, that is until the YouTube annotations mess which really gave me the drive to dive into the thick of it. Since then I’ve made small tools of my own (mostly outdated) and at the very least sacrificed some of my computer’s power as manpower for projects hosted by other people.

Data Horde is my way of giving back to a community that really sheltered me through some turbulent times in my life, I can only hope I’ll do a half decent job.

Nice to me you all…

Stretching thinly as it grows ever closer

The people are overrun with fright and terror

Yet the army to liberate them draws near

In an age where even the greatest chore can be made into a convenience one would expect that life would be effortless. Perhaps in some ways it has indeed become so, but with that effortlessness comes laziness… When one no longer needs to, why should they? Thus was born a pandemic of our times, a disease of negligence and apathy…

Everyone and everything competes for worth and attention. Who you’ll spend your day with today, what works you need to finish, what songs you’ll listen to, what books you’ll read, what albums you’ll skim through… In a fair competition it is assumed that everyone plays by the rules, sad to say this isn’t one of those. Cheating is encouraged, everything goes. No time for chat, no money for books, no knowledge on that subject, no time, no money, no knowledge…

Perhaps it’s better to throw some things away, to rid oneself of burden. That man who spoke those words is no longer me, that girl in the photo was never me to begin with… A collective disdain for the past makes them trail blindly after a future that they can never reach as by the time they’ve gotten there it has no worth left to claim. Good riddance! May those moments rot as they disintegrate buried deep within the sands of time! Yet others weep, as they’ve gone too far and can no longer find their way back. They were misfortunate forgetting to neglect leaving a trail, or leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that the creatures of the woods made their evening snack.

From this chaos emerged an order, from the victims heroes…

Data Horde is a blog we’re starting to help promote data preservation, particularly online. Although there are many small contingents who define themselves as archivists or similar, most act as lone wanderers helping save whatever is in their vicinity. To remedy this, we set out on our mission with two main goals:

1. To help unite these independent groups by acting as an intermediary platform for them.
2. To inform others about archival projects and how they might get into a field which currently has a very steep learning curve or at the very least teach them about what they can do to spare themselves of trouble in the first place

We’ll periodically be posting news related to archivist groups such as

• new tools and technologies
• announcements regarding online -or perhaps even offline- information that is at risk of disappearing ( servers shutting down, websites removing features or content based on abrupt policy changes )
• ongoing projects, talking about who are coordinating them and how one can get involved
• and results of completed projects such as community revivals

I’m tech234a, and I look forward to being a contributor to this blog! I’ve have been interested in archiving for a while now, and think it would be cool to help keep the community informed about the world of archiving.

Some of my most major projects that I have led include the archiving of Google+ Comments placed on Blogger blogs as well as the archiving of video and audio content from G Suite Training/Synergyse. I have also helped out in developing tools to help access YouTube annotations after they were removed. (I made a Firefox extension called AnnotationsReloaded, but it doesn’t work any more. I have contributed to the Annotations Restored project, which does work.) I have also helped out with data discovery on plays.tv and various other websites.

I am an active participant in the Internet Trash Heap Discord server, and I also follow Archive Team activities on IRC fairly regularly.

Anyway, I look forward to helping bring you quality content from all parts of the world of archiving, through regular summary posts as well as through project feature posts.

I encourage you to stay up-to-date with the latest archiving news by following this blog with your RSS reader.

Hope to see you soon!