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…

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!