I do understand why it happens and I agree with your points. I agree that the source link should accompany an archive link. Several users who do post archive.today links as their OP link do include the source link in their post body and I agree that is quite proper and respectful of them to other users to include both. I am sure to do this myself as well in instances when I post any links in my comments; include the source link, an archive.today link, and sometimes an archive.org link if that site will actually archive a link for me (it refuses to many times).
I was not clear at all in my wording with my "spoiled-brats" comment and what I was referring to and I should have been. I have not seen a TOR user comment regarding only an archive.today link being provided and no source. I understand why that would be improper and useless to some. What I have seen commented toward me and others is that the source/direct link is available in the OP or in a comment and it is just that the archive.today link that is also shared along with it is not the right archive site.
That is the basis for my comment regarding my seeing people complaining about the archive.today links being supplied as being spoiled and entitled - that someone put the effort in to archive the source link that someone posted in order to be kind and help out others, but these users would then complain about it not being an archive link that they can use instead of just archiving the source link on archive.org themselves. It reminded me of a spoiled rich brat getting a red BMW for her 16th birthday who then stomps her feet and complains that it wasn't yellow or that it wasn't a Mercedes like she wanted.
Sorry for writing in an insufficient and confusing manner and I hope what I was trying to relate has come across.
Sorry for writing in an insufficient and confusing manner and I hope what I was trying to relate has come across.
No worries at all. There are some on here that think AT is god's gift to the internet, <cough cough>anticlutch<cough cough> so I like to point there are good reasons to not like AT. Like when they because they couldn't monetize it. But again, it's incredibly useful, but not benign.
We good lol
Cool. I'm glad. Thanks for the information you've shared in your posts. I try to be as informed as I am able to be on topics and I am more informed on these two archive sites now than I was prior to this discussion thanks to you.
From a functionality standpoint for my usage, while I find archive.today useful for archiving general news stories, it absolutely is a piece of shit in regards to other uses - such as in relation to archiving PDF links. Instead of it archiving the PDF file so that it can be saved like a PDF archived with archive.org, or the PDF text being viewable on-screen in its entirety or in a scrollable box, it is usually just a snapshot of the start of the file as a picture on the screen and the picture even has a scroll bar in it. I archive anything of actual importance like PDFs and science studies on the toxic injections on archive.org instead.
But I did mention I encounter some issues on there. Sometimes the saved page displays improperly like it has no CSS styling and a bunch of page elements are missing. Other times I will archive a link and it says the page was successfully saved, but I then click the archive link it gives for the page and it says that page has not been saved yet and asks if I want to save it now. When I save it again it says that the page was just archived and that pages can only be archived once every 5 minutes or something but their archived page link still brings up saying that the page isn't archived yet. Archive.org also has a list of sites that it intentionally excludes from being eligible for being archived
I'll look more into whether the archive.org issues I experience are only something on my end instead of something with them (some addon combination/conflict or cache/browser issue). If I can get archive.org to actually archive links every time without the not-actually-archived issue and have the pages display properly as they normally do on the source page, I'd prefer to switch entirely over to using it versus archive.today.
(post is archived)