And just like that, archive.today lost all of it's legitimacy.

The stupid threats were bad, but now they are messing with the accuracy of the data collected, calling in question their entire archive.

In emails sent to Patokallio after the DDoS began, “Nora” from Archive.today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name. These threats were discussed by Wikipedia editors in their deliberations over whether to blacklist Archive.today, and then editors noticed that Patokallio’s name had been inserted into some Archive.today captures of webpages.

Ok, yes go fuck yourself archive,today

The Wikipedia guidance points out that the Internet Archive and its website, Archive.org, are “uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.” The Internet Archive is a nonprofit based in the US.

Fuck, I got scared for a second. Glad it's entirely separate.

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...".

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.

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.

Here's the relevant archive.today guidance page on Wikipedia for anyone curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidance

If you have a Wikipedia account, you can help replace these links!
Go to the How you can help section, then click on the search links for any of the given domains, and you can go and manually re-archive any links with Archive.org, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon.

Crap. Obviously, I'm gonna gotta stop using archive.today, but it's the only way around paywalls at numerous sites.

Removepaywalls.com (plural) inserts ads, often for shady operations.

Removepaywall.com (singular) usually works, but it's tricky sharing the links (i.e., "choose option 2" or "choose option 4").

Byebyepaywall.com has old, dead options.

Wayback Machine bombs out a lot.

And ghostarchive.org is successful so rarely it's really a last resort.

Anyone know of any others?

Absolute dumbass. Truly a self-own for the ages.

Play stupid games, ...

In emails sent to Patokallio after the DDoS began, “Nora” from Archive.today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name. These threats were discussed by Wikipedia editors in their deliberations over whether to blacklist Archive.today, and then editors noticed that Patokallio’s name had been inserted into some Archive.today captures of webpages.

“Honestly, I’m kind of in shock,” one editor wrote. “Just to make sure I’m understanding the implications of this: we have good reason to believe that the archive.today operator has tampered with the content of their archives, in a manner that suggests they were trying to further their position against the person they are in dispute with???”

That and their refusal to talk to any journalist who references information about Patokallio’s blog makes archive.today unreliable.

Fuck them.

I half thought this was archive.org they were blacklisting. Two whole different sites.

Is there a reason self hosted paywall bypass tools don’t exist? Is it because these services pay for access?

Dammit. Everyone's been using that site to get around paywalls because it works well. Now I have to go find another one that works as well. :|

Arguably the biggest problem with Wikipedia as it aged is the accumulation of dead links.

Brilliant move.

wp:archive.today

Not to be confused with arXiv or Internet Archive.

​

wp:Wikipedia:archive.today guidance