This idea was initially inspired by deleting April Fools' questions post, where funny (sometimes useful) posts (exempt toaster) are get removed from the sites, so only high-rep users can access them.
This also applies to all questions which were closed for other reason and get removed after some time, but it could be still useful to access the archived version of it (by low-rep users) for the reference.
The proposal is to implement the trigger (either automatic or manual) which would archive the page into Internet Archive Wayback Machine just before the removal. It supports different APIs to make it easier to do that.
I know that different websites or even government institution are already using their API to archive their documents before they get removed and pointing to them when accessing old links.
The idea had some positive feedback at ServerFault, so I thought it's worth to ask.
So the question is, how the community feel about implementing capturing the removed posts which can be accessible for other users via Internet Archive (without having high-rep)?
UPDATE
As initial good example: the questions which were removed by Community after some period of time or popular questions with score >10.
If spam is not meant to be archived, that's fine, as archiving can be conditional based on the closed reason (however it still doesn't guarantee that somebody didn't achieve it already or wrote some script which does that).
See also:
- Stack Overflow Deleted Questions Archive
- Deleted Meta Questions Archive
- Deleted questions at StackPrinter
- Popular Deleted SO/SU/Programmers Questions (which was removed and the archived version would be useful to have)
How this is easy?
There are at least 4 methods of archiving the page:
Go to: https://archive.org/web/, paste the url into
Save Page Now
and submit the form.Going manually to:
http://web.archive.org/save/http://full_url...
.Use JavaScript (source):
javascript:q=(document.location.href);void(open('http://web.archive.org/save/'+location.href.replace(/https?:\/\//i, ""),'_self ','resizable,location,menubar,toolbar,scrollbars,status'));
Use
curl
command:curl -s http://web.archive.org/save/http://... | tail