How can I get a notification when a new Stack Exchange dump is made available?

Question

How can I get a notification when a new Stack Exchange dump is made available?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, neither Stack Exchange nor the Internet Archive provide any satisfactory way to track or alert about Dump uploads, see below.

• You can see a user-maintained approximation of dump dates here.
• Or login to the Internet Archive and only then can you see the history of dump uploads at catalogd.archive.org/history/stackexchange (Note the submittime column.)

The Data Dump nominally updates quarterly but my recollection over the years is that the interval and the release dates are rather sporadic.

For alerts about availability, the only current option seems to be to use a third-party monitoring service like Follow That Page or similar.

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Things I tried and that failed:

• Search Stack Exchange.
• Search the SE Blog.
• Search the Internet Archive for "track"/"watch"/"alert"/"monitor" capability. Found none.
• Favorited the Stack Exchange Data Dump entry -- this added no useful alert activity, even on my favorites RSS feed.
• Used Internet Archive's "Advanced Search" to create an RSS feed. But due to design limitations such feeds are useless for update tracking.
• You can create a JSON URL that returns the last update date, though.
  So if you have some mechanism to poll that URL once everyday or so, that should show if something new is available.
• Note that even archive.org's own wayback machine does not track changes to the data dump upload very well.