An Update on Wayback Machine Access

Commenters reacted to the Internet Archive’s explanation that the Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic. Several people (simonw, jader201, packetslave) said scrapers appear to be using Wayback as a fallback to bypass blocks on original sites, and that this abuse is forcing the Archive to throttle traffic. Many praised the Archive (basilikum) and urged donations, while others reported painful collateral effects: repeated 429 errors from legitimate connections, corporate networks or Tor being blocked (timpera, BeetleB), and frustration at being asked to email diagnostics when support is already strained (msephton). Some commenters noted historic uses, like bypassing paywalls, and warned sites have begun opting out of archiving to avoid indirect scraping.

Opinion split over remedies. Some proposed stricter gatekeeping or paid access (toomuchtodo, Onavo, MattCruikshank), CAPTCHAs or compute puzzles (brador), or requiring logins (thimabi). Others advocated systemic approaches: robots.txt v2 and cryptographic bot self-identification standards (hubraumhugo), ISP and antivirus industry action to curb malicious proxies (xacky), or regulation and fines (emaro). Skeptics (zdragnar) argued this is a familiar tragedy-of-the-commons problem tied to popularity, not just AI, and warned that charging or gating archives would raise copyright and access concerns (KPGv2, extralongdivisi). The thread balances sympathy for the Archive with disagreement about whether openness or monetized/protected models are the viable path forward.