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Archive Team! With Friends Like These… —

Archive Team, that ruthless band of site-saving scalliwags, has been working like crazy on a new downloading project, and we really, really need your help.

Friendster, one of the first social sites that took off in a big way until being overtaken by other services, has been bought out by a company that intends to convert it into some sort of entertainment site. To that end, they’ve announced that on May 31st, they’re deleting all user content on their 124 million accounts. 124 million!

We’ve constructed software to go in, guns blazing, and pull out photos, blogs, notes and anything else within reach for each of these accounts. It’s going swimmingly, millions of accounts will be archived, but at current rates we’ll be lucky to get ten percent of the accounts. We could really use some volunteers to help.

If you have a unix/linux variant, a couple hundred gigs of disk space free, and bandwidth you don’t mind donating to a good cause, please come to #archiveteam on the IRC Channel EFNet and let us know you want to help.

Everything works – we just need more help.

Thanks.


Categorised as: Archive Team

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6 Comments

  1. Teaspoon says:

    Windows users, no excuses: get cygwin and join in.

  2. Chris_K says:

    Also, it’s trivial to make it work on OSX.

  3. Real classy: when I try to visit http://www.friendster.com/ via the link in your article I get a simple ‘Forbidden’ and even without a referrer I’m not let in anymore. When I try it from a different IP address with lynx I suddenly see the homepage again, with no mention of the upcoming changes.

  4. metoikos says:

    I wish I could help but I’m pinched in storage and funds at the moment. Thinking of you all! Kudos heroes.

  5. Correction about my earlier comment: it seems friendster just really really dislikes proxies. I use squid at home to direct certain domains to vpn tunnels.

  6. Coderjoe says:

    Teaspoon: I wouldn’t recommend windows, unless you use a VM. NTFS does now allow some characters in filenames that wget is attempting to write (due to them being in the URLs of blog pages). One such character is the questionmark. (unless cygwin wget does something to get around this, but I still don’t think it is a good idea)