What attempts, if any, have been made to catalogue and archive threads on Internet forums?

There is a significant amount of useful information available on Internet forums, and it can be really frustrating when these forums get deleted and a huge amount of extremely useful information gets permanently lost.

Is there anywhere (online or otherwise) that has attempted to catalogue or archive Internet forum threads?

Archive.org, unfortunately, fails to archive much of the material off of heavy Ajax-based websites, and also fails to archive much of the material that's on online forums.

InquilineKea

• internet
• web-archiving

Comments

• Flimzy: Are you asking for a *comprehensive* archive? Or individual archives for specific forums?
• Jakob: See also similar questions about collecting mailing lists and microblogging (more digital publication types may follow).

Answer by Ambo100

It's mostly up to the discretion of site administrators to backup content and in some cases publish them.

Many online forums or message boards consist of a high percentage of noise, and it makes little sense to preserve post of little value. Valuable forum posts can be selectively preserved as text files or screenshots.

Comments

• David Rothman: Agree with Ambo, but it is important to note that this topic is going to come up more and more in the future. Remember in 2010 when the Library of Congress decided to archive Tweets? http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/the-library-and-twitter-an-faq/

Answer by Joe

groups.google.com came from their acquisition of DejaNews, which had archived Usenet postings.

I know there are plenty of organizations out there which will subscribe to mailing lists or similar, and then build their own archives. Some are reasonable (eg, mail-archive.com, gmane.org), but others seem to just want to serve ads along with the pages ... and you can get so many websites doing it that a search for some error message turns up the exact same mailing list thread on half a dozen web archives.

Oh ... and for mailing lists relating to library science -- check out Eric Lease Morgan's Electronic Serials archive.

Comments

Answer by Trevor Owens

Many of the massive web forum sites get caught up in the Internet Archives work. For example, when I was doing research on discussions on the web forum rpgmakervx.net I was thrilled to find that a massive amount of the content was also saved in the Internet Archive. For example, you can see the forums in 2009 here. In practice, this actually meant that I could not only find old discussion threads, but also see edits and changes over time to those discussion threads.

Aside from that, some sites, like Stack Exchange, actually provide data dumps, which would make it really easy for groups to collect this content.

Comments

Answer by DrFloyd5

Nearly every website, at every point in time. http://archive.org/web/web.php

It's like magic.

Comments

• InquilineKea: I wish you were right, but unfortunately, archive.org's coverage is extremely sparse these days. :(