Something comes up a decent amount in discussions of ARG preservation: folks claiming "we've gotten better at it."

And it's not quite that simple.

A lot of past ARGs were meticulously documented...on the now-retired Yahoo Groups and Google Plus, on self-hosted wikis that got vandalized into oblivion, and on an online forum that couldn't be repaired.

Digital archival happened, it just wasn't prepared for the unexpected.

Remember Ning? How much notice did we get to try and build an archive before that site disappeared?

Imagine what it would be like to the current record if YouTube or Google Docs went away. That effectively happened multiple times, for past solutions.

This thread was triggered by this excellent Atlantic piece on the pending disappearance of Yahoo Answers.

Cultural archivists are working to preserve important questions like "how is babby formed", but archival isn't one-and-done: it's an ongoing process. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/04/how-yahoo-became-internet-villain/618681