Members of the Something Awful forums were given a harsh reminder of the fragility of the internet’s memory when ubiquitous image host, Imgur, announced that it was deleting nudity and pornography along with “old, unused, and inactive content” not linked to an account. This announcement was vague enough to leave people confused and concerned that one of the longest-running communities on the internet would be purging images.
The Solution
Something Awful’s owner, Jeffrey of YOSPOS, and a pair of Something Awful administrators, came up with a solution. They organized the Great Imgur Download Caper, which involved three steps. The first step was to scrape Something Awful itself, parsing its decades’ worth of threads to identify and extract links to Imgur. Those targets were identified and compiled into gigantic text files. From there, the site’s members jumped into action, divvying up the chunks and mass downloading them using scripts shared and tweaked by other posters. Finally, they hosted the images from servers paid for by Something Awful itself, then overwrote the original posts’ hotlinks to point toward them.
The Importance of Digital Preservation
Something Awful has a long and notorious past, and much of its nearly 25-year history is told through pictures. It is one of the fountainheads of our modern visual internet. Sharing their visual creations is what has kept many of them coming back. The existence of these images has never been exactly stable. The Imgur Download Caper is part of a constant struggle to shore up digital culture and to convince people that it matters.
The Future of Digital Culture
In fact, parts of the internet have moved toward deliberate ephemerality and obscurity. People have flocked to disappearing message platforms and closed forums like Discord, which have few meaningful archival options. European privacy laws have enshrined a “right to be forgotten” that lets people remove potentially embarrassing information from the web. But history is made of silly, embarrassing ephemera. Digital preservation is important for the future of our society. Anyone who spends any appreciable amount of time online will experience both the best and worst that humanity has to offer. People put a lot of themselves into their internet presence, and that is reason enough that it should be recorded, warts and all.
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