Warning: That free speech site I used to visit in 2008 is completely gone now

I was trying to find an old forum I used to hang out on, the one where we'd post about DMCA takedowns and ISP blocks... but when I typed the URL it just redirected to a login page for some generic media site. The whole archive of discussions about censorship incidents just vanished, no backup or anything. Has anyone else run into a digital community that just disappeared overnight like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

hugo2361mo ago

Lol I bet it's not actually gone gone, just buried under layers of corporate neglect. Some of those old sites got bought up by media companies who just wanted the domain traffic and never migrated the old content. I found one from like 2007 a few years ago that was still sitting on an unmaintained server with all the old threads, you just had to type the IP address instead of the domain name. If you remember the exact URL try checking archive.org or even whois lookup the domain to see when it changed hands, that's how I found out mine was sold twice before going dark lol.

calebw501mo ago

Actually a buddy of mine had this EXACT same thing happen with a car forum he used to be on back in like 2004. The domain went dead for years then one day he randomly typed the old IP address he had saved in a bookmark from some old thread and it STILL loaded the entire site. All the posts, all the user accounts, even the old classifieds section where people were trying to sell their Honda Civics for way too much money. The company that bought the domain never even bothered to shut down the server, they just let the DNS expire and it sat there online like a time capsule. He spent like three hours just scrolling through his old posts from high school and cringing at his own username "FastCarGuy87" or whatever it was. Archive.org definitely caught most of it but the IP trick pulled up some pages that even Wayback Machine missed because it was a dynamic forum that kept redirecting.