Using Way-Back-Machines: The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form - Will wis.dm and Fluther content be preserved for the next 50 years?

You know – I just learned about wis.dm this morning. I went there, and I was excited to try it.

But it was so freaking slow. I tried signing up, but I couldn’t see the captcha because it hadn’t loaded. I tried a lot of different browsers [I use chrome mostly], like safari, internet explorer 7, firefox. No go – same issue.

Finally the picture loaded, but then my password was too short, and I had to wait 10 minutes for the captcha to load again. I am not exaggerating. When I finally had an account, I went straight to the “Life” section. I was excited, the slowness was just a setback.

I answered a few comments, and then hit “Next Page”. It loaded super slowly. I left.

wis.dm is a great concept – but they need to make a snappier interface.

It will. Just the stuff from wis.dm will take 4 years to load. :-)

edit :: what she said.

lol

@squirbel – Wis.dm has always been slow, but never that slow as it is right now. The owners are already pulling the plug. Maybe they just keep one server running in their data center. Allowing people to say goodbye and download their content (which doesn’t seem to work).

:(

It is a great concept – I was truly excited. I twitter’d and facebook’d that I was trying it.

Someone else needs to do the same thing.

@mattbrowne I was able to download both my questions and messages but I can’t seem to download my comments. Any ideas?

@squirbel Yes, wis.dm was a great place. Unfortunately, the lack of speed and lack of any real moderation seemed to turn people off. Now, it is dead.

Prime example for newbie web developers: usability is always a higher priority than beauty and even security.

@FGS – In my case both the questions and comments didn’t work. Maybe it has to do with size. And since many people are trying, the server(s) can’t handle the load.

As carlos mencia says: dee deedee

20$ says that wis.dm was(is) a Ruby on Rails app.

* roars with laughter *

50$

Wayback only catalogues static content, not database content. So you will see the general layout, but won’t be able to go into any questions and answers as they are dynamic.

@TaoSan – Well, all the question and answers can be frozen at some point and turned into static HTML files. All the “answer” and “flag” buttons will have to go.

The Internet archive is one reason why the passing of the “Orphan Works” bill would de a disaster.

Every web site I ever build is on there- complete with images that will be automaticaly orphaned as the contact info is obsolete.

Protect you intellectual properties folks- watermark clearly with your full name

The Wayback site I used for Answerbag shows every question and answer that was ever made on that site, I haven’t tried any others, but it would be interesting to see what wayback has for them.