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Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, a journalist/programmer living in Portland, Oregon. I'm the CTO of Kickstarter, created Upcoming.org, and some other stuff too.

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Suck.com, Gone for Good?

Posted Dec 30, 2005

Suck.com, one of the most important and influential webzines, appears to be offline permanently, replaced by a porn search portal.

The strangest part is that the domain continues to belong to Lycos, with Hotwired acting as the nameservers. If you query ns1.hotwired.com for the suck.com domain, it returns 198.65.105.202, an IP address of a Verio server currently hosting over 36,000 domains. The server is owned by a company called ParkingDNS.net, which seems to be hosting nothing but Parkingdots.com affiliate search portals.

It also appears that there's no complete archive of Suck.com remaining anywhere online. Because the new owners have blocked web crawlers, Archive.org has purged blocked access to the archived version of the site. (Last year, Suckarchives.com expired and was snatched up by a squatter.)

If permanent, this is a tragedy for anyone who cares about the web's history. Does anyone at Lycos know what's going on? Also, if anyone out there has a complete copy of the Suck archives, please get in touch. (If you need to submit it anonymously, that's fine.)

Update: Interesting stuff in the comments below. Greg Knauss, himself a Suck.com contributor, is proxying requests to the old Suck.com server through his own server at suck.eod.com. Also, Mike at Injoke.com posted a 200MB torrent of the entire Suck.com archive. Update: Boy genius Aaron Swartz is mirroring the Suck.com snapshot from Mike's torrent. Nice work!

This doesn't change the fact that every link to a Suck.com article is still broken, but at least the articles aren't lost.

January 2, 2006: Suck.com is back! Someone out there must have the inside story of what went on over the past few days.

29 Comments (Add Yours)

Dec 30, 2005
12:42 PM  
lugeman2000 wrote:

That sucks...


Dec 30, 2005
1:06 PM  
mat wrote:

I thought Carl owned it now.


Dec 30, 2005
1:07 PM  
mat wrote:

And it is tragic.


Dec 30, 2005
1:17 PM  
jkottke wrote:

Plastic is down as well, although it seems to be a holiday thing.


Dec 30, 2005
2:25 PM  
Eliot Phillips wrote:

Damn, probably one of the first sites that I ever checked on a daily basis.


Dec 30, 2005
2:51 PM  
Mike626 wrote:

Luckily, back when suck stopped publishing I mirrored the entire site. I dug around this afternoon and found the archive. I zipped it up and put it in a torrent. Just under 200 MB, and you too can have a personal copy.


Dec 30, 2005
3:20 PM  
Greg wrote:

Why in the hell would they block Archive.org?


Dec 30, 2005
3:53 PM  
Steve Rhodes wrote:

Because media companies are stupid.

Rather than regarding archive.org as a backup
and a chance to become part of the historic record of the web, they want control (and possibly non-existant revenues from people paying for archives).

While it is good an archive is available as a torrent, it isn't the same as anyone being able to search for a Suck piece (or stumble upon it). Not to mention all the dead links.

It seems that someone at Wired News should do a story on this.


Dec 30, 2005
4:12 PM  
Greg Knauss wrote:

I've put up a site that redirects requests to where suck.com used to point, so you can still get access to all the articles: http://suck.eod.com.

This isn't a mirror -- it just adds the proper headers and makes the request of Carl's copy of the archive.

I hope Lycos points suck.com back to where it belongs, because even though the articles are now available, all the links out there are broken.


Dec 30, 2005
4:28 PM  
Philipp Lenssen wrote:

"Because the new owners have blocked web crawlers, Archive.org has purged the entire domain from its historical archive."

If Archive.org acts this way, it's ridiculous... they should only block those years from the archive which actually blocked crawlers at the time!


Dec 30, 2005
4:47 PM  
PointedDetail wrote:

Actually, archive.org is BLOCKING access to its archived data because of the no robots policy on the current suck.com site. It has NOT "purged" the data.

(This is how rumors get started, guys; let's be a bit more exact about details, yes?)


Dec 30, 2005
6:09 PM  
Andy Baio wrote:

PointedDetail: The end result for the user is the same, but it's still a good point. I changed my post to reflect your comment.


Dec 30, 2005
6:18 PM  
Anonymous wrote:

uh, that site, in a word, sucked. many new ones will rise to replace it.


Dec 30, 2005
8:10 PM  
Aaron Swartz wrote:

I've unzipped the torrent at http://suck.mirror.theinfo.org/ and put together a script so the external links work. I've only given it a cursory look, but everything seems to be there.


Dec 30, 2005
8:12 PM  
Aaron Swartz wrote:

Here's that as a link: http://suck.mirror.theinfo.org/

Lenssen suggests archive.org "should only block those years from the archive which actually blocked crawlers". If that were the case, they wouldn't need to block the years -- they wouldn't have any data to block. The reason they have to make it retroactive is so that people who don't know about the Web Archive can get their data out.


Dec 30, 2005
11:25 PM  
Waxy pal and former Suck contributor "Destiny" wrote:

I once wrote a script that spliced four random images from "Filler" into -- er, a random four-panel sequence of "Filler." It seemed appropriate to re-write it tonight to work with Greg's re-direction magic...


Dec 31, 2005
8:47 AM  
mattw wrote:

Good work folks! Now, does anybody have the old content from 99secrets.com? :)


Dec 31, 2005
2:17 PM  
wagonlips wrote:

Ironic. I originally typed the URL, suck.com, into my broswer (mosaic or netscape) because I thought for sure that it would be a porn site.

Life is strange.

Suck is dead. Long live Suck.


Jan 1, 2006
2:06 PM  
Wes McGee wrote:

You know something -- I think using Robots.txt is the absolute worse way to indicate to the archive to purge (or block) old versions of the page. Understandably, the Robots.txt was placed there before the address Suck.com itself was sold/stolen/hijacked/expired or whathaveyou, but what if what happened to Suck.com happened today, and the new pornographic owners used Robots.txt to keep search engines from crawing his new porno site -- why should that cause the previous Suck.com to be sent to digital oblivion? If someone wants the digital archive to not keep the old archives of their site, I think it really should be incumbant on them to write a letter to the archives itself stating this.


Jan 1, 2006
2:12 PM  
Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Steve Baldwin of Ghost Sites wrote a follow-up on this:
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/2005_12_31_archive.html


Jan 2, 2006
10:54 AM  
Aaron wrote:

It appears that Suck.com is serving up the old content again. Hmm.


Jan 2, 2006
9:23 PM  
Brian Mingus wrote:

Archive.org is serving suck.com content just fine. In fact, from what I can see www.suck.com/robots.txt has never blocked spiders.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.suck.com/robots.txt

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.suck.com


Jan 2, 2006
9:50 PM  
Andy Baio wrote:

Now that Suck is back online, and the original robots.txt file restored, Archive.org is allowing access to the Suck archive again.

At the time I wrote my post, the robots.txt file was blocking all spiders and Archive.org was denying access to the archive.


Jan 4, 2006
10:21 AM  
meganova wrote:

always liked that site in the past till got taken offline. Indeed the robots.txt file has been restored (search google)


Jan 6, 2006
7:16 AM  
Aldwyn wrote:

Is this suck.com interesting site ???


Jan 7, 2006
7:01 AM  
Rick wrote:

Suck.com nowadays is "just" a historical curiosity, but at the time it was a damn good read. Actually, I'll probably go reread a chunk just to see how well it's held up.


Jan 14, 2006
7:47 PM  
Brian wrote:

I kind of forgot how much I enjoyed Suck back in the day. Glad it's still there.


Feb 25, 2006
3:41 PM  
chacal la chaise wrote:

thanks for the archive. back in the day, the site was a nice respite from all the drama that went with cube-farm work.


Mar 29, 2006
8:45 AM  
Schmierwurst wrote:

Still checking suck.com every once a while and I'm glad I didn't check in it's downtime.
Just one question, maybe one of you guys can help:
Is there anything as good as suck.com or at least slightly comparable?
Looking for an appropriate compensation but can't find anything...


 

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