>We hear your concerns about losing the content that has been carefully curated over the years, and want to assure you that the content will remain available as an archive.
That's great. I hope the people saying this have the authority to actually make it so but I'm not convinced. What's not great that they're continuing to ban the IPs of archiveteam participants trying to archive the site.
The initial decision to not preserve the content long term has been as puzzling to me as the sudden closure. Photo gear, its reviews, sample photos, etc, remain relevant and useful for a number of years.
Yes, well hopefully in the background they can basically convert it to static pages and then ideally have a package that they could donate to the Internet Archive if they wanted to stop hosting it. (I feel like it would be better to do it from that side as opposed to scraping?)
Whether needed or not in the end, this is the perfect opportunity to ensure backups are made. I know it was being worked on but now there is more time.
A steady death march for magazines/niche content aggregators the world over. Poignantly, a related article at the bottom of this mentions another photography website that shut a few years back, the news itself reported by DPReview.
"Respected Camera Review Website Imaging Resource is Shutting Down"
"It’s a sad day for the photo industry. Imaging Resource, one of the most respected and uncompromising camera review websites in the world, is shutting down. The news became official earlier today when founder Dave Etchells sent an email to some of his friends and colleagues in the industry.
DPReview broke the news in a touching editorial piece written by Senior Editor Barney Britton, who has known and worked in friendly competition against (and often collaborated with) Dave and the team at IR for over a decade."
> A steady death march for magazines/niche content aggregators the world over.
There's always been a steady death march for niche content, they're passion projects for a small number of people, and life's short and people get old, move on. It's nice that modern information technology gives us a chance to keep these things alive, but that's a new opportunity we have, not a new trend that's killing the old.
There was probably a great buggy-whips comparison newsletter 120 years ago that would be cool to read through now, but it's not exactly relevant info either.
That's great. I hope the people saying this have the authority to actually make it so but I'm not convinced. What's not great that they're continuing to ban the IPs of archiveteam participants trying to archive the site.