Encyclopedia Dramatica:ARCHIVE FUCKING EVERYTHING

	“	Your natural instinct should be to archive, never to link directly. The moment you link something directly, it can be taken down.	„
	—Null, Archival Tools - Kiwi Farms

Introduction

Policy This article defines official ED Policy. Shortcut: ED:ARCHIVE

A winrar could be you when if we need to rebuild again

For Encyclopedia Dramatica, posterity is important. There is a common saying that "Everything Online is Permanent", we know that it is a lie since a lot of ED has been missing.
While MediaWiki has a log of all the page edits listed in its history, it does not automatically archive external links! There has been a common issue of people deleting fucking everything to cover their traces like:

• their Twitter page
• their Reddit history
• their YouTube channel
• their website
• or anything lulzy that the concerned would delete!

NOTE: Getting B& also causes a purge in the post history for certain websites.

Therefore we need to archive everything, whether in the form of screenshots, uploading files to ED, chat logs or even full page saves!

Methods of Archival

Website archives

Archive websites

• Wayback Machine - Link

Associated Template: Template:Wayback

• Archive.today - Link

Associated Template: Template:Archive

Screenshotting

It is preferable to do "full page" screenshots. However if it is for a post only, you can use your screenshot tool that's integrated in your computer, phone or dildo. Make sure to upload your screenshots to ED!

Chrome

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows and Command+Shift+P on Mac.
2. In the command line, type “Screenshot,” then click “Capture full-size screenshot” from the list of commands available.

Firefox

1. Right click your page and click on "Take Screenshot"​
2. Click on "Save full page"

MAKE SURE TO SAVE THE IMAGINE IN YOUR COMPUTER!

iPhone

iPhones have an integrated full page screenshot option.
Just screenshot your browser as usual then tap on the screenshot at the lower-left corner, tap Full Page next.

External methods

Websites like screenshot.guru can allow a full page screenshot.

Video/Audio Archives

Please refer to this EDF thread ^{(archive.today) (Wayback Machine)} for methods of video downloading.
To upload your video use Special:Upload as usual.
If your file is of a very large size, please contact a sysop to have it uploaded.

Image Archives

You are free to archive images and upload them to ED as long as they are linked in the related article.
ED is not your file host service for anything unrelated.

For more info on image guidelines, please refer to ED:ISP.

Archiving ED

At Encyclopedia Dramatica we periodically release text backups of all of our articles. This is to fulfill a promise we made when we took over administration: That we would provide occasional downloadable archives in case anything happens.

This is in no way implying that we are not going to be doing ED anymore. We love ED and will continue providing it until they rm -rf the data from our cold, dead servers.

Wiki Archives

We provide HTTP/HTTPS/XML for our text dumps. For recent releases and archives of ED try ThePirateBay.sx, Archive.today or Archive.org.

Forum Archives

We did not provide archives of EDF and never planned to, which is why a lot of the old articles load a non existant or unrelated page when clicking the EDF template link. However this all changed as of January 2023, as a full EDF6 archive is planned at the Encyclopedia Dramatica Archive Librarian website.
You are also free to scrape the forums using external tools that you trust or have a full web archive.

A lot of important EDF2 threads were backed up by Archive.org and Archive.today thankfully.

Examples of well archived articles

• Sarah Butts