A guy on an old forum told me to use wayback machine favorites, I ignored him for 2 years

Back in 2021 I found this forum for early 2000s web designers. One user, "OldSchoolPixel," kept posting that he had a folder of 300+ dead sites saved as wayback machine links to revisit. I thought it was pointless, why bookmark ghosts? Last month my favorite abandoned anime fan site finally went totally dark, even the cached version. I remembered his tip, dug through his old posts, and found 40 sites I used to visit in middle school, including one that had my old forum sig. He died in 2023 apparently, one of his last posts was just a list. Anyone else ever dismiss a random forum regular's advice and regret it later?

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lucas1652d ago

man that hit me right in the gut reading this. i did the exact same thing with a guy on a gardening forum who kept telling everyone to save seeds from heirloom tomatoes because certain varieties were gonna disappear. i thought he was just being obsessive and weird. then last year i tried to find this specific tomato my grandma used to grow and it was gone, completely gone from every seed catalog. i actually found his old posts after he'd passed and he had detailed notes on where to buy backups and everything. it's crazy how these random forum people end up being the ones who actually cared about preserving stuff that mattered. losing that part of the internet really does feel like losing people all over again sometimes.