Maybe It Should Be Illegal to Instantly Delete a Website's Archives – Aftermath

Law is definitely the wrong way to go here. Should I avoid writing on my personal website out of fear I may not have the resources to maintain it forever?<p>A better approach is probably a technological one: a web that encourages permanence. Something like IPFS.

Having consulted in this space and knowing that ad rev for game journalism is almost nothing and that almost noone is inclined to pay a subscription for it I can understand the decision.<p>I was involved with decision to close such a site several years ago based on a Wordpress platform. Ad rev usually but not always covered the platform fees and not much else. Certainly not any staff or writer compensation.<p>It was a largish site with thousands of reviews, walkthroughs and articles.<p>In the end I helped them convert it all to static files and a read only version was hosted for 6 additional months but then one of the various google updates toasted the small amount of rev they were getting and they turned the site off as more head&#x2F;heart ache than value.

Cost and capacity to do this aside, should one archive a site that permits user contributed content <i>text and&#x2F;or multimedia content</i> I foresee a legal conundrum. That which may be considered acceptable speech and&#x2F;or multimedia today could be deemed hate speech, libel or even illegal by a country in a few years or decades. Content deemed illegal in the future also becomes illegal to delete. CDN&#x27;s and ISP would not want to deal with the legal conundrums and would just boot archive sites all together.