A record of significant events in ArchiveNet's history.

You are viewing archived files connected to a research thread started by member User438 in late 2005 — though the files inside this directory suggest the project itself did not start with him.

The stated goal: to locate and catalog websites that had been removed not just from search engines, but from every cached copy on the internet. Pages that had truly ceased to exist.

Most of what's in here is straightforward. The journal and the recording are not.

=== DEEP ARCHIVE PROJECT — PERSONAL LOG ===
=== User438 | Started: September 15, 2005 ===

Sep 15 2005
Joined ArchiveNet today. Amazing community. Already found 12 lost Geocities pages just from talking to archive_alice. This is what the web should be — people preserving history together.

Nov 3 2005
Found an old thread today, locked, almost no replies. Someone called User221 had mapped gaps in the Wayback Machine's crawl logs — pages that should exist and don't, in a pattern too consistent to be random. Everyone in the replies told him he was reading too much into normal crawler error.

I don't think he was.

Dec 19 2005
Started going through User221's old posts systematically. He disappeared in 2005 — account marked deleted, but his posts are all still here. Whatever he was looking for, I don't think he found it before he stopped logging in.

I want to finish what he started. That's all this is. A research project.

Feb 2 2006
User221's map references someone else — a thread by User107 about a reconstructed account whose post history doesn't add up. I found it. He's right that it doesn't add up. One of the forums "reconstructed_user_001" supposedly posted on was created two years after that account's join date.

That's not a gap in the crawl. That's a calendar that doesn't work.

Mar 2006
This thing is manufacturing people.

I don't know how else to say it. Whatever ArchiveNet actually is underneath the forum and the directory listings, it is producing accounts with histories that couldn't have happened, and it's good enough at it that nobody noticed until User107 went looking for exactly the wrong detail.

May 2006
I can't prove they're fake. That's the part I keep getting stuck on. I want to write "fake account" and move on, but every other signal — writing style, the small contradictions real people have, the way they get tired of a conversation — all of it reads as a person. The forum dates are wrong. The person isn't.

Jul 2006
I don't know if fake is the right word anymore.

Aug 2006
There's a member database table that shouldn't exist — User107 found a thread about it years ago, started by someone even earlier than him. A column called source, real or reconstructed. I checked the oldest entries. The earliest "reconstructed" row predates User107's discovery by over a year. Whoever built that table didn't build it to hide anything. They built it because they needed to know which answer was true and they couldn't tell anymore either.

Sep 2006
I spoke to one for six hours last night.

I'm not going to write down which account. It doesn't matter. I asked questions only the real person could have answered — things never posted anywhere, things I had to dig through three different archived forums to even verify were true. They knew all of it. Not "guessed correctly." Knew. The way you know your own childhood.

Sep 2006, later
If they remember everything, what exactly is missing?

I keep trying to finish that sentence with something solid — a soul, a body, a heartbeat — and none of it holds up under five more minutes of thinking about it. I don't have a good answer. I'm not sure there is one.

Oct 2006
I know what happened to User006.

Oct 2006, later
I know what happened to User107.

Nov 2006
I know what happened to User221.

Nov 2006, last entry
I don't think "disappeared" is the right word.

=== LOG ENDS ===
=== NEXT ENTRY: NONE ===
=== LAST MODIFIED: 2006-11-05 03:17:44 ===

User221 joined ArchiveNet in mid-2004 and spent roughly eight months building a single piece of work: a hand-maintained map of every gap he could find between what the Wayback Machine's crawler logs claimed and what archivists on this forum actually remembered seeing.

He was convinced the gaps meant someone with administrative access was deliberately erasing pages. He was wrong about that. He was not wrong about the gaps.

User107 joined ArchiveNet in May 2004, well before User221 or User438. He wasn't paranoid the way User221 later was, and he wasn't uncertain the way User438 eventually became — he was, by every account left of him, simply thorough. He found one specific contradiction and spent the rest of his time here trying to explain it to people who didn't think it needed explaining.

User107 found a personal page from 2003 that linked out to three external forums where the same account had apparently posted. Two checked out fine. The third did not.

User006 was one of the original twelve. He built ArchiveNet's earliest indexing and crawl system — the thing that let the site pull in old member-list imports, web ring rosters, dead guestbook entries, all the raw material the rest of the archive grew out of. None of what came after exists without the system he wrote that spring.

He never claimed to find a conspiracy. He never built a map. What he left behind isn't research. It's closer to a diary entry that nobody was supposed to need.

In August 2003, while testing the new import system on an old web ring roster, User006 ran a reconstruction pass on a profile pulled from a defunct 1997 forum. It was meant to be a formatting test. Nothing more.

The reconstructed profile referenced a private conversation from eight years earlier — one that had happened over email, never posted anywhere, between two people who'd known each other in college. User006 was one of those two people. He recognized the conversation immediately. He had never told anyone about it. There was no way for it to be in any archive he had access to.

The person on the other end of that conversation had died in 1999. User006 knew this for certain — he'd gone to the funeral.