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  • It was super easy to donate; Im so glad they have a landing page that supports several payment methods and makes it easy to donate. I love the wayback machine, hope everyone pitches in : ).
    by pm90
  • I do like the Internet Archive but I wish I could retrieve large segments from it myself. It has very aggressive 429s. It would be a nice higher donor tier feature. Maybe it’s not possible to do so and retain 501c3 status? Regardless I have had to start performing personal datahoarding. C’est la vie.
    by arjie
  • 2:1 by who? That is not written.

    These types of schemes ring very poorly in my head for charity.

    If someone has the ability to give 2$ for every 1$ I give, why are they only giving on contingence?

    Just give the money!

    by tossandthrow
  • Does the Internet Archive have any options to donate from the EU so I can get a donation receipt from a EU based non-profit? I know there is the "Internet Archive Europe", but that seems to be a Wikimedia like thing, i.e. they don't collect funds for the IA but for whatever it is they are doing here (which is not archiving websites for some reason?).
    by klamann
  • The 1:2 match scheme is helpful for a foundation to (a) accept large gift and (b) meet 501c3 1/3rd "public support" requirements.

    To keep favorable charity taxation status, a large donation can only be accepted if there are sufficient small donors who also contribute. It's complex and indirect, but the matching is quite real as a $100 contribution from a small donor enables the charity to accept a corresponding amount from large donor pledges.

    by clcaev
  • Be careful: paying with Google Pay is extremely easy and the default setting is monthly recurrence. If you're not logged in, the only way to cancel (as far as I know) is by sending an email, which is incredibly precarious.
    by theletterf
  • I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocably leaks your e-mail address: https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email (2009)). What's a lot harder to overlook is that the IA brazenly hosts warez on clearnet and pulls off stunts like the COVID "emergency library".

    I'm all for ending copyright, but does any of that really need to be linked with the Wayback Machine? Huge chunks of the Web have been displaced or snuffed by social media and gen AI, making Wayback a unique(ly valuable) source of information and history. It's not my call, but it seems strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism. What happens when some stick-up-the-ass company—whose stuff is probably in hundreds of different collections—decides it really wants a payday?

    by zetanor
  • I have been volunteering with the Internet Archive via Open Library for about half a decade now. Sending money is awesome and they're also always looking for volunteers! There are so many projects going on for Open Library and staff has quite a few volunteers but right now especially I think it would be awesome to have a few more experienced folks joining to help (many volunteers are students).

    Here's just a few things we could use more experienced folks to help on:

    - Solr performance, it currently gets quite slow under load and there are two read replicas but we think there may be some ways to improve it besides adding more replicas. You can run a full production copy of solr based on the dumps... But the current workflow to do this is kinda broke so I had AI fix it up but we haven't been able to verify if it's a fully working/good solution.

    - We're doing big redesigns of major parts of the frontend. If your down to help for that Lokesh had many tickets open and guidelines and welcomes PRs.

    - I'm currently migrating us from web.py to fastapi and could certainly use more experienced help for trickier ones.

    Anyway, if you're actually willing to help all you gotta do is join our community call tomorrow at 9am PST and share your interests. We'll you on to something you like quickly :)

    https://docs.openlibrary.org/everyone/community-call.html#co...

    by raybb

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