An Ochaken Fansite Online Since 2004 Now Serves Gambling Ads, So a Web Archivist Shows How to Save Sites as WARC Files

Ochaken is an old anime series and toy line about, in De Meo’s words, “cute cartoon dog characters who have tea leaves for ears, each of them named after a different kind of tea.” Teapuppies.com was its fansite. “The site had been online since 2004 and had basically not changed since 2005,” she writes, and when she went to visit a few weeks ago, the site was gone and the domain had been taken over for gambling ads.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has its earliest capture of the site from June 23, 2004. De Meo’s point is that waiting for an archive like that to catch everything is the mistake. “I work in web archiving, by the way,” she writes. “I could have archived that site while it was still around, but I didn’t.” Her post ends up as a how-to, with an all-caps refrain: “Back! It! Up!”

The tools she recommends come from Webrecorder, and she says so up front: “the tools I’m going to mention in this blog post are made by the company I work for,” adding that most are free. The simplest is the ArchiveWeb.page extension for Chrome and Chromium browsers. Install it, open the page you want, click its toolbar icon and choose “Start Archiving,” then click around and visit every page you want kept, including menus and buttons, before choosing “Stop Archiving.” There’s also a standalone desktop app.

For a site too big to click through by hand, she points to Browsertrix, a crawler that starts at a page and follows links on its own. It’s “the only paid tool in this post,” with a seven-day trial; Webrecorder’s pricing page lists the Starter plan at “$30 /mo.” after it. Since it’s open source, she notes, technically inclined users “can run their own copies.”

What you end up with is a WARC file, or a WACZ, the packaged format that wraps WARC files with extra metadata. She explains that WARC “records complete information about requests and responses, including all headers,” which is why it can capture sites heavy on JavaScript. You open the file in ReplayWeb.page, which she says works “kind of like having your own private version of the wayback machine,” and can be embedded in any web page with a little JavaScript. Her last piece of advice is to hand copies to friends: “Lots of copies keeps stuff safe.” What became of the people who ran teapuppies.com, the post doesn’t say.

The likely next chapter, with high confidence, is more of the same: fan sites from the early 2000s run on domain registrations that lapse when an owner stops paying, and gambling and ad networks buy those names for the traffic. With medium confidence, more people will archive the sites themselves now that a browser extension does it in a few clicks. Lower confidence: an Ochaken fan with a better copy than the Wayback Machine’s surfaces after reading the post.