Archive Team Races to Save a Billion Imgur Files Before Porn Deletion Apocalypse

In case you have an old machine sitting around somewhere collecting dust and an internet connection fast enough to spare a few megabits, the Archive Team could use your help to archive some of the roughly 1 billion images at risk of deletion from Imgur.

You should know that you may be archiving a lot of porn in the process—but you’ll also be saving a lot of content that’s not porn.

Last month, the image-hosting website introduced a new terms of service that would lead to the removal of two kinds of images from the platform—various kinds of adult content, and content uploaded by anonymous users. The new Terms of Service kicks in on Monday, but it will likely take the Imgur team time to begin removing said images from their servers.

On Sunday, the Reddit user Seglegs reported that roughly 760 million images had already been archived, with more than 250 million to go. Seglegs encouraged users to download ArchiveTeam Warrior, an archival “appliance” that downloads information in bulk through a virtual machine.

“I think it’s worth noting that despite everyone’s valiant efforts there are just too many images out there,” they wrote. “The only way we’re saving everything is if you run ArchiveTeam Warrior and get the word out to other people.”

Numerous users have met the call—such that, as of this writing, the number of recovered files has increased to more than 900 million per the Archive Team’s tracker, with around 140 million more still to go.

The backup effort is one of a few attempts that have been made in recent weeks to keep one of the primary stores of information. For example, the prominent legacy forum Something Awful recently undertook the Imgur Download Caper, which aimed to archive Something Awful’s own links to Imgur. While the Archive Team’s efforts will be more complete, narrower archival efforts nonetheless will be easier to work with for specific platforms.

(For Imgur’s part, the company doesn’t appear to have taken steps to throttle these downloading campaigns—a common problem in last-mile archival.)

Those not closely watching might be wondering: All this effort to save a bunch of porn? Seglegs, in their post on the matter, made it clear that, while there may be adult content in the mix, the real goal is to help save content from online communities like Something Awful and Reddit—non-explicit content that might have been uploaded anonymously and could disrupt large parts of the internet if deleted.

“Porn is generally better archived than non-porn, so I’m really worried about general internet content (Reddit posts, forum comments, etc.) and not porn per se,” the user wrote on Reddit, citing the large number of false positives allowed by prior platforms that have removed explicit content, such Pastebin and Tumblr.

“It’s not as simple as ‘Imgur is deleting porn,’” Seglegs added.