Wikipedia might blacklist Archive.today after site maintainer DDoSed a blog

Discussions are underway among Wikipedia editors regarding the potential blacklisting of Archive.today, a site recently implicated in directing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against a blogger. This blogger had previously written about the enigmatic maintainer of Archive.today in a 2023 post. Wikipedia's volunteer editors are weighing three options in response to this incident. The first option involves completely removing or concealing all links to Archive.today and adding it to the spam blacklist. The second option would see Archive.today deprecated, discouraging any new link additions while allowing existing links to remain. The third option suggests maintaining the current status quo. The implications of these options are significant, particularly the first one, which would affect over 695,000 links across approximately 400,000 Wikipedia pages. Archive.today, also referred to as Archive.is, is a platform that captures snapshots of web pages and is frequently utilized to bypass paywalls on news sites. According to the Wikipedia request for comments, "Archive.today employs sophisticated scraping techniques and is often viewed as more dependable than the Internet Archive." The site's history with Wikipedia has been tumultuous; it was blacklisted in 2013 due to concerns over botnets and link spamming, but this decision was reversed in 2016, allowing Archive.today back into the community. The debate has been active since February 7, with various viewpoints surfacing. One editor advocating for the blacklist emphasized the importance of user safety, stating, "Wikipedia’s need for verifiable citations is absolutely not more important than the security of users. We must ensure our references are safe to access to maintain trust." Conversely, another editor supporting the option to do nothing pointed out the unique value of Archive.today, claiming it hosts a wealth of archives unavailable elsewhere, including the Wayback Machine. They argued that blocking or removing access to Archive.today would lead to significant disruptions for countless editors and readers, resulting in a surge of unresolved dead link tags.