Wikipedia bans Archive.today after site executed DDoS and altered web captures

In a significant move, the English edition of Wikipedia has decided to ban Archive.today, following its involvement in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog. During discussions regarding the potential deprecation of Archive.today, Wikipedia editors uncovered that the site had manipulated archived web pages to include the name of the blogger targeted by the attack. This alteration appears to stem from a personal vendetta against the blogger, who previously revealed that the maintainer of Archive.today operated under multiple aliases. An update shared by a Wikipedia editor indicated that there is a consensus to promptly deprecate Archive.today. The plan includes adding the site to a spam blacklist and removing all existing links to it. The editor emphasized, "There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not lead its readers to a website that hijacks users’ computers to carry out a DDoS attack. Moreover, there is evidence that the operators of Archive.today have tampered with the content of archived pages, making them unreliable." Currently, there are over 695,000 links to Archive.today scattered across approximately 400,000 Wikipedia pages. The archive site, which is under investigation by the FBI for the identity of its founder, is often used to circumvent news paywalls. The update noted that proponents of keeping Archive.today argued for its usefulness in verifying sources, but an analysis revealed that most of its functions could be replicated by other means. In response to this decision, guidance has been issued for editors to assist in the removal and replacement of links to domains associated with Archive.today, including archive.is, archive.ph, and others. The recommendations allow editors to eliminate Archive.today links when the original sources are still accessible and provide identical content. Alternatively, they can replace these links with those from other archiving services like the Internet Archive, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon, or switch to sources that do not require archiving altogether.