
Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community, group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.
The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.
This collection contains the output of many Archive Team projects, both ongoing and completed. Thanks to the generous providing of disk space by the Internet Archive, multi-terabyte datasets can be made available, as well as in use by the Wayback Machine, providing a path back to lost websites and work.
Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections, the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into the stacks to see what you may find.
The Archive Team Panic Downloads are full pulldowns of currently extant websites, meant to serve as emergency backups for needed sites that are in danger of closing, or which will be missed dearly if suddenly lost due to hard drive crashes or server failures.
This commit attempts to include guidance to developers implementing web hook sending behavior. Specifically it provides what I believe to be common-sense retry intervals that should be appropriate for most cases.
The values defined were determined after reviewing the webhook documentation of a number of public APIs. I saw total retry periods ranging from as little as 5 minutes from Pusher, to more than 12 days from Marqueta. Some APIs used constant intervals, others used linearly increasing, others exponential. In order to account for minor network glitches and still provide a reasonably large total retry period, I believe that using an exponential approach is the most appropriate.
The initial retry period of 1 minute was chosen because it was twice the timeout period and it allows the interval to be easily calculated as 2^(# of retries) minutes. This means only the retry count needs to be maintained between requests. Retry count is needed anyway to stop at the max of 10.
I stopped at 10 because it was a nice round number :-) and it provided a total elapsed of 17 hours. If a service is down for more than 17 hours, not receiving a notification is probably the least of its concerns.
I added the clause about respecting the retry-after header because if a server is going through some upgrade process that it knows will take 10 minutes and makes the effort to tell people in the retry-after header, it seems pointless to call it at 1, 2 and 4 minutes.