When I'd heard Cracked.com had unceremoniously started removing their own archive, I panicked. I hadn't visited Cracked in many years, but there was a time it was easily the best site on the internet. I, of course, came right to this sub, but barely found any discussion of Cracked, let alone an archive, so I decided to see what I could do! A month and some change later I finally finished rescuing as much of classic Cracked.com as I could before more of it disappears.
What started as a simple archive turned into a full completeness audit using Cracked’s surviving indexes and sitemap, the Wayback Machine, Common Crawl, and historical metadata. The main target was roughly the 2005–2017 “golden age” of Cracked.
During the audit I found thousands of old column URLs that weren’t represented in the original archive set I started with, so this ended up being a much bigger project than expected. There are a handful of old external Flash/video embeds that are still dead dependencies, but the archive itself is intact.
The final result is:
- 13,710 preserved pages
- 6,341 articles
- 5,537 columns/blog posts
- 1,011 Photoplasties
- 821 Pictofacts
I packed the archive as a ~14Gb ZIM file for viewing / self-hosting with Kiwix. Full-text search and sort by year included.
I’m not sure about the rules on sharing here so I'm sharing the actual ZIM/torrent separately in r/DHExchange so other's can enjoy as well. I will remove the link to that post if against the rules, but I wanted to, at the very least, share my accomplishment here as I could never have done anything like this without the years spent lurking in this community.
