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Paid a $30 'lifetime' fee for a forum archive, and the whole thing was scraped from a free wiki that still works today
So about 4 months back I was trying to dig up this old message board that had a super specific thread on repairing an obscure piece of audio gear. Google was useless, the site was gone, and I was getting desperate. I stumbled on this site that claimed to have 'the largest private archive of dead forums' and it asked for a $30 one time payment for lifetime access. I figured, whatever, I've wasted more on dumber stuff, so I paid. The search tool was slow and half the links were dead ends, but I did find the thread I wanted after about 2 hours of poking around. Then last week I was telling a friend about it and he goes 'why didn't you just use the Wayback Machine and the old forum's own wiki?' I checked, and yep, the exact same content was sitting there free the whole time, even the replies I thought were exclusive. I felt like such a sucker. Has anyone else paid for one of these archive sites and then found the same stuff on a free tool later? Or is there a better way to sniff out which archives are just scraping public sources before you hand over cash?
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