Let me rant for a minute about 2nd gen content archival
I've been getting into SHINee lately, and though the group is newer my passion for trudging the depths of the Wayback Machine for old content still lives. The insane thing, though, is that archiving is actually worse in some aspects than 1st gen. So let me rant for a bit.
Korean fansites? The Wayback Machine sucks at archiving ivyro sites, the main webhosting platform mid-2000s and 2010s K-fans used for fansites. I've barely seen any 2nd gen K-pop fansites that have been well archived, unlike the myriad of 1st gen ones. (Maybe it's because they were more accessible through web portals like Yahoo and such, but that doesn't explain why even mid-aughts groups like SuJu have their fansites archived so spottily.) Even if they didn't suck, around that period most sites were very enclosed due to people taking their stuff out without permission, which is not a good thing, but on the other hand is the only way now a lot of fan content from that time can be accessed. Foreign fansites were much the sameโa lot of them didn't even let you see most of the boards until you log in, and you can't do that on the Wayback Machine. Even a lot of general English fan forums are dying off; Allkpop gets purged every two seconds, Onehallyu closed a few years ago, and even the last frontier Soompi got closed in June.
The good thing is that sites like Wordpress, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, etc. have pretty good archiving (Tumblr keeps images and reblogs even when the original itself might not be available, which has been a godsend for me), so it's not all bad. There are way more sites in English from the heyday of 2nd gen that are still up now, compared to the few Angelfire and Tripod stragglers of the 90s. But so much stuff that could've been saved has definitely become lost media due to all of these factors.
