The downsides of not archiving
After Friday's brief stint on Kotaku, I found out that all the blog posts I made during my tenure at my old company had been taken down. I did some digging over the weekend in an attempt to find them again, but seems the Wayback Machine archived last in 2011, when I had 27 posts (if memory serves me, I had over 60 when I left.)
I'm one of those people that loves to archive. I've always said "I'll make an online portfolio of my work in case things go down" - we all know the internet is fairly permanent, but not completely. Something in the Sea, for example, isn't live anymore - but that campaign ran it's course. I have screen caps of it, though, so if I ever wanted to relive that program, I could. Not so much with the blog posts, unfortunately, because I never thought they'd go away.
I think most of all, these posts being gone bugs me not for my own writing, but for Steve Gaynor's. He was a designer at 2K Marin and wrote some bad ass posts about Minerva's Den (he headed up the dev of that DLC.) Those are gone, too, so it appears that at some point in time, someone decided to take off the posts of ex-employees.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love my work at 2K, I love the games they make, and I love the people I worked with. But I firmly believe that deleting posts off an official blog isn't the best of practices. It leaves dead links on other sites (right now a ton of categories on the blog lead to no articles) and doesn't fairly represent the history of the 2K Games community. It also means that as people leave for a variety of reasons, the content will become thinner and thinner - never a good thing for community, which is cumulative. I know that at least one other person on the current list has since left the department and I definitely don't want to see those blogs disappear. They are good content. People read them, some commented on them, and they should stick around forever (or as long as the blog is in existence.)
Here ends another chapter of "Elizabeth's random thoughts on how communities should be run."
I'm one of those people that loves to archive. I've always said "I'll make an online portfolio of my work in case things go down" - we all know the internet is fairly permanent, but not completely. Something in the Sea, for example, isn't live anymore - but that campaign ran it's course. I have screen caps of it, though, so if I ever wanted to relive that program, I could. Not so much with the blog posts, unfortunately, because I never thought they'd go away.
I think most of all, these posts being gone bugs me not for my own writing, but for Steve Gaynor's. He was a designer at 2K Marin and wrote some bad ass posts about Minerva's Den (he headed up the dev of that DLC.) Those are gone, too, so it appears that at some point in time, someone decided to take off the posts of ex-employees.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love my work at 2K, I love the games they make, and I love the people I worked with. But I firmly believe that deleting posts off an official blog isn't the best of practices. It leaves dead links on other sites (right now a ton of categories on the blog lead to no articles) and doesn't fairly represent the history of the 2K Games community. It also means that as people leave for a variety of reasons, the content will become thinner and thinner - never a good thing for community, which is cumulative. I know that at least one other person on the current list has since left the department and I definitely don't want to see those blogs disappear. They are good content. People read them, some commented on them, and they should stick around forever (or as long as the blog is in existence.)
Here ends another chapter of "Elizabeth's random thoughts on how communities should be run."
0 Comments on "The downsides of not archiving"