January 14, 2026
CAPTCHA or clapback?
Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior?
Archive site accused of pinging critic’s blog—HN erupts
TLDR: HN users spotted archive.today’s CAPTCHA repeatedly pinging a critic’s blog. Commenters split between calling it petty bandwidth waste and saying WordPress can absorb it, with calls to document, report to mods, and watch for changes—raising the stakes on transparency and trust in a major archiving service.
The internet’s favorite snapshotter just got messy. Hacker News sleuths say archive.today’s CAPTCHA page is quietly auto-pinging a personal blog every 300 milliseconds—see the screenshot. The blog? A piece that investigated archive.today’s mysterious owner. Cue the drama: some commenters smell a revenge move; others say it’s more “meh” than malicious.
The hottest take came from a user who declared there’s “not many non-malicious explanation” here, with another urging folks to email the Hacker News mods to block submissions if needed. On the cooler side, a commenter did a quick IP look-up and argued any denial-of-service (a flood of traffic meant to knock a site offline) wouldn’t bite because the blog sits on WordPress.com’s big, beefy infrastructure. Still, the vibe was very CAPTCHA or clapback?
There were memes and mystery too: one cryptic comment hinted the blogger “might need to tweak a single word” to avoid the Streisand effect—internet lore where trying to hide something only makes it more famous. Another user confirmed the behavior in Firefox and summed up the mood: “Is there even any explanation that isn’t sketchy?” For now, the community’s plan is simple: save everything, compare later, and watch whether this odd ping party stops or escalates.
Key Points
- •The author observed archive.today’s CAPTCHA page issuing repeated requests to gyrovague.com via JavaScript.
- •The provided code uses setInterval at 300 ms intervals to call fetch with a pseudo-random query parameter from the current time.
- •The fetch is configured with referrerPolicy set to no-referrer and mode set to no-cors.
- •Gyrovague.com hosts a single article referencing archive.today, dated 2023-08-05.
- •The author speculates about possible motives for the behavior and questions the timing, noting uncertainty.