EpicFail
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We went dark. This is the dig.

EpicFail ran for 9 years, from 2009 to 2017. Then it stopped. The domain stayed, the site did not, and for a long stretch the only way to read anything published here was through someone else's cache.

What you are reading now is the archive coming back, one post at a time. Not a relaunch that borrows an old name: the actual posts, recovered from the original WordPress export and swept back out of the Wayback Machine, checked by a person, and republished with their real history attached.

14,146

posts recovered

3,352

live right now

24%

of the archive restored

9

years, 2009 to 2017

What nine years actually looked like

One bar per year, counted from the date in each post's original permalink. This is not an estimate and it is not smoothed. 14,071 of 14,146 recovered posts still carry the date they were published under, and every one of them is counted here exactly once.

  1. 2009997
  2. 20101,783
  3. 20111,476
  4. 20122,592
  5. 20132,852
  6. 20141,605
  7. 20151,004
  8. 2016862
  9. 2017900

The shape tells the truth better than a paragraph could. 2013 was the peak at 2,852 posts. After that the pace falls away year on year, which is what winding down looks like from the inside when nobody announces it.

The rules we restore under

A post keeps its real date.
A fail from 2009 is a fail from 2009. We never restamp an old post to make it look like today's, because the age is the point, not an embarrassment to hide.
A person reads every post before it goes up.
Nothing publishes itself here. Not the restored archive, not new submissions, not anything.
We do not invent numbers.
No made-up view counts, no invented ratings, no badges nobody earned. Every figure on this page is a row count you can check against the hubs. A founding date we could not evidence used to sit on the masthead, and it was deleted rather than defended.
Credit stays attached.
Every post carries where it came from where we know it, and if you made something here and want it gone, ask and it goes.

What is still missing

10,794 recovered posts have not been published yet. Some are waiting on a human to read them, some lost their images somewhere between the original server and here, and some of the videos they pointed at no longer exist anywhere. Saying so is cheaper than pretending the archive is complete, and you would find out anyway.

Were you here the first time?

If you remember a post that is not back yet, or you made something that ran here and want it credited differently, tell us. If you have something new, send it in. Or just go read the old stuff.