Unfortunately newer systems seem more resistant to archival than older. Compare getting a copy of a mailing list vs. getting a copy of a forum like phpBB or (ev

Unfortunately newer systems seem more resistant to archival than older. Compare getting a copy of a mailing list vs. getting a copy of a forum like phpBB or (even more modern) archiving a copy of a subreddit or Facebook group. Some people on a mailing list may already have a full copy simply from their participation in the list, and if the list has archives then presumably they are in a format which has stood the test of time. The other cases contrast with this. You can run wget on online forums, though the result is not as clean as the mailing list. Someone (maybe me) should write a bot to parse the pages into something more useful. I've also seen a script to scrape subreddits, though in my experience scraping subreddits is rarer than spidering forums. No idea what you can do with Facebook groups. While I am irritated by how much of the internet has been replaced by JavaScript, one advantage has been the exposure of APIs that can be reverse engineered, as seems to have been done in the recent Yahoo Groups case. So there might be some hope here.