archive.org

Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2013–2024), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with archive.org, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 16 complaints

Archived wiki content is hard to use and often missing pages2024-10-10
Page buried in ads, can't zoom text into view on Firefox iOS2023-05-18
No pagination buttons, so regular users must edit URL parameters to move between pages2022-09-11
Close button hidden behind timeline on mobile, and the replacement banner also can't be closed2021-12-28
Useful content is hard to find organically across the site2021-05-16
Linking to a middle page of the viewer makes it hard to read on slow connections2020-09-30
FULL TEXT link doesn't lead to the file and no download link is findable2019-12-28
A blue bar pops in and out repeatedly, distracting from reading2017-02-10
Advancing many pages requires pressing PageDown repeatedly, with no page-number jump2014-10-29
New interface is optimized for casual discovery, not for people who come to find specific archived material2014-10-29
Uploads list stalls on 'Fetching more results' and tab filters reset the view2014-10-29
Infinite scrolling and image-focused layout make the archive cluttered and hard to scan; file list is hidden2014-10-29
Page seems slow on first look, and the content drop-down is disliked2014-10-29
Collections are organized by provenance, so items are impossible to find by browsing subject2014-10-29
Site practically unusable in Safari, often fails to load2014-10-29
Can't browse periodical collections chronologically or search and filter within issues2013-07-27