Products · Product
Wayback Machine
Raised as a usability problem by 21 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 21 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Cannot easily find the list of other archived pagesUnreviewed
20102026- Archived content is hard to find because there is no usable search2024-08-03
- Says page is archived, link then says not archived, forcing repeated re-archiving attempts2021-12-21
- Hard to tell where other archived content is; can't easily find the list of archived pages2019-05-18
Archived page calendar and snapshots take 5 to 10 seconds to loadUnreviewed
20102026- Archived page calendar and snapshots take 5-10 seconds or more to load2021-06-30
- Loading snapshot year pages and archived pages takes very long, about 90 seconds total2021-03-02
- Archived pages take so long to load that the experience suffers2020-07-29
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 23 complaints
- Searches usually fail with a 498 error, and date scrolling is clumsy2026-02-20
- Wayback pages show a full screen of blank space above the content on mobile2025-04-27
- Archived content is hard to find because there is no usable search2024-08-03
- Human-verification dialog appears over the article and never goes away2023-06-16
- Unclear what the tool actually does; can't tell whether it downloads or spiders2023-04-16
- Says page is archived, link then says not archived, forcing repeated re-archiving attempts2021-12-21
- Downloads either a single page or an index, missing images and assets2021-07-15
- Archived page calendar and snapshots take 5-10 seconds or more to load2021-06-30
- Loading snapshot year pages and archived pages takes very long, about 90 seconds total2021-03-02
- Banner lacks an 'open actual site' button, so users must copy and paste the URL2020-09-16
- Shows 'site appears offline' overlay on working sites, covering the whole page, almost daily2020-09-08
- Hard to get content removed; only option is emailing with slow or unhelpful replies2020-09-08
- Archived pages take so long to load that the experience suffers2020-07-29
- Browser keyword search shortcut for Wayback Machine doesn't work2020-06-10
- Browser cookies pile up until the site shows only a blank page2020-01-22
- Cookies pile up until the site refuses every request with a blank page, silently2019-12-11
- Hard to tell where other archived content is; can't easily find the list of archived pages2019-05-18
- Audio doesn't play on page load, only after navigating to another page2019-05-15
- Archived sites become unreachable after the domain is parked with robots.txt restrictions2017-06-21
- Archived result only shows a page-load spinner, and the site needs JavaScript to work2017-04-25
- Cannot search old captures; user must already know they exist2014-02-26
- Prefilled http:// prefix stays in place, so pasted URLs produce a doubled prefix and no results2011-01-21
- Pre-filled http:// prefix doubles up when pasting, giving zero results2010-06-17