A fan has archived almost 200 BBC websites, which have been earmarked for deletion by 2012, and distributed them in a single torrent.
In a wave of brutal cuts at the broadcasting corporation, the BBC recently announced plans to shut down 172 websites in an attempt to scrimp on server fees. "The material taken offline is stored for future reference," said BBC Online managing editor Ian Hunter, "or deleted altogether."
Some of those are pages for now-extinct shows like VideoGaiden and
Move Like Michael Jackson. But others are far less disposable, such as "WW2 People's War" which archives personal memories of the war from the public.
To get this data, the mystery torrent-maker purchased a cheap, bare-minimum virtual private server for $3.99 (£2.50), and went about spidering (an automated process where a website is indexed and downloaded into a database) the BBC's designated sites.
The whole web-crawling process took just under 24 hours, "and would have been quicker if I had been less kind to the BBC's servers".
The anonymous distributor -- thought to be ex-BBC engineer Ben Metcalfe based on his Twitter messages -- has more lofty reasons for the archive than just digital archeology.
The archivist argues that the BBC is mothballing the sites simply to "to demonstrate cost savings within the department," in a response to cost-cutting initiatives in the British government. His project hopes to "expose the 'cost savings' of this proposed exercise as nothing more than a charade to appease the detractors to a strong BBC, and to curry favour with the current government."
You can download the full torrent file, right here.
The BBC is no stranger to making rash decisions in the name of budget cuts. During the 1960s and 70s, the BBC wiped the only copies of shows like Steptoe and Son, Dad's Army and Doctor Who, for economical and space-saving reasons.
Losing the offical website for Trexx and Flipside wouldn't be quite as rough going, but it still deserves to be saved. Probably.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
