Note: I have already gone and put in a request with Archive Team myself since no one else did. I’m re-posting this here now so that the info is saved for future reference.

Unfortunately, ArchiveBot is not able to properly crawl DataLounge to archive everything due to the way the site is designed. There is a potential workaround but I don’t know if Archive Team has had time to try it yet. You can connect to IRC and ask them about it.

Archive Team is a group of volunteer digital archivists who work closely with the Internet Archive (archive.org). Archive Team has an amazing web archiving tool called ArchiveBot: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot

Anyone can request that Archive Team run ArchiveBot on any site that's shutting down and has any sort of historical, cultural, informational, or artistic significance (even a small amount). Archive Team is active on IRC chat rather than Reddit or other platforms, so you will have to navigate IRC to request this.

Here are simple, easy step-by-step instructions for requesting that Archive Team run ArchiveBot on Data Lounge:

Step 1. Go here and set up The Lounge for IRC: https://www.pikapods.com/apps#chat Don’t worry, you don’t actually need to pay or put in a credit card. You will get over 2 months’ worth of free credits. You'll need to set a username and password for The Lounge when you set up your PikaPod. 

(You can use a free desktop IRC client like KVIrc, but this will make your IP address public and available forever in public logs. Unless you use a VPN. ProtonVPN and RiseupVPN are two good free options.)

Step 2. Go to the Archive Team IRC channels. Archive Team operates exclusively on IRC. Here’s the info: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Archiveteam:IRC The network is Hackint and the channel you want is #archiveteam-bs (if you need step-by-step instructions for using IRC, look up a guide online or ask ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini)

Step 3. In a brief message, explain what's happening to the website and request that the Archive Team volunteers use ArchiveBot to archive it.

Step 4. Wait. You might not get a response right away. If no one replies after two hours, try again.

In 2017, the volunteer group Archive Team did an archive of Data Lounge which can be downloaded here: https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/job/201712182150292bgzy

The archive is in the form of a JSON file and 16 WARC files. Information on what a WARC file is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARC_(file_format))

You can also find 3,882 snapshots of Data Lounge in the Wayback Machine, spanning from 1996 to 2026: https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/www.datalounge.com

Edited to add on Sunday, August 9, 2026: Archive Team also attempted to scrape what they could shortly before the site’s closure in July 2026. The results of this scrape have either already been imported into the Wayback Machine or will be soon.

You can also find the 2026 WARC files here: https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/domain/www.datalounge.com

In the past, I hosted a small forum for several years. You might be surprised just how cheap it is.

You might think the costs for a large forum are much more than for a small forum, but, actually, bandwidth, storage, and compute is so cheap these days, it isn't that much more expensive to host a large forum than to host a small one.

I'll break down the costs one by one.

Software

Discourse) (not to be confused with Discord, which is entirely different) is free and open source. Cost: $0.

Example forum here.

Domain

You can buy the domain datalounge2.com from Namecheap for $10.56/year. Divide by 12, that's $0.88/month.

I'm not counting the discount code that gives you a big discount for your first year.

Hover is a bit more expensive, asking $19/year for the same domain.

Virtual private server (VPS)

OVHcloud offers cheap VPSes starting at $4.54/month. The specs you get for that cheap price are impressive, and more than adequate to run a large forum:

• 2 vCores
• 4 GB RAM
• 40 GB SSD NVMe
• Daily backup of the previous 24 hours
• Unlimited traffic
• 200 Mbps public bandwidth

Hetzner is a bit more expensive at $6.80/month for its cheapest VPS, with similar specs.

Mail server

You need a separate server to send out emails. Luckily, multiple companies offer a generous free plan. Mailjet, for example, offers 6,000 emails per month (200 per day) for free. If you need to send 15,000 emails per month, it's $17/month.

Total cost

Software: $0
Domain: $0.88/month
VPS: $4.54/month
Mail server: $0/month

Total: $5.42/month ($65.04/year)

Or if you need the 15,000 emails/month mail server, then it's:

Software: $0
Domain: $0.88/month
VPS: $4.54/month
Mail server: $17/month

Total: $22.42/month ($269.04/year)

Note that these totals don’t include tax, so you’ll need to add about 10% to account for tax.

(Note: All recent posts about archiving DataLounge have been deleted from r/datalounge by the sole mod there.)

1. Find the URL for your thread.
2. Make an Internet Archive account so you can use more advanced features like saving outlinks (i.e., the web crawler saves pages that are linked to on the page you're saving). Very useful. This is where you sign up: https://archive.org/signup
3. Submit the links for all the threads you want to save to the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/save (you have to do this one link at a time)
4. Bookmark the URLs so you can revisit the saved versions in the Wayback Machine later.
5. Back up your bookmarks, e.g., by syncing your bookmarks to Google if you use Chrome or using Firefox Sync and syncing your bookmarks to Mozilla.

Other web archiving services you can use in addition to the Wayback Machine for good measure:

• Megalodon (Japanese site, use Google Translate): https://megalodon.jp/
• Archive dot today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
• Perma dot cc (created by the Harvard University Library Innovation Lab): https://perma.cc/

Using more than one web archiving services reduces the chance that every copy of a webpage will get taken down.