A Big Hole in Chessvibes

Oops! A few weeks ago, on my World Chess Championship Blog, I wrote a post about London Candidates - Second Week. The post was basically a set of links to different primary resources for the 2013 Candidates tournament, which I later extended to include rounds played after the second week.

One of those resources was Chessvibes.com, which had some great content and comments about the tournament, destined to go down in chess history as one of the great chess events of all time. A few weeks after writing the post, the Chessvibes links stopped working, and pointed instead to the first page in the site's 'Archive for Reports'. Scrolling down to the time period covering the Candidates tournament, the archive shows only this...

...where nearly all content between 15 March and 25 April is missing. A Chessvibes post, Back up, dated 28 April explained,

After a downage of almost two days, and one of the most unpleasants weekends we've ever had, were finally back up. So what happened? Well, our hosting provider's fire alarm went off on Friday night, and the sprinklers in the data centre then damaged many hard drives, including ours.

The post, which could have been titled 'Back up But No Backup', went on to admit that the site was 'still missing quite some content', and nearly a month later I guess that it will be permanently missing. Fortunately, we always have the Archive.org Wayback Machine: Internet Archive : http://www.chessvibes.com/. My previous experience with Archive.org is that it is normally a year or two behind the current web, but for Chessvibes.com, the most recent crawl is currently 20 April 2013.

Is all of the missing Chessvibes content present and accounted for? I can't say. Are the user comments intact? They seem to be present, but I doubt they are complete. Will I change the links on my 'Second Week' post? No, but I'm glad to know that they are still working in at least one corner of the web.