I meant to finish this earlier. The FP has confirmed something called an Atom feed “that will let Oppo export existing content to another platform”. If it there are no hiccups, and all of it is being transferred, that’s good news! And therefore, I don’t know how useful the rest of this post is going to be, but oh well. You can never have too many backups.
I contacted the Archive Team again, said that the archiving project is underway, and I got confirmation that comments are being included. I also 100% made sure they didn’t miss out Oppo. It’s looking good!
AKBrian mentioned trying to contact the r/DataHoarder subreddit, a group of people that like, well, hoarding data. I posted there, but I received no meaningful responses. I did contact someone from a previous reddit thread about possible Kinja archives. They said they lost the data drive, but did keep the script, and are currently downloading stuff again. They haven’t responded in a few days though. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, but it’s not hard to be anxious with the situation. Would the code even be useful?
Should things go dire, I did find some sort of aggregate site called ichi.pro that takes content from other sites, and Oppo happens to be one of them. Far from ideal, images are all cropped to a certain size, they don’t copy stuff like authors, image captions and most crucial of all, comments, but they do keep tags. I don’t know what determines which stuff they take: if you look at my ”A list of every single” series tag, I currently have 8 entries. View the same tag on Itchi, and you’ll see it has saved 5, including Chevrolet Part 2, but not Chevrolet Part 1. View the Oppositelock tag, and it’s not especially clear how things are sorted or saved, as opposed to the Jalopnik tag, which seems mostly up to date. The site seems to prefer longer articles? I have no idea how far back it goes too. Should the others all drop the ball and all else fails, it could be a last ditch effort to retrieve at least a very small portion of Oppo, and hopefully save lots of the longer, high-effort posts (Sorry shitposts). Let’s hope it never comes to it.