How can I continue to access Wizards of the Coast's D&D 3.5 Web articles?

Question

It appears that in anticipation of D&D Next Wizards of the Coast has removed much of the Dungeons and Dragons, 3rd Edition Web content. I didn't perform a thorough search to determine if all the content is removed (e.g. I know the Three Dragon Ante Web enhancement "Luck of the Draw" and the Mind's Eye column about psionic tattoos "Getting Wired" are both gone--better not to ask why those are my go-to articles), but it all might be.

What's the best way--and by best I mean both legal and convenient--to continue to access this content?

Answer 1

When D&D 3.5e's web articles went dead, WotC copied them to an archive site at archive.wizards.com, and you could access those links by visiting the archive instead.

However, the archive site is now dead, so we have to fall back to the next available option: the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. This service periodically scans notable pages it finds across the internet and saves a copy of them for historic reference, like what we're doing now.

This means we essentially do one of two things:

• Visit the original material via the Wayback Machine.
• If the original material wasn't archived somehow, visit WotC's internal archive of that material via the Wayback Machine.

Loading the original material via the Wayback Machine

For any given web address, you can prefix it with the following to explore the Wayback Machine's archived versions of the page:

https://web.archive.org/web/*/

So, for example, to get the D&D Updates Archive, formerly stored here:

https://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/updatesarchive

You just stick that first address on the front like so:

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/updatesarchive

This will look up the Wayback Machine's samples of this URL and offer you options.

You can also just visit the Wayback Machine's front page and enter the URl into the input at the top.

Loading WotC's archive site via the Wayback Machine

Maybe somehow the original material wasn't archived on the Wayback Machine. However, maybe the Wayback Machine has archived Wizard's archive copy of that page. (This is too many uses of the word “archive” in a paragraph.)

/dnd/Article links

Article pages have /dnd/Article.aspx in the URL, like in the questio. To access these, replace the 'www' in the URL with 'archive'. So for the updates archive, this:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/updatesarchive
       ^^^

becomes this:

http://archive.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/updatesarchive
       ^^^^^^^

If there's no www. in the original, and it's just http://wizards.com/..., then add the archive. subdomain: http://archive.wizards.com/...

and then we access it on the Wayback Machine as above:

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://archive.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/updatesarchive

/go/article links

That's for links of this form:

http://dnd.wizards.com/go/article.aspx?x=dnd/updates

These were just forwarders to the proper article link. Since the 'go' behaviour is now dead, we want to get the proper article link itself. Take the bit at the end following the ?x=, which in this case is dnd/updates, and dump it on the end of the proper Article URL:

http://archive.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=

to get this:

http://archive.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/updates

which we can then access via the Wayback Machine as above.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://archive.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/updates

Answer 2

As of this posting, the specifically referenced articles are still available. The best way to locate them is to let google do the heavy lifting for you. Visit google.com and enter the search query

site:wizards.com "mind's eye archive"

or

site:wizards.com "getting wired"

or

site:wizards.com "three dragon ante"

or

site:wizards.com "luck of the draw"

If you would like to save it for future reference, it is advisable that you save the content in an offline format, such as printing the page to a pdf or saving it via a read later style app (wallabag, instapaper, pocket, etc.).

Answer 3

I believe a complete centralized copy of all the official 3.x wotc web content can be found in a personal archive over here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dbmkg8efcbn4eak/AAB8n4GLPJ5WLhr3B--461Uka/Nijineko_Archive/nijinekoArchivePlus_v1-4/WotCArchive_v1-4/%20wizards%20web%20site%20downloads?dl=0&subfolder_nav_tracking=1

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For those looking for other materials from the same era the top level link might be useful: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dbmkg8efcbn4eak/AABSjyTbZIEDdIWm0I_uVFkpa?dl=0

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The Wayback Machine is also your friend, and most the articles used to be able to be found thereby.