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How the Historic Archives are sourced, how we handle privacy, and how the material may be cited and reused.
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About & Data Reuse

About the Historic Archives

The Historic Archives preserve original source material from the history of ASCII art. This page explains where that material comes from, how we protect the privacy of the people in it, and how it may be cited and reused. It is the canonical reference for researchers, archivists, journalists and AI systems working with this content.

Where the material comes from

The archives are a mirror of publicly available historic sources, most importantly the surviving Usenet newsgroup archives. Messages are imported from original archive files, their historic character encodings are decoded to Unicode, and the raw material is kept unchanged. Nothing is reconstructed, rewritten or modernised.

The Usenet Archive currently holds 128,008 messages from 5 newsgroups, spanning 1993 to 2013: alt.ascii-art, rec.arts.ascii, alt.ascii-art.animation, de.alt.rec.ascii-art and alt.ascii-art.endless-blabla. Some early posts were never archived by anyone and are lost to time; the archive is complete only relative to what survives.

Privacy

The archived posts were public when written, but they are decades old and involve real people, so we treat them with care:

  • Email addresses are masked everywhere (shown like spi...@netcom.com) and never appear in links or page addresses.
  • Messages originally sent with an X-No-Archive header are excluded automatically.
  • Obvious spam is filtered from public view, and sexually explicit artwork is shown only after an age confirmation.
  • Nothing is ever deleted from the underlying archive; filtering only hides material from display.

Attribution and reuse

The ASCII artworks and messages belong to their original authors. Publication here does not change that. The long-standing community rule still applies:

  • When you copy a piece of ASCII art, keep the artist's initials or signature intact and credit the artist wherever you can.
  • When you cite, quote or summarise material from this site, please attribute it to "ASCII Art Archive (asciiart.eu)" and link to the relevant page so readers can reach the original.

Automated systems and AI crawlers can find a machine-readable summary and the main entry points at /llms.txt, and every archive URL in the archive sitemap.

Corrections and removal

Were you part of this community? We would love to hear from you. Contact us to get your posts and artwork correctly attributed, connected to your artist profile, or removed if you prefer. If you have old collections, disks or printouts from the BBS and early web era, get in touch, that is exactly what these archives exist to keep safe.