This just suggests to me you've not paid attention to news reports around big services shutting down, as Archive Team gets brought up regularly in those instances.

Nothing wrong with that, and asking the question is fair enough, but doubling down on it in the face of being given references to who they are that are easy to verify gets a bit tiresome.

Especially since this is a group prominent enough to have a brief but well cited Wikipedia page [1] with references to media appearances in Wired, The Register, PC World, Technology Review, OnTheMedia, Techdirt, BBC, RadioNZ, CBC, New Scientist and others.

You can also find Jason Scott on HN [2], and his comments will point you to a number of other HN threads discussing archival, some of which are relevant to Archive Team.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Team

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=textfiles

They've been around for over a decade and every time a service shuts down and pulls their content there's always a mention of ArchiveTeam trying to coordinate an archive (negotiating end dates, any limiting or throttling with backup, asking for help). I've used them a bunch of times over the years when I see a thread like this. Just search this forum and you'll see them pop up for things like: imdb forums, coursera courses, soundcloud, tumblr's nsfw content, friendster, google reader archives.

> I think not since I've never heard of them and I've read tech news daily for the last two decades.

That's weird, because they seem to have quite a lot of coverage in major tech news sites:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/In_The_Media