It’s very useful that Internet Archive Wayback Machine (IAWB) captures the same page multiple times in archives spanning years, and gives users access to a calendar. It’s great but it needs to evolve because history shows that some pages are garbage at various moments. Sometimes it’s incidental (e.g. temporary web server problems). Sometimes it’s intentional, as more and more services become deliberately hostile toward IAWB and resist scraping.

Here is an example:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221101000000*/https://www.magic-systech.com/doc/M6.pdf

Many of the PDFs are damaged. But one is good. The calendar should give more info. It should tell us how big each capture is. Some captures have a bigger circle around them and a bigger bar in the bar chart. That seems to just indicate number of attempted fetches. We need size indicators. And it would be useful if we could hide or color the captures that are just 403 errors as red.

(update) An anti-Cloudflare group (deCloudflare) once published a browser extension that not only auto-redirected to archive.org pages of Cloudflare-jailed webpages, but it was also smart enough to select the most recent functional version, IIRC. That team did a lot of very useful thankless work. It’s a shame they seem to be gone now.

(update 2) From the FaQ:

Why are some of the dots on the calendar page different colors?

We color the dots, and links, associated with individual web captures, or multiple web captures, for a given day. Blue means the web server result code the crawler got for the related capture was a 2nn (good); Green means the crawlers got a status code 3nn (redirect); Orange means the crawler got a status code 4nn (client error), and Red means the crawler saw a 5nn (server error). Most of the time you will probably want to select the blue dots or links.

I think the colors are broken. I have only ever seen blue. But kudos to them for trying, at least.