Forensic archive reconstruction
Rebuilding the historical @davidsliker account from saved pages,
the Internet Archive, and contemporaneous reporting. Every post carries its own provenance.
The historical account is @davidsliker, created February 2010, stated by two
independent Wayback profile snapshots. The aggregator spelling davidslikre returns
zero captures across the entire Internet Archive. The real handle returns 769,
so it is recorded as indexing noise and excluded. The account now holding the username was
created 2025-01-21 and is a different account, gated out of the corpus by date.
| Handle | Confidence | Verdict | First | Last |
|---|---|---|---|---|
davidsliker | CONFIRMED | SOLE CONFIRMED HISTORICAL HANDLE | 2010-02-01 | 2021-08-29 |
davidslikre | REFUTED | INDEXING NOISE, EXCLUDED | n/a | n/a |
davidsliker (2025 account) | EXCLUDED | DIFFERENT ACCOUNT, SAME USERNAME | 2025-01-21 | n/a |
davidsliker SOLE CONFIRMED HISTORICAL HANDLEEvidence. Wayback profile snapshots 2015-02-18 and 2015-08-18 both state 'Joined February 2010'. Local saved-page headers from c.2012 and c.2014 carry the same handle, display name and IHOPKC bio. Internet Archive holds 764 captures of twitter.com/davidsliker/status/* whose snowflake IDs run 2011-02-27 to 2022-06-25. His own site davidsliker.com linked to twitter.com/davidsliker in every sampled yearly snapshot from 2014-05-17 through 2024-01-12, and carries no Twitter link by 2025-03-04.
Created February 2010. Tweet counts observed across snapshots: 4,801 (c.2012 saved page), 7,326 (c.2014 saved page), 8,131 (2015-02-18), 8,373 (2015-08-18). The bio had changed by 2022 to promote 'The Nations Rage'. Latest archived post recovered is 2021-08-29. No earlier or alternate handle surfaced in any source family.
davidslikre INDEXING NOISE, EXCLUDEDEvidence. Internet Archive CDX returns zero captures for twitter.com/davidslikre* and twitter.com/davidslikre/status/*. The davidsliker spelling returns 769 on the same query. Twelve yearly snapshots of his own website never link it, and no contemporaneous source uses it.
Originated in a people-search aggregator listing and reads as a transposition of 'sliker'. Quarantined, so no record carrying this spelling enters the corpus. The 'joined March 28, 2014' date attached to it is contradicted by the February 2010 join date on the real account.
davidsliker (2025 account) DIFFERENT ACCOUNT, SAME USERNAMEEvidence. The current X profile reports a January 2025 creation date with a single post, which cannot be the account that held 8,373 tweets in August 2015.
The historical account left the platform and the username was registered again later. The identity gate excludes anything dated on or after 2025-01-21, and zero records in the corpus fall on or after that date.
One yearly snapshot of davidsliker.com from the Internet Archive, read for the
Twitter handles the page linked. The handle holds steady for a decade and then the link goes away.
| Site snapshot | Twitter handles linked |
|---|---|
| 2013-07-18 | no Twitter link on the page |
| 2014-05-17 | davidsliker |
| 2015-02-02 | davidsliker, traceysliker |
| 2016-01-10 | davidsliker |
| 2017-05-21 | davidsliker, IHOPU |
| 2018-01-22 | davidsliker, traceysliker |
| 2019-01-03 | davidsliker, traceysliker, Calebculver |
| 2020-02-21 | davidsliker, traceysliker |
| 2022-01-03 | davidsliker |
| 2023-04-04 | davidsliker |
| 2024-01-12 | davidsliker |
| 2025-03-04 | no Twitter link on the page |
davidsliker spelling
and never the davidslikre spelling. The 2025 snapshot carries no Twitter link at all,
which fits an account that had left the platform before the username was registered again.| Year | Recovered | With text | With tweet ID |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 1,363 | 1,363 | 0 |
| 2011 | 1,324 | 1,324 | 11 |
| 2012 | 1,853 | 1,853 | 6 |
| 2013 | 1,512 | 1,512 | 4 |
| 2014 | 18 | 18 | 2 |
| 2015 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| 2017 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 2018 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| 2019 | 34 | 34 | 34 |
| 2020 | 205 | 205 | 205 |
| 2021 | 96 | 96 | 96 |
| 2022 | 44 | 44 | 44 |
Tweet counts include replies and retweets and fall when posts are removed, so they serve as approximate benchmarks rather than denominators.
| Snapshot | Tweets | Followers | Following | Source | Website shown |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7,326 | 8,804 | 126 | local_capture | davidsliker.com | |
| 2012 | 4,801 | 5,240 | 90 | local_capture | http://www.ihop.org/resources/author/davidslik |
| 2015-02-18 | 8,131 | 9,985 | 164 | wayback | n/a |
| 2015-08-18 | 8,373 | 10,414 | 170 | wayback | n/a |
| 2022-01-13 | 472 | n/a | n/a | wayback | n/a |
| 2022-04-21 | 10 | n/a | n/a | wayback | n/a |
| Class | Count |
|---|---|
EXACT_COPY | 6,060 |
EXACT_PRIMARY | 413 |
IDENTITY_UNRESOLVED | 49 |
| Family | Provenance records | Distinct tweets |
|---|---|---|
| local_capture | 20,010 | 6,108 |
| wayback | 748 | 413 |
| article | 12 | 12 |
| site_link_evidence | 12 | 0 |
| search | 1 | 1 |
Provenance is plural. One post can rest on a saved page, an archived status, and an article at once, so the tweets table and the sources table stay separate.
Timestamps stay separated by origin. A snowflake decode lands in one column and a date reported by a source lands in another. No timestamp is invented.
Inferred years are marked. Saved pages that printed a bare day and month take a year from the timeline's own descending order, and each such record carries that note.
Uncertainty survives. A block whose author is not established stays
IDENTITY_UNRESOLVED rather than joining the corpus.
Known limit. The saved-page corpus preserves wording without status IDs, so those posts carry no canonical URL. Recovering their IDs is the next pass.