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Over time, web-pages are moved, servers crash and data
is lost, or the domain itself expires. This is the
phenomenon known as 'link-rot'.
Sometimes, however, the error is transient, and the page
will become accessible again at a later date.
In respect of this, the halfbakery allows
links to be
flagged, indicating their fallibility, which is a nice
feature.
However, when a link is proper broken, there is a most
useful service known as "The Wayback Machine",
available at archive.org.
When a link is broken I will typically go there and see if I
can extract the link from the archive. This involves a bit
of fiddling to get to the
archived page at an appropriate snapshot.
I propose that when a link has accreted its full quota of
flags, an "archived copy" link be automatically created to
the internet archive -
directly to the page at the nearest time-point before or
after the original link was made.
If there is no archive, words to that effect are given
instead.
No, I don't know exactly how hard that would be.
[link]
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Nice. Pretty straight-forward, I think... A browser plugin? Triggered by 404 receipt |
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There's a nice Wayback Machine extension (not a plugin)
for Firefox that
I've used, that automatically detects 404s and checks if
there's an archived copy, and provides a button to go to it
if so. I use Chrome most of the time, though, but I haven't
bothered to look for a similar Chrome extension because
I've just set up a search shortcut many years ago, and
that's been fine. If I get a 404, I just press command-L (or
control-L on my Windows computer), left arrow, wb,
space, enter. Then I get the Wayback Machine calendar of
archived copies of that page. You can do the same in
Firefox, but it's slightly more awkward. |
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This idea is something I'd like, though, because
automatically picking the closest-dated archived copy
would still save me a lot of time, not just in finding that
archived copy but also in adding a new link (or updating it
if it's mine), and also because it means that the link to
the archived copy doesn't end up at the bottom of the
links list (unless it's mine). |
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Bitrot is one of the greatest evils of the modern age. I'm not being even a little snarky. [+] |
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After fixing a 14-yr old link today by just copying it into the
Waybackmachine, I had this same idea. |
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Of course now I want to create an idea for "static internet".
Internet hard drives switch from electronic or magnetic media
to literally be written in stone. Might not be great for
removing embarrassing content. |
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After checking some old posts with dead links I'd like to resurrect this idea for our fearless leader to review and consider. If anybody could to this they could. |
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