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.-- Loris, Aug 08 2019 Nice. Pretty straight-forward, I think... A browser plugin? Triggered by 404 receipt-- Dub, Aug 08 2019 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.
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).-- notexactly, Aug 13 2019 Bitrot is one of the greatest evils of the modern age. I'm not being even a little snarky. [+]-- Voice, Aug 13 2019 After fixing a 14-yr old link today by just copying it into the Waybackmachine, I had this same idea.
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.-- Worldgineer, Oct 11 2020 Clever.-- doctorremulac3, Oct 11 2020 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.-- doctorremulac3, Jul 24 2024 random, halfbakery