link rot

[alchemia]

i've noticed a lot of link rot, especially since the recent changes at LJ... links are either dead, or link to posts that are now locked (friends or private).  Is there an automated spider/robot to find these links, or do we need to manually flag them... and once identified, what can we do to fill in the info that is now lost?

Comments

[morgandawn]

First off, the Fanlore FAQ on cite archiving is here: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Help:Citing_sources#Archiving:_Preventing_Link_Rot

I remember there being some discussion of creating an list of dead links but don't know the status.

In the meantime, if you see a broken link you can (a) fix it yourself using the tools I mentioned above r (b) flag it so someone else can fix it.

Last if the page is dead and cannot be revived, we do not delete the dead cite - we just note (offline, not archived).

You can learn about the Fanlore cite tool here: https://fanlore.dreamwidth.org/84651.html

[elf]

We have a Shiny New Template to flag those links!

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:Linkrot

Just put {{Linkrot}} after a dead link - that'll add it to the Link Rot category and someone can later go through and try to find an active/publicly-available link. If there isn't one, at least it's tagged as "this used to be a functional link and now isn't."