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Amber is a new tool currently in beta that claims to be able to fix broken links. You can read a news article about it here and check out its actual website here. Long story short, it's like "a decentralized Wayback Machine" that locally caches every outgoing link posted.

Can we get this on Stack Exchange?

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    You might want to think about rewording this a bit, especially the title. I was two seconds away from flagging this question as spam.
    – MTL
    Feb 6, 2015 at 18:32
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    Somehow I'm not sure if SE is really going to be capable of caching every single page linked to from its network. That'd be extremely resource demanding, given SE's size.
    – Servy
    Feb 6, 2015 at 18:32
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    As a suggestion for improving the question: perhaps start by presenting a problem that you feel the SE network currently has, and then describe how the tool would fix that problem; rather than starting with the description of the tool, which feels "spammy."
    – MTL
    Feb 6, 2015 at 18:37
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    Disregarding technical issues and consequences, never mind legal ones, I'd say that addresses the problem on the wrong end. You'd better focus on getting posts self-contained rather than trying to have a copy of whatever external content the post relies on.
    – Bart
    Feb 6, 2015 at 18:54
  • Locally caching every link on SE? Lol.
    – user1228
    Feb 6, 2015 at 19:05
  • Related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/238956/…
    – PeterJ
    Feb 7, 2015 at 2:29

1 Answer 1

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Like Bart said in a comment, this shouldn't be too much of a problem. If a link dies, the content should already be included in the answer, so that the link should not be necessary anymore.

If you find that there is a widespread problem of "link-only" answers on your SE sites, you should either edit those answers to include the important information, or flag it as "not an answer."

That said; as Servy pointed out, this would be a massive undertaking, which would involve a lot of resources that SE just might not have. There are a lot of links around, and caching them all is a lot of information that, as mentioned above, shouldn't really be needed.

I don't think that this feature is a good, or necessary, idea.

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