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Often I post messages with many links to external resources that will probably go stale over time. A facility to generate a permalink to (say) archive.org or a mirroring facility might be helpful to secure resources over time.

Also, many firewalls block sites like Flickr. I'm a contractor so I tend to be at the mercy of whatever network security policy happens to be in place at the site. Sometimes I would like to be able to post screen shots or other supporting files such as code snippets but I don't always have the option of doing this.

This situation is going to get worse over time as the blacklist vendors spot new sites. They also tend not to be overly concerned about false positives. 1337-ness is ephemeral - attempts to find more obscure sites are just an arms race against blacklist vendors.

You will find that none of the commercial blacklist vendors block (for example) slashdot.org as they know that they will get a serious PR backlash if they do. Given that Stack Overflow has quite a high profile these days an 'official' Stack Overflow archival site would have similar political clout.

While it is (to some extent) reinventing the wheel I think that relying on third party sites to host such material is not always workable. A service 'material.stackoverflow.com' or similar for posting supporting material would help with such issues.

I've gotten some comments, but the answers only refer to images, whereas this question refers to being able to attach other artifacts such as source files as well.

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My biggest concern with this is the resources it would take up which would be otherwise used for increasing overall bandwidth and maintainability of the sites themselves (especially as they continue to grow in size in terms of users, questions, answers, and comments).

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  • I think that is the obvious concern. Given that this material is going to be mostly static would infrastructural caching at ISPs and backbone providers mitigate this?
    – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
    Jun 30, 2009 at 12:41
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Snippets makes it sounds like it's a pastebin like service.

We can and most do post the vital information for a question in the question itself and the service has a good feature set for quoting others.

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  • Doesn't matter what it's called. What I'm getting at is a controlled archival facility and/or interface with archive.org to deal with two issues in linking to external fan-out.
    – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
    Jun 30, 2009 at 12:45
  • And I'm saying that the current system handles this quite well.
    – Ólafur Waage
    Jun 30, 2009 at 12:55
  • I think the current system has no facilities at all for this unless there's something I've missed. Could you be more specific about what facilities the current system has and why you believe it handles this well?
    – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
    Jun 30, 2009 at 13:03
  • For example, can I inline an image in a posting so it doesn't have to refer to an external site?
    – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
    Jun 30, 2009 at 13:05
  • No you can not, what I am talking about is quoting text / code.
    – Ólafur Waage
    Jun 30, 2009 at 13:07
  • I think that's a bit limited in scope. It works for smaller items but not for items such as images or larger bits of code. For example, once I posted a database reverse engineering script that was several hundred lines long. This is really too big for quoting but this sort of thing is potentially a reasonable response to a question. I think for stuff this big a means to link to an archive copy that has at least the availability of SO itself (both over time and in the face of over-zealous firewall or blacklist administrators) is a win.
    – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
    Jun 30, 2009 at 13:14

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