I was reading some answers about Ruby and there are a lot of links to _why's sites. _why has recently left the community and took all his sites with him.
Almost every introduction question about Ruby will include at least one or two links to one of his sites. Examples:
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6806/what-is-the-best-way-to-learn-ruby
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32516/getting-started-with-ruby-development
- Is there a tutorial that teaches common Ruby programming idioms used by experienced programmers, but may not be obvious to newcomers?
- Learning Ruby: recommended blogs to read?
- What's the best/easiest GUI Library for Ruby?
With a bit more effort I could probably find more questions with a lot of dead links.
My suggestion for discussion was, what would be a good way to solve dead links in the answers/comments? Not every site _why created has resurfaced somewhere else, but some could be replaced by new links.
But I wanted the discussion to go beyond this specific problem of dead links in the Ruby answers, an automatic solution would be to let the links be scanned in a batch and when found dead be replaced by a Google cache or Wayback Machine version of the page, and perhaps mark it so that the community can replace the link with an alternative?