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I found some good advice on handling dead links and one of the pieces of advice is to fix the link if possible.

In the situation where the link is dead and I can correct the link, can I strikethrough the original and give the corrected eg <del> or http//news.com.au instead?

I figure it shows that the link has changed, should anyone wonder about the original site.

Edit: Example of where I have tried to do this: https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/2911883. In this situation the original blog is no longer live, and the author uses a new address.

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  • Remove the http:// and strikethrough?
    – Oded StaffMod
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 10:47
  • Other highly voted answer on deadlinks - without a comment on strikethrough: meta.stackexchange.com/a/71260/171148
    – Crowie
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 10:55

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No. leave a comment pointing out the link is dead and/or replace it with a valid one. Striking it out won't do anything except confuse the user, you'd have to leave an additional remark that the link is dead, which makes striking it out unnecessary.

Another approach would be to check if the answer can live without the link, if no, you could try to acquire the information from the web-archive and copy it into the answer, noting that the link is dead but leaving it there (for attribution and information purposes). If there's no way to retrieve the information from that link and the answer is not helpful without it, then the answer should most likely be deleted.

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    In that case just replace the link (with a valid markdown links please). There's no need to keep original links around if the site just moved.
    – Time Traveling Bobby
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 11:09
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    @Crowie, also note that SE might crawl links, and would then still create unneeded warnings for dead links. And strike through is just a variant to adding the word "EDIT"—see When is “EDIT”/“UPDATE” appropriate in a post?
    – Arjan
    Commented Sep 13, 2013 at 9:49

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