5

Since 2013, Perma.cc has been providing researchers and law first firms the ability to provide URLs to online content that is archived permanently; somewhat similar to The Internet Archive, but on an as-needed basis. The idea here is to get rid of link-rot from "their" Internet:

Perma.cc will store the page [you provide] and give you a unique Perma Link - like perma.cc/ABCD-1234 - that you can use to direct readers to the preserved page.

However, the source link has to be "vested":

Links become permanent when they are “vested” by someone affiliated with a vesting organization, such as a journal or court. Perma.cc limits vesting privileges to help prevent abuse and to focus on solving the problem of link rot in academic and legal writing.

There may be some areas on Stack Exchange that fall under the umbrella of academics (not only Academia.SE) and possibly legal writing.

Would there be interest from Stack Exchange to invest in this idea and/or starting a discussion that may make use of this?

This is in a similar vein to Stack Exchange's investment in an IMGUR pro account, making image uploads "through a specific portal" remain available indefinitely.

Improve this question
5
  • 5
    All this is doing is exchanging one external dependency with another, and also adding a single point of failure as being critical to the whole system.
    – Servy
    May 4, 2015 at 14:51
  • 1
    Use Web Archive. Don't sweat it.
    – Deer Hunter
    May 4, 2015 at 14:54
  • Do you mean that Stack Exchange itself should host such service and archive external contents, or do you mean they should use this existing service by perma.cc?
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    May 4, 2015 at 14:58
  • 4
    For what it's worth, there's no such thing "archived permanently" - even perma.cc itself can go down any second. They can say 1000000 times they are permanent, but those are just words.
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    May 4, 2015 at 15:00
  • @ShadowWizard: I was pushing the archival process onto someone else, just like images are pushed on to IMGUR (right?). I'm also not referring to a singular "site is down" situation, but that linked content disappears, permanently.
    – Werner
    May 4, 2015 at 22:04

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
10

Personally I am not sure whether this is having the expected result.

I am not sure about that company / site, but it is possible that Google, Microsoft, Apple and others are more reliable in keeping up than it is with that site. In fact, you are swapping the dependency to those sites (which will be 90% of the total urls in SO for example), to an external source that might be not that reliable.

Also, external URLs are meant to support the post, whether it is a question or an answer. If the post isn't good on it's own, it isn't going to get better with a good external resource. I would focus on getting posts better, rather than keeping links from rotting.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .