Questions tagged [link-rot]
Link rot describes the result of removing a web page from the Internet while other sites continue to link to it, causing "Page not found" (404) errors.
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When an SE site is closed, redirect the dead URLs to Area 51 instead of 404s [duplicate]
Example: https://productivity.stackexchange.com/ was closed. It'd be better if it redirects to https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4296/personal-productivity instead of some 404 message, so ...
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Help center page on flairs links to a YouTube video that has since been made private
Article in question: https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/flair
Flair is an image summarizing your accomplishments (your reputation,
your badges, the top sites you've participated on), suitable for
...
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Improve Community bot replacement edit summary
In the context of the Community bot URL replacement run addressed in 'Links to HTML versions of RFC's need to move from "tools" to "datatracker"' it became clear that the ...
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To prevent link rot, don't roomba posts that are linked by other posts
Over on Skeptics.SE I've been following this question, which is part of a series and links to four other related questions, as indicated in this handy table:
Unfortunately, three of those questions ...
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Automatically load external images in posts onto Imgur (like GitHub camo) [duplicate]
GitHub uses "camo" (anonymized image URLs) for all external images that appears on GitHub, like when rendered in a README file, in a document, or in issues/pull requests. Using a proxy for ...
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Stable links to latest Boost documentation?
Boost C++ library documentation links typically look like these:
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_71_0/doc/html/stacktrace.html
and I (and others) occasionally use them in answers on the site. But ...
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Bitbucket will shut down hg repos in 2020, what to do with existing links?
As described in https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket bitbucket will delete hg repositories in less than one year from now.
For an example, I linked to the thg repo and ...
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Links to tinypic.com are about to become permanently broken on August 26, 2019
I notice that there is an image link that no longer works at the end of this recently updated page in Meta.SE.
I suspect that this is only one example of many items that have links to tinypic.com.
...
- 1,589
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Automatically have links archived in the Wayback Machine
In a recent (now deleted) question, I proposed having a little reminder of some sort to archive links that are put in questions and answers, as they can die and much of the time there is no archive of ...
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Broken image (error code 400) for some Facebook avatars
I noticed a broken image on this profile. Closer inspection showing the avatar throw error with status code 400, for this url: https://graph.facebook.com/280988338943803/picture?type=large
Probably ...
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Remove link to elections.se from all network sites which conducted an election [duplicate]
As can be seen in elections.stackexchange.com isn't loading, the site http://elections.stackexchange.com/ is closed until further notice (which can take long weeks/months) hence all the links ...
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Link in example newsletter leads to dead YouTube video
When visiting an SE community you are currently not a part of, you may see something like this:
Upon clicking the "example newsletter" link you can scroll all the way to the bottom to find these ...
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File-sharing service links like Dropbox and Google Drive contribute to link rot
I'm a little surprised that this hasn't been requested already, as far as I could tell. I've recently encountered 3 users who used Google Drive links to share images in their questions, rather than ...
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Enable users to edit link rots [duplicate]
An answer to previous questions on link rots indicated that they are best fixed by user edits. Such edits are limited to a minimum of 6 characters, which is sometimes not the case with link rots. So ...
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Routine inspection of internet links [duplicate]
Some of the internet links on the site are not working, e.g. link #1 in the answer to this post.
Is there an automatic routine check that all links on the site are active? Would it be useful for ...
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All Imgur accounts are "Pro" nowadays: should we still move regular Imgur uploads to the Stack Exchange account?
In August 2010, Stack Exchange started providing user uploads to an Imgur Pro account:
Alan Schaaf, the man behind Imgur, generously provided us a network-wide "pro" account that keeps any images ...
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dead img-link on "The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta" [duplicate]
On https://blog.stackexchange.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/ is a dead link to a picture in the section with the title
Take Ownership of Your Community
below the term ...
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Should link-rotten answers be deleted?
This answer was deleted by a moderator, probably because of link rot. Copy paste for those who can't see it:
Yes, see os::javaTimeMillis in /src/os/solaris/vm/os_solaris.cpp to see the Solaris ...
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Dead links in the "Stack Exchange 2011 Elections Begin" blog post
This blog post contains links to http://se.awio.com/ which is now long time dead:
Can those links be removed, probably with the whole related section? Can't see a reason to keep dead links around, ...
- 175k
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Dead link trouble
While going through several answers and comments I found that several of those have dead links for example This Answer have A link and this is a comment link etc.
Like for answer we can edit them. But ...
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Link on newsletter preview broken
The link to the Nyan Cat video subscriptions page on stackexchange.com on the newsletter preview is broken because the account was deleted.
Example preview
I suggest that this link will be replaced by ...
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Lots of edits changing the link to Java documentation
There's a guy on a mission to change all links to Java documentation from old version to Java 6 or 7 (the old documentation is not online any more). For example that one: https://stackoverflow.com/...
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Is it appropriate to flag or downvote an answer that (only) links to a service that no longer seems to work?
As an example, someone mentioned a service which has not been renewed by the original owner. This is the whole answer:
I have had your problem many times. There is a good Word / Excel clean-up site ...
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With respect to the recommended approaches to dead links, can I use strikethrough as well?
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 ...
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What should I do if I spot a "link only" answer, that links to a deleted SO post?
My question stems from seeing this post.
Normally, I try to discourage link only answers by either prompting the user to add more information, down voting, and/or flagging if the post is from a while ...
- 1,695
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User Notification of expiring hyperlinks?
Would it be possible to implement feature whereby a user is notified of a hyperlink becoming unavailable? In doing so, they can take the action of fixing the link or removing the reference altogether? ...
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What should be done with questions where the question and answer are 404 on jsfiddle?
This is an example:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9569986/jquery-register-click-event-twice (10k)
It seems like it should be a candidate for close and deletion-- this is no longer really a ...
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Answer with outdated links
I have a question regarding outdated links in answers.
While browsing through Stack Overflow, I stumbled upon this post that was finally answered by giving the right hyperlink. Unfortunately, this ...
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Should you be able to delete questions which are actually referenced by a (careers.stackoverflow.com) resume?
Following George Stocker's suggestion, I would like to ask the Stack Exchange community its opinion about old questions which:
are not a good fit for Stack Overflow
are in the process of being ...
- 13.7k
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Pulling old hotlinked images into imgur account
We have a quite a few old posts with hotlinked images (they predate the SE imgur account). The problem with these posts is that the image at the original URI is beyond our control, and can be taken ...
user200500
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Allow questions to become unlisted
An "unlisted" question is deleted for all practical purposes, except it's visible to people who have a link to it. This would allow us to have a graceful way to "retire" questions about topics that ...
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How is it possible to mass update a broken link accross SO? [duplicate]
Sometimes, links point to sites which are dead, or not what they used to be, thus are broken.
Sometimes, those sites do have mirrors.
Is it possible to update all broken links in the various ...
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A call for MATLAB link maintenance
I recently noticed that the documentation pages for MATLAB on the MathWorks site have been updated to a new format. Unfortunately, this also involves a new format for many of the page URLs, breaking a ...
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Dead link hunter-killer
Did a quick search for similar, sorry if I duped.
Feature suggest for any SE site:
run a cron task...
that checks all posted links for dead-ness...
using methods suggested here or elsewhere
if link ...
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What to do about Wiki Tags that Reference "The Great Stack Overflow Tag Cleanup" now that the page on MSO is AWOL (404)?
I was looking at the context tag, which said:
DO NOT USE - Removed as part of https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/128315/the-great-stack-overflow-tag-question-cleanup-of-2012.
I've updated ...
- 11.2k
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Link Rot: Encourage author to cache snippets of relevant text to prepare for this eventuality
I have withdrawn this from being a feature-request to just a discussion (as recomended by @arjan).
What I would like to propose is more awareness of the fact that Links Rot, and so should only ...
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WSOiN - Who is going to fix the links? Or is link rot OK now?
As per the previous Meta post Stack Overflow Is, the old What Stack Overflow Is Not question has been deleted.
It was pointed out to me this morning that there was a link to the now non-existant ...
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Allow deleted answers to be visible to anyone if linked to directly
I got a rep boost today when someone on Reddit linked to an answer I made 4 years ago.
Now that answer was a bit flippant and if I made it today it would definitely be a comment, but after seeing the ...
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Search engines and removed questions [closed]
Before I ask a question on Stack Overflow, I try googling. When I google for "visibility of panel in vb.net," I got this link in Google. When I click on that link I got:
This question was ...
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The link validator is overzealous and should allow posting so-called 'invalid' links [closed]
On Stack Exchange, as with any web site containing external links, there's a problem known as link rot. This is the phenomenon whereby some URLs no longer point to the information that they once ...
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Are IP address links valid in posts? [closed]
I added a link in my post to an IP address based link such as 127.0.0.1/my_awesome_image.png. It appears that an automatic process added a comment on the post asking me to correct the link.
I know ...
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Keeping links to the closed sites
Is there any way to keep links from the closed sites, so they can redirect to the migrated questions?
See here for the migration of the recently-closed sites.
The problem is with links on external ...
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how to deal with link rot caused by deletion of popular off-topic questions?
While I am all for deletion of off-topic questions, I am not comfortable with some consequences related to the way how it is done now.
Namely, I am concerned about the fact that popular questions tend ...
- 11.3k
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Why was this useful question about app costs deleted?
The following was highly-voted question originally asked in '08. It had over 400,000 views and 270 upvotes, with one of the answers nearly approaching 1000 upvotes. Obviously this was a popular (and ...
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Fix links to broken git documentation
There needs to be a link sweep to questions/answers in SO that are pointing to http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/. Lots of google juice for git questions are pointing to these SO ...
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Add the alternative of "delisting" questions; deletion is usually harmful overkill
There has been a lot of debate about deleted posts over the years. The classic example is the old discussion about handling old popular posts, upon which consensus has never been reached and the ...
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Integrated social bookmarking per SE site
This is related to my previous suggestion, where the following was mentioned, but not elaborated on.
In short:
Stack Exchange could store bookmarks, linked to an internal ID. When
linking to ...
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Can someone fix all the broken links to the Stack Exchange Data Explorer?
The URL for the Stack Exchange Data Explorer changed from odata.stackexchange.com to data.stackexchange.com some time ago.
There are still a lot of broken links on Meta SO to the old Data Explorer ...
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Add link for image upload on mobile devices?
On devices that are not shown the editing toolbar, would it be possible to add some way to use the SE provided imgur image upload?
(I appreciate the effort SE has made to prevent image rot!)
- 28.2k
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Low rep users should be able to fix broken links
At present a low rep user (under 2k) can only make an edit suggestion of more than 6 chars, however when someone has taken the time to find to correct link it is a real shame the correction can help ...
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