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Comment by mfoy_ | Hacker News Reader

A similarly really annoying thing is when you find old technet articles, stack overflow questions, or blog posts that seem potentially really useful, but that have broken images, broken links, etc... so the content (possibly extremely useful at the time) is completely useless now.

It really stresses the importance of directly quoting / paraphrasing the content you want in your plain text, and not relying on external resources for posterity.

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The one I hate is when I find old forum posts explaining how to do something in the physical world and all the embedded photos are broken. Not because the image host went out of business or the user deleted them, but just because they didn't log in for a year and the host deactivated their account. This is why whenever I link a photo I upload it to my own server and I never change the URL.

Also 500px (I think--if not a similar image host) has recently banned all 3rd-party images, at least at the free level, which has broken a TON of the old forum posts I want to see. It was the defacto image host, kind of like imgur is now.

I apologize in advance as there's no non-morbid way to ask this but... what happens to the images on your server if you die tomorrow? It would be exactly the same situation, right? They would exist until your bill is due in a couple years then your account will be deactivated and your images will linkrot.

He's not advocating people rely on his server, he's saying hosting it himself allows him to quote freely without worry. If someone else wanted to quote him and followed his example, they would not have a problem when he died.

I have the server paid up for 10 years and the domain for 15. But it's true, eventually all things must end. I do have credentials for all the things written into my will so I guess it ultimately depends on how much my children care about preserving my helpful forum posts.

Or when they're broken because the image host discontinued third party image hosting/started charging for it, despite said feature being the only reason their site caught on in the first place.

Looking at you Photobucket. And all those useful images now replaced with a meaningless Photobucket placeholder.

Wikipedia also hit pretty hard by link rot, nice thing there at least is that volunteers can try to fix it

Wikipedia is working with the Internet Archive to automate the prevention of link rot.

For anyone curious, you can help fix dead reference links on Wikipedia in just a few seconds. If you find a page that has a dead link (or several), click the "View History" tab at the top, then click "Fix Dead Links" to run the InternetArchiveBot on the page.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot

Genuine question. Why isn't this done automatically? Astronomical (even suspicious) amounts of continuous outgoing bandwidth?

Just speculating but possibly the difficulty of finding a truly dead link. Often they just redirect to a registry asking if you want to buy the domain.

but redirects are also present in legitimate pages

I'm reading Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog articles from 2006. Most of the links that I try (75%?) are dead.

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