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Comment by Faaak | Hacker News Reader

The idea is interesting and even kind of tech-funny.

But man, you really have to explain how it works a bit better. At first I thought that we should redirect 404s to your website and I was: "??".

What I understood: Which each iteration of the website, you archive the old one on a specific subdomain. Then, you redirect all 404s of the new website to the old one. Like that: no link is broken.

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Yeah, I didn't understand and jumped straight to the comments to see if there was an easy explanation here. Guess I should have clicked "How?" at the top.

https://4042302.org/how/

Even after reading that page, I didn't understand that this was a suggestion to start regularly archiving old versions of the site and only sending visitors there if their link didn't point to anything on the current site. Instead, I thought the idea was that, for software reasons I don't understand, web developers commonly changed the subdomain name for the main site and this was just a method for reducing the number of broken links when such a change was made.

4042302.org definitely needs better explanations.

Agreed, I thought this is a service that would provide automatic redirects to the Archive or similar.

FWIW Brave does that. If you reach a page with a 404 a banner will appear on top with a button to try and navigate to the latest version of the page you're looking for at the archive.

There's a fantastic extension for Firefox, Chrome, etc. called Web Archives which will attempt to find a copy of the missing page from the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, Archive.is and many more.

https://github.com/dessant/web-archives

There's an official Wayback Machine extension for Chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fp...

I use it, it's really useful.

Except it very often misdetects a successful load of a page as an error and redirects you away.

Really? It's not done that to me yet. It just pops up a 'see this page on the wayback machine' dialog, which I can dismiss if I want.

Same happened with me. Here is the idea :

> Here’s the simplest solution I could come up with:

> 1. Serve the current site from a subdomain (e.g., 2017.ar.al)

> 2. Make my 404s into 302s that point to the previous version of the site.

> 3. If I change the site again in the future, rinse and repeat.

> I call the technique 404 to 302.

There's a big "How this works" link on the page.

Ignoring database defined URLS, which make this harder or at least different, you could automate this to some degree with snapshots (for filesystems that support them), using the snapshot time as the subdomain or path prefix that references an older version, and the 404 page noting the current domain, finding the next oldest snapshot, and redirecting to that next subdomain or path prefix.

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