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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

Why the Archive.org link?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2138014.stm

Not often I give props to the BBC, but impressive how they've managed to keep that page/article working for so long. Even most of the links on the page still take you to somewhere relevant and the search box still works.

Surprised they haven't bothered to try and migrate the old articles to their newer systems though!

I guess it's still running on the original server... the page took about 30 seconds to load for me!

It took less than 1sec for me, on mobile w/ 4G.

The genius is exactly that they haven't bothered. Can you imagine the flow of layout bugs over the past 20 years, or the managers calling to scrap old content because it's generating so much workload?

That's very much a successful case of avoiding needless technology

Serving up unsecure HTTP pages isn't ideal though.

Oh boy do I got news for you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk

Wasn't really thinking of the NSA/government agencies. Of course they'll be able to do dodgy stuff. Was more thinking about public WiFi networks and bad actors!

CNN still has its very first pages from 1995 http://www.cnn.com/EVENTS/timeline/

Its site design in the early 2000s was much like the BBC's http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/08/11/email.hoaxes/in...

Past headlines remain relentlessly interesting... https://web.archive.org/web/20000815060311/http://www.cnn.co...

SEO? I suspect keeping old pages as-they-were helps with search ranking of the site.

We've changed to that now from https://web.archive.org/web/20210126143212/http://news.bbc.c.... Thanks!

Oh! To be entirely honest, I got the link directly from a reference on a Wikipedia page, so I assumed the old link must be down since it was using archive.org.

With that being said, the archive.org link is probably better in case anyone comes across this HN discussion in the future.

I think Wikipedia references are encouraged to use archive links because it will show the page at the time that they used it as a reference as opposed to linking to the live page which can change at any time.

Wikipedia references should include both the live url and the archive url, and then set the “dead” flag to either true or false to choose which url to link to. Probably either an automated process or an inattentive user falsely marked the url as dead.

Wikipedia has been around long enough that many of the citation links pointing to other websites are broken. So there are several wiki bots that go around replacing direct links with links to the archived pages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem links both to the live page and to the archived copy (in that order).

Linking only to an archived copy when the original is still live would be unusual.

We ask people not to submit archive links* because it's important for readers to see the original provenance of the article, e.g. in the site name displayed to the right of the title.

"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* If the original article is really not available anywhere else on the web and is interesting enough for a good HN thread, posting archive.org is ok.

Noted. Thanks for updating the link!

Interesting that this is in the Science/Nature section. I wonder why not Technology.

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