Broken links in news articles

Shelix

Greetings!

I've always know about Penny Arcade; I think over the years I've even visited a comic strip or two, but never with any regularity.

Last week I started all the way back in 1998 with the original comic strip and started reading, often following up on the news and reminiscing on what was popular/important/at issue at the time. I'm currently almost to 2003, and a recurring theme in the news is that the links are broken. Granted, we're traversing back in time some 5 years and websites go out of business, move websites, change domains...

But even some of the internal links are broken, and quite often I'll find a link to Gamasutra or Gameinformer to an article that isn't there anymore.

Is there any intent, future or otherwise to try maintaining links for historical significance? I find myself somewhat disappointed as I try plodding in the footsteps of Penny Arcade's trek to the present and keep finding missing footsteps.

-Shelix

darleysam

If the site being linked has changed things around, there's not a great deal that can be done about it other than to try and hunt down the new address (if the content even still exists) and update the page. I doubt there's many people who would see the need to do this when very few people (such as yourself) would really find it useful.
With that said, the forums and main page aren't really related, so there's probably not a lot anyone here can do about it. Gabe and Tycho don't read the forums.

the cheat

That isn't entirely true, alphamonkey is in charge of keeping the comic archive running smooth and such as well as coding the forums.

At least internal links should be fixed, though. Although a few features are no longer around that used to be on the site.

darleysam

Hah, I didn't know that, figured he was forums-specific too. My bad.

Älphämönkëy

Gabe and Tycho feel pretty strongly against "de-publishing." While this falls into a grey area, I would rather setup permanent redirects from old URLs to new URLs than edit historical posts.

If you have specific examples, I would be interested to hear about it. The one off the top of my head that I need to write a filter for is /?date=YYYY-mm-dd

Tube

the cheat wrote: »

That isn't entirely true, alphamonkey is in charge of keeping the comic archive running smooth and such as well as coding the forums.

Nope. That's Ramius.