link rot sucks so much

[ratcreature]

For the first time in some years I checked my rec pages to see how many links don't work any more (trying to gauge how horrible it would be if I decided to update again -- answer: very horrible), and so many stories have moved or worse vanished. A few of the vanished ones can still be found through archive.org, but many seem gone entirely. Depressing.

OTOH thanks to the import of 852 Prospect to AO3, I didn't just come across many moved URLs, but also rediscovered some authors whom I really liked in TS in the late 90s, then lost track of, only to see that they are actually still writing fanfic and posting new stuff to AO3.

Comments

[bluemeridian]

I can't imagine how many links are broken even on my Star Trek rec pages of a few years back, let alone anything older. But rediscovering old authors is some pretty good serendipity!

[ratcreature]

Yeah. The Sentinel recs didn't turn out as bad as I feared initially. While a ton of links were broken, a bunch of sites are actually still around just the URLs changed. Like one multi-author archive site used to be in a subdomain and that fandom site vanished, but the site owner now has a new domain of its own for it and such. I even found some new installments to an AU series that I had only followed up to part ten or so and now there are twelve.

Still, I've spend a few hours already on just tracking down the TS AU recs, and those aren't even one-tenth of the total... At least since I divided them on subpages I can subtly fixing them one at a time. I figure I'll finish at least the TS ones, seeing how I'm almost through already, and then see how my motivation holds up.

[princessofgeeks]

This happened to me, and I was abjectly grateful when someone volunteered to update all my links (my list is Gateverse). It was so nice to see how many people were indeed on AO3. A few had gafiated or deleted, but the list was pretty much salvageable.

[ratcreature]

With SGA I'm finding that much of those are LJ links (more so than the SG-1 side of things) which are remarkably robust, because they more often than not stay even if the people gafiated, unlike personal webspace, which has to be paid and maintained. I dread the day LJ vanishes though. I mean as a platform it is becoming less popular, so sooner or later I expect it will go away as geocities did. That will be similarly awful.

[princessofgeeks]

Yes, nothing lasts forever. But perhaps because LJ has so much its platform that isn't fandom, and is actually non USA, that will help it last. Dunno.

[ratcreature]

Geocities had a broad base too, but I guess eventually it was past its time because the web usage had changed, and that seems to be happening to LJ. Its Russian popularity seems to help it some -- I'm not sure it would be still around if it hadn't been sold to SUP. So I don't think it'll vanish next year, but when it goes down it'll take a lot of fanfic with it. I really hope that at least everyone who is still active will archive their stuff in multiple places. Redundancy is key. But many use say AO3 for their new stuff but don't move all their old fanfic that is scattered across their journal, comms, and kinkmemes.

[princessofgeeks]

Yeah, you're right, and I worry about this too.

I try to post in multiple places for just this reason. And although I adore AO3 and think it's great, I am a big believer in redundancy!!!

[ratcreature]

Yeah. I mean, the AO3 at least sets out to preserve and be stable, but nothing is guaranteed. I still really wish AO3 would get around to hosting images already. I have "archived" my art there, but of course it is only embedded, so if my own website went down it would all be gone (well I allow robots and archiving, so people could retrieve it with the Wayback Machine, probably, but in principle). And the images on LJ/DW would be broken too. I have stored it at deviantArt as well, but their rules about explicit stuff are fairly strict (most of mine is okay, but that's not true for everyone).