Broken Links in Archived Threads

[Dannyalcatraz]

I was just surfing the Archived Threads section and noticed something: many of the links I tried were no longer active, making some threads essentially useless.

And as I understand it, Archived Threads can't be edited, so those links can't be fixed.

Can anything be done about this?

 

[Piratecat]

If anyone wants to volunteer, I think we'd be happy to give them editing rights for a few weeks to edit them manually. I'll tell ya, though, it's probably a deadly boring job that's good for patient people. I don't believe anything can be done automatically.

 

[darjr]

How are they broken? Or what needs to change to fix them? Maybe some judicious sql could fix the lot of them.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Not being a computer guru, the most I can say is that I got "404" errors and "Could not find page" messages.

 

[coyote6]

What are they links to? Other threads? The layout of ENWorld has changed, IIRC, so some threads to the old site need to be updated, or just won't work.

For example, in this post, Terraism's sig has this link: enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=35100

That version of ENWorld is a long time gone! But if you just take everything from "showthread" on, and append it to enworld.org/forum/, you get www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=35100.

Paste that into your browser, and ENWorld redirects to here: www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-legacy-house-rules/35100-favorite-threads-here.html -- which I believe is the right thread.

So you have to do stuff like that.

Edit: and then you edit to tell the forum to quit eliding the link names.
Edit2: but it still does it, so I cut the http:// off, so the board will show the entire link

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Some of the links are external to ENWorld.

 

[coyote6]

My access to non-.org sites is limited ATM, so doing random checking is a PITA, so my extremely brief check didn't turn up any non-ENWorld, non-functional links, so I have no idea why they aren't working. Those sites/pages may simply not exist any more, or those sites may have been moved or restructured, just like ENWorld has been. Maybe Google-fu could find them, if they still exist; or hit the Wayback Machine.