Why stop updating broken links?

[doktorbro]

Travis has a blog. In https://github.com/travis-ci/blog-travis-ci-com/pull/21 somebody finds a broken link and tries to fix it. A Travis guy answers:

Here's a general question: Is the blog meant to be a document to reflect how things are now, or a historical document that announces what was new then?

It makes sense to make corrections to errors for a short while after the article's publication, but at some point we should stop updating them.

The Travis guy do not merge the fixed link and leaves the issue open. It is open now for two months.

It would be helpful to provide motivation in such situations. I think on images like this:

Image source

[gjtorikian]

Heh, well, I don't think it's ever going to work to police other people's behavior. As well, I'm not sure how an image would be shown on a terminal / log output (unless it's turned into ASCII, which actually might be kind of awesome).

If people want a broken website, that's their decision, just as they can choose to have yellow font on a white background. All pages on the Internet are "historical documents," to quote the issue. If I can find it, it should work.

Still, I'm not sure what, if anything, html-proofer can do for them.

[doktorbro]

I forgot to explain the usage. It’s all about persuading to start using Proofer.

Imagine a successful open source project with broken documentation. The lead developer doesn’t care about, because she knows everything. People ask her for improving the docs, but nothing helps. They say: “Just use Proofer, all the cool guys do it too.” But no arguments help.

Now is the time for the promotional leaflet with pets and children. People would show the lead developer all the propaganda stuff hosted by Proofer and then she complies.

But I agree, if people want to make history, nobody should disturb them with seals.

[gjtorikian]

Hahaha. Well, on that note, I do agree that this project should be more accommodating to non-Ruby non-Jekyll projects. I know it sounds completely crazy but I could see writing an example of how to install the gem and exec the command-line app within another language (if not in the README, then in the Wiki or something).

Reopening with that in mind.

[doktorbro]

Related to this discussion I have a great case for adopting Proofer. @mmistakes’s Jekyll themes are very successful. In mmistakes/so-simple-theme#78 he starts to use Proofer. Note his answers below mmistakes/so-simple-theme#78 (comment).

[doktorbro]

Just to be clear, I didn’t want to start a technical discussion how to use Proofer, but an ethical why care about broken links. There are enough guides about installing Ruby, Jekyll, Proofer and Continuous Integration.

[holic]

@penibelst I discovered HTML Proofer through your PR on the Poole repo. I've been wanting to add something like this to check for bad links in our blog content. So thanks for the inspiration!

I want to fix broken links, but I hate to get rid of the links entirely as a copy of the original page may exist somewhere, so I've created a little service that allows the bad link to continue working and points to alternative locations for the once-working link. You can find an example here.

Basically, prepend http://achived.link/ to the bad link and you'll land on a working page explaining that the original link is broken and offers alternatives. The current landing page is extremely basic (tossed it up in a matter of minutes), but I plan to improve it over time with better documentation, design, live link checking (redirects on good links) and other archival sources.

[doktorbro]

@holic I’m glad my mission was successful. Your service tackle the archive strategy. I’m curious how many people will use Archived Links in one year.

[doktorbro]

I close it as it’s way to dreamy. The Proofer is widely used now.