Old and outdated threads

[jabguit]

Upon checking out several threads with information deemed highly invaluable and with several pages of replies, I am often greeted with links that are dead. Why are these threads still on the forum? Does it serve any purpose if a new member can't view their contents?

Mods - please examine.



cheers,

[Colossal]

I identify with your frustration. As you mentioned, in the course of my own after-hours reading and research on this topic or that, I have often encountered dead links and dead pictures. Images go away because some image hosting sites have changed their policies or users pull their images, much to my frustration and the detriment of the site. Sometimes original content can be restored by using the Wayback Machine archive. I have rescued a few things here and there, typically as I encounter them and information is available to restore them. I've pulled pictures down from hosting sites and imbedded them in the thread so that they will be permanent. To my knowledge, the fragmented threads exist because a) no one has made a decision to delete them, and b) some information is better than none. I can't tell you more since there has been no discussion on this matter between the site's owner and the moderators. Hope that helps.

[roberto]

jabguit,

I'm moderator and administrator on other forums, and I can guarantee you that behind a flawless forum there are alot of hours of work that are stolen from everyday's life.
Scanning continuously all dead links it's not possible, nor it's correct to erase threads just because there are dead links.

Best option is to save the attachments on the forum itself, or copy-paste the text of major interest.
This will prevent what you are experiencing now, and that I fully understand.

[pompeiisneaks]

I don't have the free time to go over hundreds of pages of forum threads and delete dead links. I've seen them, I've spent some time trying to find/fix them and after I spent a significant amount of time with very little success, I gave up.

I feel strongly that having at least the discussion about it has some context we don't want to lose, and if the original posters ever come back they may find the time to restore those files, etc.

It can definitely be frustrating, I get it. We have two moderators on this site, myself and Structo. We both spend what time we can. I personally load this forum up on my computer at least 10 times a day, for a few minutes each time to check on new posts, approve new accounts (and fight spammers) and just don't have the spare time to do 'pretty'.

I would much rather we find replacement data for the dead links than nuke them from the history of the site... so I leave behind the skeletons.

~Phil

[drew]

If there is a particular thing that you’re interested in, ask. Some members might have made their own offline copies of it.

[thetragichero]

I'm new here but pls run your establishment as i see fit

[BobSimpson]

Now that's funny right there...

[Phil_S]

Let's not be too hard on the new member. He used the search feature, instead of posting a question that's been asked and answered, again, and again...

[thetragichero]

I'm just poking a little fun
I'm on the moderator staff of a smaller forum that's been around... decades? so i understand that just keeping spam out can be hectic at times. add to that a popular, once free image hoster (photobucket) changing their policy on hotlinking and keeping old images valid can require a lot of work (we had one kind soul download each hotlinked photobucket image, upload to another host, and edit the posts to display the image)
there's a lot of thankless stuff that goes on behind the scenes

[Phil_S]

Oh, I think I lost my sense of humor while plotting load lines