Hello. Imagine that on your Discourse forum, no external links are broken anymore. That’s right, your visitors would browse your site, click on external links, and never encounter the infamous 404 error again. This is what the WayBack Machine site and the WordPress editor offer in the form of a plugin. So now, would this idea be useful for your Discourse sites? 
AI-generated summary
In a discussion titled “No more broken links, ever?”, users explore the potential of a Discourse plugin that utilizes the Wayback Machine to fix broken external links. patrickemin introduces the concept, asking if such a feature would be useful for Discourse sites to prevent 404 errors. Canapin responds positively, citing the plugin’s solid documentation and their personal interest in information preservation, noting the frustration of encountering broken archived links on platforms like Wikipedia.
elmuerte emphasizes the feature’s value for forums with long histories, mentioning their own 25-year-old posts filled with broken links. They express a desire to make older content viable again, though they note that the Internet Archive struggles to properly index Discourse pages, preserving only a fraction of the site’s output. In response to elmuerte’s concern about archiving issues, sam invites the community to open bug reports so the team can address and improve the archiving process.
7 Likes
Looking at their doc, the plugin seems solid.
I have an interest in information preservation on the Internet, which was my primary motivation to migrate several Discourse forums from old engines (not to say derelicts…).
I also grit my teeth each time I encounter a broken “archived” link on Wikipedia, which happens quite often.
4 Likes
The oldest post on my forum are more than 25 years old. Going back to them they are full of broken links. Then I migrated to Discourse I put a lot of effort into trying to prevent link rot from the old forum software URLs. But the rest of the internet quickly forgets their past addresses. In quite some cases the content is still their, just at a completely different location.
A feature like this would be incredibly helpful to also make older content on my forum worthwhile.
Sadly the Internet Archive can’t keep up with preserving the internet. When I looked at what it managed to archived after I migrated to Discourse, it is quite sad. Only a few pages of the indexable output of Discourse are preserved. IA’s archiver isn’t able to properly archive Discourse pages. (I wish IA could more correctly archive a Discourse site.)
5 Likes
If there are issues we absolutely want to improve them, please open bugs
5 Likes