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? 
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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.
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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.)
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