Reversing Link Rot

[bsilvereagle]

Expected behavior

Visiting:

• https://opensource.osu.edu/lockdown
• https://opensource.osu.edu/su12
• https://opensource.osu.edu/au10/xen

Should route to the new versions of those pages. The URLs have changed quite a bit, for example, meinwald's xen talk URL: https://opensource.osu.edu/events/2010-11-18-xen-virtualization/

The old versions can be found on archive.org

Actual behavior

Page Not Found

Steps to reproduce the behavior

Visit the URL

[smacz42]

This can certainly be remedied, and some pages have already had this implemented. For example, the osuwireless links:

https://github.com/OSUOSC/website/blob/master/_tutorials/02-osuwireless.md
https://github.com/OSUOSC/website/blob/master/_tutorials/01-osuwireless-in-ubuntu.md

Their permalinks ensure that the page is redirected to the appropriate URL.

This will be revisited once the site is back up and running.

[oscziryak]

https://opensource.osu.edu/about/officers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Curtin

[enzanki-ars]

I will take a look at trying to find all of the links that have gone missing. archive.org showed a lot of links that have changed entirely.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/opensource.osu.edu/* shows 4,293 URLs that it has ever seen.

The API call the web interface makes is easily accessible, and I should (in theory) be able to make a program to find missing URLs (comparing to a locally hosted version to stop the script from abusing your server's resources. There are also a number of those pages that can be cleared, for example the LAN wiki, which clears about 927 of those links, and the IRC logs, which clears another 277 pages.

My plan is most likely to create a spreadsheet with the current and old links, missing status, and a link to an archive version. That should make it easier for people to help out with links.