There is a serious “broken” link issue, and I’m not referring to the baf’s guide links, but to the links to xyzzynews, because the domain was taken over by a really questionable venture (a gambling one…) and IMVHO should be removed. (the links led to 404, but sometimes people facing a 404 go to the homepage for navigating their way toward the link…)
Someone can warn the maintainers of ifdb of this serious issue ?
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I agree, but I’d like to suggest that we replace the current links with links to the Wayback Machine’s archived version, see for example this snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20161018163325/http://www.xyzzynews.com/
This way, the information will not be lost.
Could this be archived somewhere more accessible, the wayback machine puts it own controls at the top of the page that can confuse people that just want to look at the original site and don’t understand how the wayback machine works.
There have also been occasions when pages have become inaccessible by mistake and there is no real guarantee that it will exist forever.
There are other tools to self-archive sites, but the first step is not “download the copy from Web Archive”, it’s “make the copy from the site while it’s still online”.
Agree. Is what ifwiki has done, at least partially, AFAICT.
OTOH, also agree with Oreolek that keeping a personal mirror is the Right Thing. here the …/if directory is basically a select mirror of the if-archive, but here tastes, preferences, even partisan opinion can heavily weight on the ‘select’ part (I never stored here CYOA or web-based material from if-archive, for example)
Ideally, the content of IF related sites ought to be mirrored and archived on the if-archive (and the if-archive itself mirrored in more than two or three trusted IF fellows’s HDs… a really proven ultimate preservation backup)
Backing up IF sites is within the Archive’s mission. We have already done this for inform-fiction.org, for example. Please contact us (or me) if you have a site and you want to propose something.
The IF Archive itself is hosted on Linode, and uses Linode’s server backup plan. I’ve also dropped a copy of the Archive data into S3 storage in case Linode unaccountably wipes out. I intend to update that S3 backup annually.
As far as I know, all the issues of XYZZY news are available on the IF Archive, so that’s one possible place to point the IFDB links if other options don’t work out.
http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/magazines/XYZZYnews/
Oooh, that’s cool! I didn’t know that.
However, I think, as one of the other options you mentioned, it would be even better to have an HTML version there as well, so that one can link to individual game review pages and use HTML anchors to go to the right place within the page. That’s where the current “See the full review” links in IFDB point to.
For example, here’s a review page with anchor for “Hotel California”: https://web.archive.org/web/20160722103318/http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.2g.html##hc
Is anyone in contact with Eileen Mullin?
Otherwise, we could try to copy the HTML pages from the Wayback Machine with curl or wget, I guess.
Do you think that a single editor can edit thousands of external links ? (aside that now begin the IFComp season…)
In my IT analysis, it’s a repetititve across-board editing work, whose is best handled by bots.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.