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Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

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Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#231

Post by mark-r »

bartread wrote: post #21

I'm not sure I'm a fan of this because it just turns WayBackMachine into another content silo. It's called the world wide web for a reason, and this isn't helping. I can see it for corporate sites where they change content, remove pages, and break links without a moment's consideration. But for my personal site, for example, I'd much rather you link to me directly rather than content in WayBackMachine. Apart from any…

And when you die, who will be maintaining your personal site? What happens when the domain gets bought by a link scammer?

Maybe your pages should each contain a link to the original, so it's just a single click if someone wants to get to your original site from the wayback backup.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#232

Post by canofbars »

mark-r wrote: post #231
bartread wrote: post #21

I'm not sure I'm a fan of this because it just turns WayBackMachine into another content silo. It's called the world wide web for a reason, and this isn't helping. I can see it for corporate sites where they change content, remove pages, and break links without a moment's consideration. But for my personal site, for example, I'd much rather you link to me directly rather than content in WayBackMachine. Apart from any…

And when you die, who will be maintaining your personal site? What happens when the domain gets bought by a link scammer? Maybe your pages should each contain a link to the original, so it's just a single click if someone wants to get to your original site from the wayback backup.

Wayback machine converts all links on a page to wayback links so you can navigate a dead site normally.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#234

Post by canofbars »

riffraff wrote: post #62
mcv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be nice if there's an automatic way to have a link revert to the Wayback Machine once the original link stops working. I can't think of an easy way to do that, though.

wikipedia just does "$some-link-here (Archived $archived-version-link)", and it works pretty well, imo.

iirc wikipedia has some logic for this. When you add a reference it automatically makes sure the page is backed up and if not it triggers a wayback copy, then it scans for dead links in references and if one is found it replaces the link with wayback.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#235

Post by marcus_holmes »

falcolas wrote: post #224
fwip wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Is it unacceptable for an artist to throw her art away after it has finished its museum tour? Should a parent hang on to every drawing their child has ever made? If you are a software developer - is all of the code you've ever written still accessible online, for free? (To the legal extent that you are able, of course.) Have you written a blog before, or did you have a MySpace? Have you taken care to make su…

> Is it unacceptable for an artist to throw her art away after it has finished its museum tour? Should a parent hang on to every drawing their child has ever made? This boils down to the public domain, IMO. We have made a long practice of rescuing art from private caches and trash bins to make them publicly available after the artists' passing (the copyright expiring); regardless of their views on what should happen…

Not sure we need any more encouragement on that front ;)

Sure, after I'm dead, you can do with my stuff whatever you like.

But while I'm alive.... it's my stuff and I can do with it what I like. Including tearing it up because I hate it now and don't want anyone to look at it.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#236

Post by mark-r »

canofbars wrote: post #232
mark-r wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when you die, who will be maintaining your personal site? What happens when the domain gets bought by a link scammer? Maybe your pages should each contain a link to the original, so it's just a single click if someone wants to get to your original site from the wayback backup.

Wayback machine converts all links on a page to wayback links so you can navigate a dead site normally.

Well that's a bummer. Any way to defeat it?

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#237

Post by tdrp »

markjgraham wrote: post #197

We suggest/encourage people link to original URLs but ALSO (as opposed to instead of) provide Wayback Machine URLs so that if/when the original URLs go bad (link rot) the archive URL is available, or to give people a way to compare the content associated with a given URL over time (content drift) BTW, we archive all outlinks from all Wikipedia articles from all Wikipedia sites, in near-real-time... so that we are abl…

Thanks so much for running this site - as a small start-up we often manually request a snapshot of our privacy policy/terms of service/other important announcements whenever we make change to them (if we don't manually request them the re-crawl generally doesn't happen since I guess those pages are very rarely visited, even though they're linked from the main site). It's helped us in a thorny situation where someone tried to claim "it wasn't there when I signed up".

It might be an interesting use-case for you to check out, i.e. keep an eye of those rarely used legal sublinks for smaller companies.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#238

Post by javajosh »

a1369209993 wrote: post #230
javajosh wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is a little indirect, but it does avoid the case where the Wayback machine goes down (or is subverted): include a HASHREF which is a hash of the state of the content when linked. Then you could find the resource using the content-addressable system of your choice. (Including, it must be said, the wayback machine itself).

> (Including, it must be said, the wayback machine itself). Citation needed? Eg something like http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=http://haskell.cs.... produces lines of the form: edu,yale,cs,haskell)/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/haskell-report-1.2.pdf 20170628055823 http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/haskell-report-1.2.pdf warc/revisit - WVI3426JEX42SRMSYNK74V2B7IEIYHAS 563 But there seems to…

> Citation needed

Oh, sorry, I don't think the WM supports this today. I only meant that it could support it "trivially" (I put that in quotes since I don't know how WM is implemented. But in theory it would be easy to hash all their content and add an endpoint that maps from hashes to URLs).

My point was that you could add an addressing system that is both independent of the Wayback Machine, but which you could still (theoretically) use with it. But you'd have to add the facility to the WM.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#239

Post by javajosh »

ponker wrote: post #228
javajosh wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is a little indirect, but it does avoid the case where the Wayback machine goes down (or is subverted): include a HASHREF which is a hash of the state of the content when linked. Then you could find the resource using the content-addressable system of your choice. (Including, it must be said, the wayback machine itself).

I've found that web pages have so much dynamic content these days that even something that feels relatively static generates two different hashes almost on every pageload.

Indeed. I don't think you could or should hash the DOM - not least of which because it is, in general, the structured output of a program. Ideally you could hash the source. This might be a huge problem for single page applications, except you can always pre-render a SPA at any given URL, which solves the problem. (This is done all the time - the most elegant way is to run e.g. React on the server to pre-render, but you can also use another templating system in an arbitrary language, although you end up doing all features maybe not twice, but about 1.5x).

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#240

Post by a1369209993 »

javajosh wrote: post #238
a1369209993 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Including, it must be said, the wayback machine itself). Citation needed? Eg something like http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=http://haskell.cs.... produces lines of the form: edu,yale,cs,haskell)/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/haskell-report-1.2.pdf 20170628055823 http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/haskell-report-1.2.pdf warc/revisit - WVI3426JEX42SRMSYNK74V2B7IEIYHAS 563 But there seems to…

> Citation needed Oh, sorry, I don't think the WM supports this today. I only meant that it could support it "trivially" (I put that in quotes since I don't know how WM is implemented. But in theory it would be easy to hash all their content and add an endpoint that maps from hashes to URLs). My point was that you could add an addressing system that is both independent of the Wayback Machine, but which you could stil…

Ah, that's disappointing, but oh well.
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