Forum:How should we deal with link rot?

The 8 free e-books (of Human Nature, etc.) that used to be at http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/ebooks/ disappeared in a site reorganization some time this year. On each of the 8 novels' articles here, we've got a link to the no-longer-existing page.

You can still find them all at the Wayback Machine (http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/ebooks/). The online and printable versions seem to be accessible at any snapshot from 2005 to 2010. To see all the images, and to get the PDF, PDB, LIT, and Mobi versions, you may have to look through a few different snapshots.

I don't know what this wiki's policy is on this. Should we replace the links in the articles to Wayback archived versions, remove them, or replace them with a note that they used to be available at (URL in plain text rather than as a link) but no longer are? --70.36.140.19 07:03, September 23, 2011 (UTC)


 * This is an interesting question. I think it might be acceptable to link to the Wayback versions, but does that cross the line of linking to "official" web content since it's no longer hosted at BBC? &mdash; Rob T Firefly - &#916;&#8711; - 00:19, October 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * We don't have a policy on this, and as far as I can tell, it's never even been discussed on the forums before. I guess people just weren't that bothered when Martha Jones' myspace blog disappeared. :)  My initial thought, however, is that it's not really our job to provide access to content that the BBC have intentionally removed.  The easiest solution in this case is probably the "morally correct" one.  If it were me, I'd just pull the links and forget about it.  But, like I said, we don't actually have a policy on links to material that no longer exists on the current revisions of pages.  So this is a chance for the community to formulate new policy.  Get to talkin' about it, people!  01:46: Tue 11 Oct 2011


 * After giving this some more thought I've concluded that you're probably right, and the easiest and least-potentially-troublesome thing to do would be to just pull the dead links. We could mention in the article that there used to be a free ebook online at BBC but there isn't anymore.  We could still cite the WC as a source for anything which was exclusive to it, just as we currently cite other out-of-print items like Target and Virgin books, but it will be up to people to track down the web archives or whatever on their own. &mdash; Rob T Firefly - &#916;&#8711; - 21:05, October 11, 2011 (UTC)