Actually. I doubt if that is really needed. If the pages are NOT being
updated - one perl script should be able to go through and grab the "archive
name" line, and use that to create a re-direct page to http://www.faqs.org/ ,
(which would require the user to click through- so that they would be
informed that the link there were using is bad). Optional would be a cgi
type intercept which would include the referring page, and ask the user to
inform the webmaster of the referencing page. I suspect that if the archive
were to disappear tomorrow, that it might be six months or more before the
last traces disappeared from the search engines.
The existance of the search engines is the reason to not use the another
idea, that of mailing the maintainer a note when his or her FAQ is accessed,
containing the name of the referring page, so that the FAQ maintiner could
attempt to contact the owner of the bad page. I would be afraid of drownding
in mail conatining the web address of search engine results and bookmark
files. It would be one way of getting rid of a lot of bad links though.
FAQ maintainers may want to re-visit their FAQs and include a URL for an
address that they intend to keep up to date within the first 60 lines of the
body of their posting (including the http:// so that it is likely to be
"clickable" ) so that outdated info is less likely to be referred to.
Of course there are a significant number of FAQs that while still mostly
valid have not been aggressively maintained for a while, so the maintainers
of those faqs may not have noticed that they are still referring to an old
archive. And then there are all the information pages on the web that may
also be not being aggressively maintained.
I always hate the idea of advocating the deliberate creation of a dead-end
for someone who is searching for information.
Charles MacDonald - Labour Information Management
< My own Opinion unless Otherwise Credited >
---------- Original Text ----------
From: "Andrew D. Taylor" <adt@renc.igs.net>, on 17-Feb-2000 18:26:
To: INET["FAQ-Maintainers" <faq-maintainers@lists.consensus.com>]
SUBJECT too long. Original SUBJECT is
Re: Web Faq Archives .. mostly broken, posing servers and spam from
sun00744.dn.net
---------------------- Original Message Follows ----------------------
Previously, Matt Curtin <cmcurtin@scooter.interhack.net> said:
> Our (OSU-CIS) FAQ archive has officially closed and the main interface
> to the FAQs is making a best-effort attempt to redirect to the right
> place on www.faqs.org. There are some direct links to us still
> floating around and someone a long time ago unfortunately made several
> paths to get to the FAQs on our server, so we've still got some issues
> to settle there. (That's why you can still get to some FAQs.)
>
> But we're closed for lack of resources to maintain it; please remove
> any references to it.
Then why not just erase the archive. That way out dated info will not be
accessable and people will just get a broken link. It sometimes takes a
broken link to get people to stop refering to a web site.
-- Andrew D. Taylor adt@renc.igs.net http://www.renc.igs.net/~adt/There are few forces on earth as powerful as a person driven by greed, lust, or pride, but when they try to oppose God, it is quite like a Twinkie trying to stop a steamroller.
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