Linkrot is a solved problem

Using a text filter for Drupal and the Wayback machine.

Park your mouse pointer over the links below.

HK-bladet 🏛️

The first link is old and does not work. The other one is perfect.

We revived thousands of dead links on Vertikal.dk with a simple text filter for Drupal.

Background <

At vertikal.dk we've got:

The stories are filled to the brim with links pointing in all directions. These links are valuable. They illustrate the points we make and point people to more knowledge.

Every time a link dies, our stories suffer.

Luckily there's an elegant solution to this problem.

Wayback Machine <

At the time of writing this the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has stored away 397 billion webpages since 1996. It's possible to find a copy of almost all pages we've ever linked to.

So we made up a good rule:

If a story is more than 5 years old, there a distinct possibility that the links in the story are pointing to nothing or to something new that we did not point to all those years ago. That's why we add a Wayback link to all the links in the older stories. The Wayback link is pretty straightforward to cook up using the datestamp from the story and the architecture of the Wayback archive.

Of course we won't change a single dot in the old article or change the links. The Wayback-functionality resides solely in the presentation layer.

A simple text filter for Drupal <

Most modern content management systems are able to get  Wayback-links (and we're here to help 🏛️). Thus far we've completed the task for Drupal 7.

Vertikal's Wayback Filter module gives you configuration page, where you tell the system when to start providing Wayback links. As a relative date ("Articles older than...)". Or as a set date ("all links before 2010-01-01 are possibly rotten"). We recommend using the relative date.

See it work once more <

Park your mouse pointer over the links below.

Du kan læse hele historien i HK-bladet

Links <

All our old and popular stories. Some with Wayback links, most in danish.

Wayback link on Drupal.org 🏛️. Get the module.

Link-råddenskaben breder sig. Use Google Translate 🏛️ if you are not familiar with the fair danish language.