Common failure mode

[mmcirvin]

An amazing number of old Web pages have links apparently rotted not by file disappearance, but by file permission problems.

Comments

[iayork.livejournal.com]

What makes you assume that's accidental? When I want to take stuff "off" my web page, I generally just change the permissions -- that way, if I change my mind it's trivial to "replace" the page.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

What makes you assume that's accidental?

I've seen a lot of situations in which, say, the home page is still there and all the links still exist, but 68% of the locally stored stuff it links to has broken permissions. It happens a lot on rarely-maintained university pages. I'm guessing that in many situations, the page is really the walking dead; the author went away years ago and the linked material is subject to entropic variations in site maintenance.

[purgatorius.livejournal.com]

I want to read my old homepage from 1997, but aa.net's robots.txt file prevents archive.org from making that possible.