Topic: Source Link Protection

Posted under General

So there's been a lot of confusion and drama recently with one of the sites (Twitter) that very frequently appears in the sources section of posts here.

While I find it unlikely that Twitter will actually become inaccessible in the near future, it does bring a salient question to the surface:
What happens if a huge furry art repository goes down and breaks millions of source links?

Wikipedia currently has a bot that automatically fixes broken links with archive.org links, but unfortunately many of the sources here are not amenable to this technique.
Twitter links, for example, are not often archived, and it's hit or miss whether archived links from twitter actually display correctly when they are.
Many furry art gallery sites also don't play nice with web archives, with many either disallowing crawling and others only allowing registered users to access posts.

acidph said:
What happens if a huge furry art repository goes down and breaks millions of source links?

Same thing that happened with the Great Tumblr Porn Purge -- nothing. The source links stay as they are so people have the option of using it to find an archived sources somewhere if/when archives crop up. It also allows people to find images by searching the source URL if they happen to have the URL for the image they're interested in.

watsit said:
Same thing that happened with the Great Tumblr Porn Purge -- nothing. The source links stay as they are so people have the option of using it to find an archived sources somewhere if/when archives crop up. It also allows people to find images by searching the source URL if they happen to have the URL for the image they're interested in.

So if Twitter goes down, does the art that has been uploaded using Twitter image links disappear or not? I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, but I am incredibly uninformed.

banditbirb said:
So if Twitter goes down, does the art that has been uploaded using Twitter image links disappear or not? I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, but I am incredibly uninformed.

Nothing on e621 itself will disappear, all images on the site are hosted internally.

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