Improving Our Archives
Seeing what recently happened to the Groklaw community/resources (site/domain hijacked), today we spoke for a bit about what to do about old links in old articles. The majority of links in very old articles are broken and many now link to dead domains, which are either unreachable or some kind of scam platforms/sites. It's a real problem, not limited to any one particular domain. For search engines it's a problem as well; Google likes to completely exclude "old" pages.
After seeing the consequences in Groklaw's case we decided to check the integrity of our archives. Since 2006 we must have published many millions of words here (there's no simple way to properly add up or count words because many are quotes) and we are trying to fix some Unicode-related issues in the very old archives, which suffered a compatibility (charset-related) problem when exporting from MariaDB. So expect our archives to improve a bit very soon, even if this won't be immediately visible to those who just read the latest articles.
We're generally doing fine and grow over time in defiance of jealous militants who try to sabotage us. The more stubborn they become, the faster it backfires.
Our old archives are still accessed a lot. Making them better is well worth the investment. █