Broken official forums links

[Sekoia]

There are about a billion broken links to the Official forums on the wiki. Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration... but still.

I have a dead links report here: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/User:Sekoia/Deadlinks The vast majority of broken links are to the official forums. And they've been broken now for well over a year.

What do we want to do about these? My understanding is that they're broken because the posts in question no longer exist, due to purging. Is there any reason we shouldn't just go through and remove them all?

[Aggelakis]

Taking a poke at the links, most of them are broken because of the forum migration, not because of purging. I'd bet the majority of them could be found if we knew what the title of the thread used to be on UBB, which would have been ported over to vBulletin. But - again - the majority of them we have no idea what the title was, what much of the content was, or even who the original poster was...so we have no idea how to search for them on the new software to fix the link.

I would say we need to make a template for something like this.

{{TemplateName|oldlink=httpwhatever|reason=deleted, purged, ubb, whatever}}

So that it would suppress the old link so it doesn't display but not delete it entirely, and have a small (superscript?) "[post missing]" where the link would be in the text -- so that one day if someone magically stumbles over the original post the wiki could be updated.

[WanderingAries]

I was wondering when somebody would notice this sort of things as they keep screwing with the official forums seemingly at random. Not even the links I had saved within the official forum work anymore because of this and they were my 'utility' links for referencing things like binds, etc.