Link expiration

[jackg]

I'm not sure if it's just me thinking this but I was searchin for my old topics and found one that had a link to a site, it looks to be a legitimate site at the time but now has been bought by someone else and is potentially being used for malicious purposes (it wanted me to allow my firefox to disable noscript and then allow a program to install - surely that's going to be harmless )...

Anyway, could we make it so that if links are posted after about a year or two that they expire unless they're from a highly visited site like blockchain.com/blockchain.info or other sites like that that get a lot of clicks.
This should also be helpful in reducing database sizes too. I reckon that there's a lot of blockchain.info links that are posted here that are going to go dead in a few years anyway so those could be de-linked too.

[1714102225]

1714102225

[1714102225]

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[SFR10]

could we make it so that if links are posted after about a year or two that they expire unless they're from a highly visited site

Good suggestion but how about the collateral damage to other remaining links, from genuine websites with less visits (if it's automated)?
- The only way to make that work, is having someone to check every single link "manually" from time to time and since this means more work for admins, then most likely has a very small chance of happening any time soon...
Perhaps we can have a "warning message of some sort (a pop-up upon clicking the links)".

[jackg]

could we make it so that if links are posted after about a year or two that they expire unless they're from a highly visited site

Good suggestion but how about the collateral damage to other remaining links, from genuine websites with less visits (if it's automated)?
- The only way to make that work, is having someone to check every single link "manually" from time to time and since this means more work for admins, then most likely has a very small chance of happening any time soon...
Perhaps we can have a "warning message of some sort (a pop-up upon clicking the links)".

A warning on links 2 plus years old is a good idea. A warming every time is not so much of a good one as it'll slow us down quite a bit,

[qwk]

The underlying problem is as old as the web.
No really good solution has been found so far.
Forgive my skepticism when I say we probably won't as well

Of course, a partial solution could be something like the image-proxy of bitcointalk.
I.e., when you post a link, the bitcointalk server might itself follow that link and create an archive out of it, not unlike archive.is (I'm not linking that ).
If you then clicked the link in bitcointalk, it could lead you to an intermediary page where you can view the archived version but also select to follow the real link.

Caveat:
Such a thing is hard to program and especially to program well.
You might easily end up turning the proxy into a DDOS-bot.