Category talk:Articles with formerly dead external links

Statistics
As of 13 August 2018

Collaboration of the month - April 2018
We have a few hundred Articles with formerly dead external links. These are links that previously had domain or page not found but are now showing a valid web page. Many of these are referencing other, incorrect, businesses. Some are just incorrectly tagged. Would be good to have a concerted effort to fix these links or removed listings that no-longer exist. --Traveler100 (talk) 08:09, 3 April 2018 (UTC)


 * If you've not done this before, then there are instructions at the top of the category page. Alternatively, look in the wikitext for a dead link template with two months:    and check the marked URL.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:41, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Here are a couple of examples were the web address exists but have been taken over by tourist site pages, Westfield MA, Truro MA. --Traveler100 (talk) 05:51, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Half way through. --Traveler100 (talk) 06:43, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
 * A few contributors have made a serious impact on quality of articles reducing pages with link issues from 812 to 174 in one month. --Traveler100 (talk) 07:36, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

A note on false positives
As the bot is currently re-running I'm seeing a number of links being marked as "previously dead" that, when you click on them, still show up as being obviously dead in a browser. In the majority of cases I've looked at, what is actually happening is that the link itself is usually an  link. When the bot hits that link, the site in question appears to have a global rule set to redirect all  links to the   equivalent. The "page has been moved" (301 redirect) response from the site is interpreted by the bot as a successful response since it does not attempt a second request to the provided  target. In other words:


 * 1) Bot queries link of the form
 * 2) The site in question returns a response indicating that the page in question has moved to  .  At this point the bot treats the link as again being alive since it is now getting a response that it has been coded to treat as a success.
 * 3) However, if you actually go to   the page does not exist.

At some point in the future I may update the bot to handle this edge case, but for now this explanation hopefully provides some insight as to why the bot is suddenly tagging links as "previously dead" when they are clearly still dead in a browser. -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 01:43, 1 June 2020 (UTC)