Hello folks, it's time to make this project official. To get things rolling I'm going to outline the reporting method, provide an example, and cover any exceptions/additional considerations.
Our goal here is to find and fix dead links. A good chunk of these will be pages that no longer exist, and an equally big chunk will be on the Site News pages. Some of these will be articles that were moved/re-titled. Others will be pages that have not been created. In regards to these two categories, if you cannot find a record of deletion in the deletion threads, PM the author, if they are still present, and inquire whether or not this was an intentional dead link for narrative purposes or if they had renamed the page, assuming you aren't already aware of it being renamed.
When does the above not apply? When an author is including deadlinks on their page as part of a tale series where they are leaving an open link to the next entry. Offer to remove the deadlink or replace it with the element I will discuss next. On Site News pages, pages that are using a dead-link for narrative purposes, or tale series replace the broken link with a [[a class="newpage" href="#"]][[/a]] which should look like SCP-XXX. In regards to link removal, simply remove the triple brackets around the item to preserve the content of the page.
As far as reporting the broken links goes, we want to document a number of things:
- Where the deadlink was (article link).
- Who the deleted/moved page was created by (If attainable).
- What type of page the broken link went to (Tale, SCP, other?)
- How was the deadlink created? (Typo, page deleted, page moved and link not changed)
- How the link was fixed (Link removed, fixed, or replaced)? Link to the moved article if available.
The link to our google doc with the full list of deadlinks is available to anyone in the MAST discord.
As an example of the reporting standards I will do one link from the first page of links.
- This workbench had a link to a tale by
Kain Pathos Crow titled "21st - 30th November 2008". The link was created by a deletion of the tale, and the link has been removed.
Obviously for dead-links where multiple different pages link to an absent page, report all the pages that were altered. All reporting should be done in this thread.