Removing dead links from artist wiki?

Just recently I came across this. Should we be removing URLs that are no longer active? I never do this, and personally I would discourage it as I like all information past and present to be available there. I suppose there's extremely little use for deleted Pixiv accounts there when all of their images have been tagged (since I assume if they ever come back, it will have to be a completely new account), but this still strikes me the wrong way.

Well, on that last account, in two different situations artists I've subscribed to wiped all the art from their accounts and websites and started from scratch with new uploads.

There is no limit to the number of URLs an artist entry can have and removing them would screw up the ability for the find artist tool to find them on posts that the original uploader missed the artist on. Leave them.

There are also instances where following links to dead sites can allow for material to be recaptured from the Internet Archive (this works surprisingly well sometimes). Killing the dead links would cause "find artist" to fail in this instance as well.

Right, leave dead links in. Very useful for matching old posts to artists.

After coming across this, I would really like to reiterate that people SHOULD NOT REMOVE dead links from artist wikis. In this instance, the link to 71's Twitpic is now active again. You never know when the old links might be useful.

Are you really surprised that rantuyetmai ignores common sense at this point?

I am not pointing out anyone in particular. There are others who have done it. Just want to remind forum goers (maybe there is a wiki somewhere we can put this note too?)

There's howto:artist I suppose.

I've added a line in howto:artist regarding dead links.

I'd like to take this opportunity to ask about Artists' "Active" checkbox.
Does this checkbox indicate whether an artist is currently active or inactive?

No, it's a replacement for the "delete" function.

Hey, sorry to bring this topic up again, but I've just been informed (when I edited toweringman) as to the "Active" checkbox's function.

Reason I'm posting is because I'm almost certain I may have delisted some artists a while back :x
I'm going through the Artist records now, but it's a long slog - could anyone quickly double-check if/where I made the mistake?

Kikimaru said:
Reason I'm posting is because I'm almost certain I may have delisted some artists a while back :x
I'm going through the Artist records now, but it's a long slog - could anyone quickly double-check if/where I made the mistake?

Two years and counting... =/

I've gone back 62 pages (takes me to around Christmas 2011) and haven't seen any edits like what I'm thinking; but yeah, it really doesn't mean much...

Shinjidude said:

There are also instances where following links to dead sites can allow for material to be recaptured from the Internet Archive (this works surprisingly well sometimes). Killing the dead links would cause "find artist" to fail in this instance as well.

My strong support to this. However, I would like to propose a recommendation like this:

If it seems obvious that one or more of the artist site links are permanently dead (the site is not just temporarily offline), feel free to edit the link list. Dead links should be last and marked with '(old)'.

Bump!

Is it currently impossible to add "(old)", "(deleted)", or such after a URL (as I suggested back in the days; see above)? Or is that considered unnecessary?

If it is possible, what is the DText syntax for that?

A friend of mine asked instructions on editing artist pages. I told her to be careful and use the preview. The preview lied: "(deleted)" showed as an addition to one line in it, but formed a line of its own when the edit was submitted.

Why is it that there is no real preview for the URLs field?

You can mention that a link is "(deleted)" in an artist's wiki page, but not the URLs field, because the URLs field is just a list of links with no formatting and no non-link text

We strongly suspected that, but it was not mentioned in howto:artist, so we kept trying.