How should I choose and set end date, when I found that some links are broken or unavailable now?

MusicBrainz Style
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Options

Should I choose the date when I found they are not available anymore?

2026-03-06

Or I need to round this data to some level (to yyyy-mm, to yyyy only), if I don’t know the specific data when they started to be unavailable?

2026-03
2026

Or I need to set this info only if there are some articles, explanations and other proofs with some specific time/data? And if there are no these proofs, I don’t need to set ‘end data’ field at all.

Example

For instance, this artist have next links on his youtube channel description:

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изображение1286×821 163 KB

Both of them are unavailable now. Which end data should I set? Until now I preferred the first option I mentioned, so it is just 2026-03-06. But I want to check that my behavior isn’t against any guidelines and/or observes them.

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  1. Use 2026-03-06 if you know the link was working on 2026-03-05
  2. Use 2026-03 if you know the link was still working before 2026-03-06 but after 2026-02-28
  3. Use 2026 if you know the link was still working before 2026-03-06 but after 2025-12-31
  4. Otherwise, it’s fine to leave the date blank if the date range is too broad or you don’t know
3 Likes
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Hi, thanks for your quick answer! The problem is in most cases it will be impossible to recognize when they expired, because we don’t check and remember usually if links to our music/artists are active and that’s totally fine.

For instance, in this case I knew about this artist only because I’m adding this release right now: Release “Katayoku no Tori” by Milkychan - MusicBrainz and I was need to add him to MusicBrainz. I see him for the first time, so I certainly can’t know when these links have expired, even with round to year. Maybe it was this year, maybe the previous one or the year before previous. And I guess in the most cases it will be the same for artists that are not monitored actively by anyone.

I know that’s totally fine. I even didn’t see that anyone else use this feature and I understand it is fully optional. But that’s the point, that I want to mark this info. Even if I don’t know the exact date, it is still expired links and I want to mark them in this way to show that after 2026-03-06 they are not available.

So I try to understand how to mark it, when it is impossible to find the exact date of expiration and which way of marking it should be preferred in these cases for being as accurate as I can and for being as close to the style guidelines as I can at the same time

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When you don’t know a date, just tick “ended” and leave no date. Unless you want to trawl through the Wayback Machine most links end when no one sees it happen.

5 Likes
5

I was just about to post that the Wayback Machine would be a way to track it down, if you really want to.

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I try to locate the first loading failures, hijacks or redirects with archived versions at web.archive.org.
And if it’s not possible to pinpoint a date, a month or a year, I just tick the ended checkbox.

1 Like