I’ve ticked “other” and “remove obsolete links”. What I’d prefer is – since, as pointed out above, it’s not in mb control what the wayback archive stores nor can mb assure a valid capture exists there – that broken links would get moved “out of sight” and only be visible like an edit history. Searching for an obsolete link in the wayback archive could be an (userscript) option, but it might be better not to return an easily clickable wb link per default.
Also, hiding rotten links might prevent bad things for metadata grabbers / 3rd party services using mb data. Must say that I’m not sure if this would really be an issue, just thinking it could be and an additional “invalid” flag added to a link is probably not good enough for cases where links lead to now nefarious pages.
The vote is closed. The sum is more than 100% since it was possible to choose more than one variant. Results:
60%: Keep obsolete link “as is”, add validity date to mark it as obsolete. As @jesus2099 noted, just mark as “ended” if the date is unknown.
50%: Replace obsolete link with a link to Wayback Machine (archived version of the original site).
21%: Remove obsolete link.
5%: Other.
0%: Keep obsolete link “as is”.
Majority (60%) is for keeping obsolete link “as is”, marking it as obsolete by either setting the validity date (if known) or just marking as “ended”.
@bsammon had created a ticket to show “ended” links in plain text, to prevent users from accidentally following obsolete links. Please consider voting for the ticket:
Since ended links are now not clickable anymore, can I get any opinions on my suggestion earlier in this thread?
When I go through the pages saved in the Wayback Machine to find a timestamp that contains the correct information, it would be nice to store this somehow to save others the trouble if they want to look up the information as well.