Hmm… yeah… I imagine this would be good about 80% of the time. I’m imagining a number of (unlikely) possible cases where this “nearest” wouldn’t get the best version. The most likely would be if–as an example–say I added an “official homepage” link in 2018 but it was a “official homepage coming soon” placeholder for all of 2018, then maybe a 2019 snapshot (in 2019 the homepage had lots of actual information) would be better than a 2018 snapshot. (and yeah, in this hypothetical the homepage is gone in 2020)
1 Like
Yeah but that would no longer be what you would do, because you’re smart and the text would say something like:
ended
last known active date (not today’s date - a date when the relevant site was still active): --
If you don’t know what date the site has actually ended and don['t want to dig through the wayback machine then I don’t see the point in you putting in a random end date, just check ‘ended’.
2 Likes
If I have to dig through the wayback machine to find the proper date, where’s the benefit to the “automatic” URL calculation? At that point it would be just as easy to add a direct link to the last good snapshot.
Added: but thank you for assuming I’m smart. 
1 Like
I think that would also be fine (a direct link).
If it is too complicated though maybe just a link to the wayback machine page with all the dates, in every situation.
I always check archive to see when it disappeared.
If I don’t have time or if I cannot see when because not enough archived versions, I just check ENDED.
No one should set a date without knowing, ENDED is enough in most cases.
Because we are not responsible of the Internet Archive URL pattern.
If they change the URL pattern, we just have to change our display code, not all thousands of relationships.
Also, the Internet Archive is often changing the genuine URL (adding :80, or superfluous index.htm).
It’s still historically nicer to not change our real URL.
And it can be hidden and displayed only as text (no hyperlink).
4 Likes