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The accepted answer for Mobile phone detection (brand, model, browser etc) from 2010 has links that someone has edited to mark as "dead link".

There are enough dead links that to remove them involves almost re-writing the answer to keep it useful.

Is there a protocol for this sort of situation?

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    It wasn't just "somebody" that edited the answer. The person who originally posted the answer came back 10 years later to edit it. It appears they edited a few times over the years as links died.
    – Stephen Ostermiller Mod
    Sep 21, 2021 at 2:06
  • Can mods 301 internal links?
    – Mike Ciffone
    Sep 29, 2021 at 5:10

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I believe one of the reasons that particular post is so out-of-date is because it's for the most part a recommendation for a 3rd-party tool, in response to a question soliciting recommendations for 3rd-party tools. Those 3rd-party tools posts get dated rather quickly, which is one of a few reasons why they have been off-topic on Webmasters SE for a while now. I just gave it a historical lock.

For this particular post, there's no good new resource to update the link to, because it's a download link to a specific piece of software that's no longer available from the publisher. I don't believe link rot is nearly as much of a problem for on-topic questions, because there are often alternative resources you can link (e.g. swapping in an MDN page for a dead article about an HTML element).

That said, before I locked the question I updated one of the links to an archive.org snapshot. In situations like this where the post is linking to a very specialized resource (a specific forum post from 2008), I think it can make sense to use an archive.org snapshot when available.

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    When I lock such a question I usually comment as to exactly why it would now be considered off-topic.
    – Stephen Ostermiller Mod
    Sep 21, 2021 at 2:07

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