The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was Approved.

Operator: Anomie⚔

Time filed: 05:04, Thursday December 1, 2011 (UTC)

Automatic or Manual: Automatic, unsupervised

Programming language(s): Perl

Source code available: User:AnomieBOT/source/tasks/ReplaceExternalLinks5.pm

Function overview: Replace dead or dying external links with links to archival websites, as needed.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 44#Semi-emergency request - bot to engage website archiving of links

Edit period(s): As needed

Estimated number of pages affected: 1277 for the first run

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): Yes

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Yes

Function details: Occasionally a site widely used as a reference goes away. When this happens, it is useful for a bot to replace the links with links to archive.org, webcitation.org, or the like, and to tag the remaining links with ((dead link)) or a similar template. AnomieBOT will do exactly this.

Discussion[edit]

This is heavily based on the code approved in AnomieBOT 44. For the initial run for Gamepro links, ((dead link)) will not initially be added. I may have the bot add it after the site actually goes down on December 5. Anomie⚔ 05:04, 1 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Uncontroversial. Approved for trial (30 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. (technical trial) - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 12:03, 1 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete. [1] No issues. Anomie⚔ 17:50, 1 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I guess, the question is, how do we know we've got a copy of the version they cited? That doesn't seem like a problem to me, but it's odd when you get an archivedate that is before the accessdate. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 18:51, 1 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

At the moment for citation templates it chooses the archive with the date closest to the accessdate; for bare links, it chooses the most recent archive. This can be changed easily enough, but if the page was archived in January and May and the accessdate is March, we can't really know whether the page might have been changed in February or in April (or both!) to make those archived versions different from what the user cited. Anomie⚔ 20:06, 1 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Given my experience with the website for Game Pro (since I put in the initial bot request) they rarely make corrections and if they have done so, its usually within 24-48hrs of the article post. So any version prior to the original accessdate from the ref will work, and if we find the odd case of changed or missing cites, we'll deal with it as it comes. --MASEM (t) 00:33, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

And are we confident that all the archives prepared by Betacommand are useful - none of them display as blank or something? - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 11

52, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

I spot-checked a half-dozen webcite pages throughout the 193-article list, and it appears good. There's some articles that hide the content iframe (for ad purposes) but clicking on "continue to Gamepro.com" unhides the content frame. --MASEM (t) 16:20, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Trustworthy op, edits seem fine.  Approved. --Chris 17:20, 4 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA.