Why do some web links not work?

Over time, web sites change, are revised and updated, or discontinued. Individual files or web pages to which we might link have each ben checked at the time of posting to the Clinical Waste Discussion Forum. After that, we have no control over other sites, and have to find a way to deal with those links that are subsequently broken.

As frustrating as this is, we have adopted a revised solution to this problem that will hopefully reduce that frustration for our users.

We now have software running continuously, silently checking every link that we create and reporting daily on those for which there is some problem.  That might seem a little bit ‘over the top’, but with more than 6,000 links on the Forum, including the oldest Archive files, it’s a huge task.

So now, we can separate those links that are temporarily down and give time for these to be rechecked without loosing that link, since it may come back to life and once more be accessible.  For those links that are down and reported by the target site as unavailable, we are dealing with a daily list – there are a handful  of these broken links every day.

We have decided to simply remove these broken links, rather than edit them in some other way basically to say ‘it used to be here , but it isn’t there now’.  We didn’t think that the latter approach would be particularly helpful or user-friendly, and thus will now remove broken links routinely.

Occasionally, this will create an automated revision of a post that after revision is somewhat grammatically clumsy. So be it. We will do what we can to improve those situations but regrettably some will always slip through.