Subject:
Re: [discuss] Dead links; linuxdoc.org (was: Dead link in a HowTo)
From:
Rick Moen ####@####.####
Date:
14 Nov 2008 07:45:51 +0000
Message-Id: <20081114074450.GL30874@linuxmafia.com>
Quoting David Lawyer ####@####.####
> So what is needed is a volunteer to run wget (likely via a shell
> script) on all HOWTO's periodically and get a list of broken links for
> each HOWTO and then email them to the appropriate author. Actually,
> authors should do this frequently, but I don't think many do,
> including myself. Fixing a broken link is sometimes easy if wget
> shows a redirect. It also can be difficult or impossible when the
> link has disappeared without any replacement found using Google.
This means, in particular, that the sooner a broken link gets spotted,
the more likely you are to find the linked page/image at a replacement
URL, for a number of reasons including people's tendency to leave HTTP
301 redirects in place only for ~6 mos. to a year, if that, so you often
have a limited time window in which to find where things moved to,
subsequent to which knowledge acquisition, you have at least three
places you might find it: the Internet Archive mirror copy of the
original location, the replacement location, and the Internet Archive
mirror of that second location.
> One common "broken" link is linuxdoc.org. Well, it's not really
> broken but it points to the wrong place. Our old domain has been
> taken over by someone and made into a commercial site. We should have
> asked Poet to give linuxdoc.org to us, but I guess he sold his
> business and whoever got the business may have sold this domain.
No, I strongly suspect that Poet simply let it expire without asking,
for example, LDP if we'd like it back. At that point, a domain
speculator re-registered it via a domain-acquisition and parking script
that deals in such domain properties in bulk (and in large numbers)
without human involvement at any point whatsoever.
How can I tell that? First, have a look at the present Web contents:
It's one of those low-grade, low-budget "search engine" setups beloved
of domain squatters (er, "speculators") everywhere. They don't
seriously expect anyone to actually appreciate that feature; it's
strictly there to fool unwary people who've followed old, obsolete links
into spending a few minutes on the site, which drives up their
ad-impressions count, which generally nets out to more than their US $7
annual renewal cost. _Or_ it increases the traffic stats that they can
show to potential domain buyers, driving up the auction price they can
charge in selling it off.
Ergo, if you want that domain to eventually get dropped so LDP can
re-register it, the only winning strategy is to seek out _all_ external
hyperlinks that drive traffic to "linuxdoc.org", and pester the various
site maintainers into either eliminating the hyperlink entirely or
substituting a suitable tldp.org link. "Parked" domains that cease
making speculators more annual revenue than they cost to keep "parked"
get dropped.
> However, whoever got it never offered to sell it back to us.
I surmise that it's a domain-speculation subsidiary of Dotster, Inc.,
called "Domainbank". I doubt that any human being, there, has even
looked into who wants the domain at all: Domainbank probably has
scripts that analyse expiring domains for revenue prospects, attempt to
grab the ones that look promising, and put up fairly generic "parked
domain" so-called search engines on them without any manual labour
whatsoever. Imagine a firm that does this with tens of thousands of
domains all that time, and that's very likely the sort of firm we're
talking about: They make very little on each typical speculation domain
"property", but they make it up in volume.
> Thus the task of fixing these erroneous linuxdoc.org links in HOWTOs
> is important....
Agreed. Because that (along with hunting down and pestering out of
existence hyperlinks to that site elsewhere) is how we would change the
economics experienced by Domainbank (or whichever squatter, er...
speculator it is), making it earn less than it costs.
Any domain with significant "google juice" will stay locked up forever,
because the scripts will keep renewing. Change the economics, and the
script will branch the _other_ way, and let it expire.
> ...and one could do this without getting the authors' permissions,
> although perhaps not legally.
I would favour this. Again, who on earth would haul you into court and
say "You committed a civil wrong against me by making me look more
competent than I really am. I demand damages for the... um... loss to
my reputation", hmmm?
> If we change them (all or some), it will hurt the traffic to
> linuxdoc.org, and affect their business.
Right.
> Can a third party, the owner of our old domain, linuxdoc.org, sue for
> violation of licenses when this third party is not the copyright
> owner?
No. To answer that for yourself, consider whether any obligation was
failed, or any legal right was infringed.
> I've quickly looked over the linuxdoc.org site and it's quite poor.
It's a "parked domain" robot page, doing really low-quality associative
matches of guesstimated fields of interest. I'll bet you good money
that it's 100% autogenerated by a generic site-parking script, and no
human at the owning firm has ever dealt with it except as a metric item
on a spreadsheet along with many thousands of others.
