This one’s been pissing me off for ages.
This Intarweb thing- you may have heard about it, it’s been in the papers and on the telly- is a big place. There are a lot of websites out there, and they can’t all be the Greatest And Best Website In The World*- but having said that, the number of “Abandoned Websites” out there- ghost towns on the information superhighway, if we want to get all '90s buzzword-style on the subject- is not only massive, but quite frustrating.
All to often, as I’m doing some research for a writing piece or an article, I come across a potentially useful website, only to discover something at the bottom like “Last Update: March 1999”, or “The Next Re-Enactment of the Battle of Toxic Springs Creek is scheduled for June 14th, 2002”.
That’s most interesting, especially seeing as it’s now 2006, and “new shit has come to light” (to quote Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski) in relation to a lot of stuff that people may be looking for- companies go out of business or start up, new books are published/existing information is shown to be inaccurate or incomplete, and so on.
It gets worse when the links on said websites go to web pages that don’t exist, E-mail addresses that are defunct, or link to defunct organisations or businesses.
Hell, I notice there’s a link to Teemings, a defunct SDMB e-zine on the front page of this very website. The last issue of Teemings was in August 2003. Three years ago. Most of the people involved in said mag are probably long gone, anyway. Where’s the new issues? If there aren’t any, at least put something on the website to the effect it’s purely archival now- it just seems silly to be linking to a 3 year old e-zine made by people who may not even be here anymore anyway.
It’s a minor annoyance, but still irritating- so, I’m going to say that there should be a requirement that all websites be updated every other month, or else they get deleted (with exceptions for memorial sites, archival sites etc).
In the interests of keeping this pit worthy:
FOR FUCK’S SAKE, EITHER KEEP YOUR WEBSITES UPDATED REGULARLY, NOTE THAT THEY’RE PURELY ARCHIVAL, OR DELETE THEM, YOU LAZY PIECES OF SHIT!
There, that feels a little better.
I know, lame rant, but there you go…
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