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[HN Gopher] GitHub: A case study in link maintenance and 404 pag...
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GitHub: A case study in link maintenance and 404 pages (2013)
Author : roryokane
Score : 17 points
Date : 2026-01-07 16:36 UTC (5 days ago)
web link (chrismorgan.info)
w3m dump (chrismorgan.info)
| tempaccsoz5 wrote:
| Hilariously, a link given as an example is now effectively
| broken.
|
| https://github.com/styleguide/templates/2.0, cited in a comment
| cited in the article now just redirects to a style guide landing
| page with no context.
| lelandfe wrote:
| In their defense, I think that's the right move. There isn't an
| analogue for that page anymore, so it redirects to the new
| style guide's landing.
|
| I think it's rather cool that they've redirects still going for
| (quick Archive check) 11-year defunct URLs.
| holman wrote:
| 404s were designed for performance, as OP says here, but also to
| be as simple as possible.
|
| Part of the difficulty was info leakage; early on there was a lot
| of concern that a 403 would imply the existence of a repo that
| the org might otherwise not want known publicly. This was a
| little trickier in practice, really: early versions of the page
| took slightly different pathways as it went through auth, so
| based on the duration of the page to render you could make some
| assumptions about whether the underlying repo existed or not. It
| was annoying to sort out, so it wasn't touched very often.
|
| Certainly a lot could have been done with 404s over the years;
| they've only gotten worse. I put ultrathin font weights on the
| error pages move than a decade ago, when they were en vogue, and
| it kills me every time to see them still there. And, of course,
| the parallax effect has been removed, so now it's just sort of a
| dorky Star Wars or Looney Tunes reference without a lot behind
| it. Weird.
| ada0000 wrote:
| > vying with Microsoft for the "worst maintainer of links on the
| entire Web" trophy
|
| Anybody who has tried to read Microsoft's dev blogs know they've
| earned that trophy. Raymond Chen's articles are excellent, but go
| back a few years and every single link is broken. They're using
| WordPress at the moment but don't use slugs and never bothered to
| rewrite old URLs from whatever they used to use.
|
| As an aside, I also worry that a software company can't make a
| working cookie banner for WordPress.
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