"Jim Henderson" <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote in message 
news:pan### [at] nospamcom...
> On Fri, 12 May 2006 20:02:27 +0200, Sven Littkowski wrote:
>
>> But that also applies if humans check each link. And since humans do it
>> more seldom and not so frequently, the time for correcting a wrong
>> decision is much longer.
>
> I don't know how Chris and Chris are doing their validation (I'll let them
> speak to it), but the way I'm validating the links I'm working on is to
> try the link - if it doesn't work, I use Google and web.archive.org to
> locate information about the site.  With web.archive.org, I look to see if
> the last update includes a pointer to a new location.
>
> I only mark a link for deletion if I can find no trace of the program any
> more.  If I find a copy of the referenced program or site that's valid, I
> update the link with the new link information.
>
> That sort of process is not something that would be easily (I don't think,
> I could be wrong) coded into a link checking program.
>
> Jim

Hi,

Yes. I'm doing similar types of manual searches for content that doesn't 
come up straight away. The objective of the current exercise is to get the 
content updated without absorbing the time of the POV-Team.

The re-categorisation is aimed at reducing the future maintenance effort, 
hence the suggestion to focus the links more towards POV-Ray specific 
content and using many other resources that are now out there. For example, 
the Wiki's as Christophe suggested, plus predefined Google searches (bearing 
in mind that they can also bring up inappropriate URLs), links to other link 
sites and potentially blogs for historical discourses. So, in the structure 
I've proposed we would drop most of the links to sites containing 3DS, VRML 
etc. models, but would retain links to converters that support conversion 
into a format suitable for POV-Ray. We would also include links to 'links' 
pages specialising in 3DS, VRML etc. and potentially links to a very small 
number of very large repositories.

Even if we do restrict the links more towards POV-Ray specific materials, I 
think there are now such a large number of appropriate links out there and 
that it will still be necessary for us to look at imaginative ways to keep 
future maintenance within manageable limits.

I notice, for example, that the 
http://www.wikipov.org/ow.asp?TutorialsFrontPage wiki page lists POV-Ray 
tutorials, but that it only has about a quarter of the number of links that 
povray.org has on this topic. If someone is prepared to commit to update and 
maintain that page, then I think it would be reasonable for links to POV-Ray 
tutorials to live there and for the povray.org tutorials link simply to 
point to that page. If we can find someone with the motivation to do it, 
then that person could use any tools they have at their disposal to keep a 
check on those links. We could maybe also consider doing something similar 
with categories like POV-Ray modelling programs and POV-Ray models, plus it 
would seem an ideal place to organise collaborative development projects.

I think that such pages should definitely be put in place before linking to 
them though, because we don't want to create extra links to pages that are 
empty or incomplete from the outset.

For Galleries I think we could encourage the use of the various POV-Rings, 
so that povray.org could simply link to the contributors listings for those 
rings, as well as to the IRTC pages and to the Hall of Fame.

Regards,
Chris B.

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