The Wayback machine (web.archive.org) is a web crawler which stores websites
since a couple of years, sometimes back to the nineties. I'm just finalizing my
work about updating the POV-Link sites and found a lot (in fact the most) of the
broken links at wayback. But should we really use Wayback? And redirect all the
broken links to the saved mirrors? I'm not quite sure about it.

First I observed sites which are changed by their authors by design. Anto
Matcovic or Toni Bratincevic e.g. removed the POV-content by design. We should
accept this and don't link to older sites at wayback, where the old content
still can be found IMO. Anto and Tony will have their reasons.

The second thought is about the sites which are down due to insolvency of the
providers (geocities, lycos). Some of this users can be found at reocities, in
this case we can assume an agreement to use the old content. Some can be found
at wayback using geocities instead of reocities. But did this people really want
to have their entries restored? May be they simply were lucky to get rid of
their internet entries. And they were not aware of the wayback machine. If they
were interested in an internet site, why didn't they start a new one with a new
provider? And even if you decide to abandon your site for what reason ever, that
should be respected. Who really knowns about a file called robot.txt, which is
respected by the Wayback machine? I do, but who else?

So, still I had a lot of work, to regain old stuff from the wayback machine, my
personal idea is not to use them. We must respect the decisions people made. If
they will withdraw from the net or only some contents we have to accept this.

May be one makes a flaw by random and one will correct it, with Wayback your new
employer finds it.

Best regards,
Michael

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