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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Would be nice if there's an automatic way to have a link revert to the Wayback Machine once the original link stops working. I can't think of an easy way to do that, though.

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Brave browser has this built in, if you end up at a dead link the address bar offers to take you to wayback machine.

http://blog.archive.org/2020/02/25/brave-browser-and-the-way...

This was first implemented in Firefox, as an experiment, and is now an extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/ro/firefox/addon/wayback-machine_...

I used this extension for a while but had to stop due to frequent false positives. YMMV

There exists a manual extension called Resurrect Pages for Firefox 57+, with Google Cache, archive.is, Wayback Machine, and WebCite.

I just use a bookmarklet

    javascript:void(window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/'+location.href.replace(/\/$/,%20'')));

(which is only slightly less convenient than what others have already pointed out — the FF extension and Brave built-in feature).

Another nice solution is to create a "search engine" for https://web.archive.org/web/*/%s you can then just add the keyword before the URL (For example I type `<Ctrl-l><Left>w <Enter>`). Search engines like this are supported by chrome and firefox.

I would love for there to be a site that redirected eg. better.site/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzwMjOl8Iyo to https://invidious.site/watch?v=jzwMjOl8Iyo so I could easily open YouTube links with Invidious, and the same for Twitter→Nitter, Instagram→bibliogram, Google Maps → OSM, etc without having to manually remove the beginning of the URL. I’d presume someone on HN has the skill to do this similarly to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24344127

You can make a "search engine" or bookmarklet that is a javascript/data URL that does whatever URL mangling you need. (Other than some minor escaping issues).

Something like the following should work. You can add more logic to supoort all of the sites with the same script or make one per site.

javascript:document.location="%s".replace(/^https:\/\/www.youtube.com/, "https://invidious.site")

wikipedia just does "$some-link-here (Archived $archived-version-link)", and it works pretty well, imo.

For me that is the real solution when you know that the archived-link is the one consulted by the author/whatever and the normal one being the content (or its evolution).

Agreed, and it shouldn't be too much of a burden to use since the author was quite clear about it being for reference materials. The idea isn't all that different from referring to specific print editions.

iirc wikipedia has some logic for this. When you add a reference it automatically makes sure the page is backed up and if not it triggers a wayback copy, then it scans for dead links in references and if one is found it replaces the link with wayback.

Either a browser extension, or an 'active' system where your site checks the health of the pages it links to.

> browser extension

E.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/wayback-machine_new...

Their browser extention does exactly that...

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