I am "pinging" this topic / response to bring it to wider attention - in bookkeeping and with the original poster's permission it has been moved to the public area as it provides a useful discussion of how links are "done".


To add - I continue to quietly take copies of .pdf documents that people refer to in their posts and add them to our member's archive so that they can be found later even after the original site has moved on.   There's now gigabytes of data in this archive though (as with many dusty archives) it's not often called up;  one of the ongoing issues we have on the server is the number of off-top searches made by people testing at the door.

 
I haven't contributed, so have no concerns, but I agree that this discussion would be a useful reference for our wider membership, in News, Help and Assistance.

 
Parts of this discussion are of general interest and this thread is rather lost in "And Also".  I have asked the originator if I may move it to a public area, and if any other contributors on this thread have concerns please let me know in the next 36 hours (i.e. by end on 14th August)

 
In theory the URL themselves shouldn't change as they're generated when you publish the item from the content production system. As Graeme says where they appear is dynamic and there's much more emphasis on metrics now (i.e. most read) rather than curated material. Occasionally the publishing application will change as is happening at the moment but that's only about once every twenty years so far.

The video and audio within stories may disappear as they're stored elsewhere although the new way of publishing online content makes that less likely. Until recently (last 4 or 5 years)  joining the video and/or  with the text was not done in the most elegant way mainly because the two mediums had completely different workflows and systems

Some Journalists also like to work they way they always have which means it doesn't always work as planned on the newer systems but they're the one's who'd still be using minidisc or 1/4 inch tape if we let them.

 
I'd describe that as an overhaul - which I agreed way back that does change eventually

 
Certain BBC content does vanish - I'd a link to a local news programme set of interviews and the BBC were at the time using Realplayer for media, and when that died a death they didn't migrate the content to something more sensible.

(Said news programme: the interviewer did a series of vox pops to camera, interviewing drivers on what they thought of the traffic around (yawn) Bath and what could be done. This from the mid-sixties when the door was being slammed shut on the railways - not that they featured. One driver was interviewed at the gates of what's now Bath Spa University, close to the Globe roundabout, and with the potential to cut to something on the GWML at speed should the crew have been so inclined, the oppotunity was not taken, nor that to point out that the parking situation in Bath was about to be slightly eased by the closure of one of the city's stations with its land permanently repurposed to host private vehicles.)

Mark

 
So the storyboard is static & the links section is dynamic - I agree.

 

It is a dynamic presentation of the same content.

By way of example - here is a link on the forum from 15 years ago - https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/r7767.html  to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-11510084 which takes you to the same story of a charming youth who won't ba a youth any longer and who spat on a member of the staff.   However, it to the right on that URL it takes you to the talks / Zelensky and Ukraine, and in the days of the original post Zelensky was just a wannabe comedian in an obscure Eastern European country.

 

Not sure it is - I have URLs to pages within the BBC News website that still exist years after they were published on these URLs. If their site gets a complete overhaul, yes, they might disappear, but this site has been unchanged for a long time now.

 

Not a forum policy stated as such.

The Coffee Shop is a forum where people are able to freely post in a style that they wish; I / we do encourage people to post in such a way that links and references are easily followed, and with links to where the articles being talked about / data given will last.    If I see a link to a .pdf document that I fear may be gone in months or years, I tend to add a copy of the article to our archive and, though rarely accessed, that means we can look back a decade or two to historic documents.

Personal comments ....

Now - the text "From the BBC" and the question I have is whether I put a front page link on the BBC or a link to the article quoted and being talked about.   

The standard adopted in places like WikiPedia is to link to a definition of the word linked, and not to it in context.  Which - I admit when I follow it - I find highly frustrating.   So I don't do that - even though the link word suggests it's the logical thing to do - I link to what I believe to be the permanent URL of the article within the site being referenced, in the hope that it will last for a significant time, way beyond where it's the BBC's headline.

For example, as I write

https://www.bbc.co.uk ... takes me to the BBC front page where I read "Zelensky could still attend Trump-Putin meeting, but rest of Europe is shut out" and if I were wanting to talk about that on the Coffee Shop, it would work for a few minutes.   

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5eedq7ldro ... is what I would post.  That's direct to the article and will last longer.  And I would post that link even though it is NOT to the main BBC page that's kinda implied by the link text that just says BBC. 

BBC content is dynamic - so even the article link WILL lead to varied content quite quickly - things like the "top stories" change, and over time as the BBC updates the look and feel of its website, the whole look and feel (wrapper) may change too - and whatever link we post we have no way of showing the page as it was when first referenced.  We have to trust to stability at our content provider - BBC not a problem, but on Real Time Trains with a relatively short history links even to specific trains do die; I can understand why as they have so much incoming content they couldn't keep it all.

One final thing - when I post a link, unless I'm in a panic / rushed for time I tend to click on the link in my own post to make sure it works.   I have a reputation for not smell checking things, and a single character retyped wrong or (more likely) left off the end of a cut and paste spells a broken link and frustration for anyone following it.

Longer explanation than you were looking for, I fear ... hope it helps.

 
Sorry ChrisB, when you want one you can't find one. Tend to be a reproduction of a BBC article, with text and images. Item titled from BBC link (main page).

I just wondered if there was a forum policy.

 
To what are you referring to? 

 
Is there a reason why links to the BBC are given to the home page, which means the item is likely to be largely unfindable within the BBC system after a few weeks, short of trying an external search engine.