Dead Site Directory

If you’re here, there is a good likelihood that you clicked on a link that used to take users to one of the sites discussed here in the Dead Site Directory where we document dead sites that we used to link to which are no longer operating. This section is a work in progress as we use automated tools to determine which outbound links on our site are broken. By “broken” we mean that the source is gone either due to it being deleted by the source site or the source site ceasing to exist. The Dead Site Index is devoted exclusively to the latter.

Why Redirect You Here?

We decided to replace links to domains we know to have been down for a long time that we don’t think are coming back because of a bad experience we had as a result of a source going offline and falling into the wrong hands. In that case, we clicked on a link to a site that used to host relevant material only to be greeted by poorly formatted foreign language text, a pop up featuring a fake announcement that we had won a prize, and a warning from Malwarebytes that the fake prize script was likely serving malware. We realized that something needed to be done to protect users from that domain, so we decided to replace all links to that domain with a link to a notice explaining that the source is offline and that it is better to serve them with a notice than something unknown which is at best an error message or at worst malware.

What Does This Mean for the Information?

It means that the information is nothing more than an accurate representation of information that existed elsewhere on the internet at one time. The only difference now is that we can’t point you to the exact URL where it was hosted originally. We can say that the content was hosted on a domain that we discuss here, but that for safety reasons we just don’t link there directly anymore. None of this makes the material an any less accurate documentation of others’ words.

Dead Sites

Some types of sites have been dying at shocking rates in recent years. Rates so shocking that we once joked that the owners must have all gotten COVID. We are not sure exactly why so many have shut down, but we do know that when they do go down and have been down for months that they rarely come back. Often, the domains are allowed to expire which makes them a security risk. The sites in this section have had all direct links replaced with either a likely match from Archive.org or this page.