What to do when you run into a dead link

[Richard T Eger]

Dear All,

I think a bit of site background is in order.

LWAG was created in June 2024. About 90% of the material listed came from the 12 O'Clock High! (TOCH!) website with agreement of that website's webmaster, Ruy Horta. At the time, Ruy had a 2,000 entry limit per forum from the server he was using which meant that after about 5 to 6 weeks old entries would simply vanish. Amongst them, I felt, were items of significant archival interest that they should be saved. Ruy was agreeable to transferring these to the LWAG site and, for the next 4 years, I spent enormous amounts of hours transferring the threads, some in multiple places due to their multiple interest matter.

In 2024, Ruy changed servers, as well as the site format. With the change, he was no longer restricted to 2,000 entries, and thus material was no longer lost. While the LWAG site has an advantage in more distinct categorization, Ruy has done a reasonable job in trying to sort out his material, too.

At this point, the benefits of continuing the transfer became much less and, quite frankly, my research load exploded. Thus, I decided that, in most cases, I would not do any further transfers. Also, his new format made transferring more labor intensive.

Still, the LWAG site retains an enormous amount of useful information to the Luftwaffe history researcher. However, the links have now frequently ended up dead as either sites have dropped out of existence or have changed their URL's. My recommendation to you if you run into a dead link is to take some of the key words and enter them into Google's search engine. If the site still exists, it should show up there.

For those unfamiliar with Ruy's site, you can go there at http://forum.12oclockhigh.net/.

Regards,
Richard