So, to while away a lazy Sunday morning, I've taken a pass through the
Links page on the main site. There were an awful lot of links that were effectively broken because the site maintainers had an affiliate programme but weren't keeping it up to date, so the sites are probably still there, but the links we had wouldn't work as-is. I may, at some point, do some forensics and restore some of them to life, even if they become just direct links to the site rather than affiliate links, because frankly I'm not fussed about the tiny amount of income they generate for the Plaza maintenance costs.
That does open up a wider question about whether the links page(s) in general are useful to readers, in their current form. I thought I'd solicit opinions here before embarking on a wider strategy of fixing them up. Do folks here ever find themselves browsing those pages trying to find new sites to visit? Or use them as a resource to remind themselves of a link they'd forgotten about?
I'm conscious that there's a high degree of link-rot, and that goes up the more sites are linked. Some are personal favourites of mine, some I'd never heard of before, and some are so ancient that they make the archived Geocities sites we host look positively modern. But there are so many that I'm not sure a big flat list of links is particularly useful, if you didn't know what you were looking for already, would that page really help you find it?
