u/Kholgan

For those who are unfamiliar, link rot refers to the tendency of hyperlinks to eventually stop working - either because the page has been moved or taken down.

This question came to my mind after looking through some older questions/responses and finding that a lot of the links no longer worked; these links were to a variety of website types, it wasn’t just a non-academic vs academic resource issue. In your experience as moderators/users, is this a big problem or did I just get unlucky with the posts I was looking at?

Regardless of whether or not it’s a widespread issue, I do think that it may be worth addressing to help ensure longevity of responses. While I don’t know how feasible it is, I would suggest either requiring answers to use links from web archives or have a bot that automatically converts typical links into links that point to a web archive then replies.

Edit: for example, here is one of the responses that I was looking at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/KfIR5wjZZp . While most of the links work, some of them just don’t lead anywhere.

Hi I’m asking this question on behalf of a family member. When they go to open an online retailer website through Safari on their iPhone, they get this error: “Access Denied; you don’t have permission to access sitename on this server.”

I’m certain that this is a network issue, but the problem is only on her device. When I try to connect to that same website using a phone I have no problem. I’ve tried a couple other troubleshooting steps but nothing seems to be working: resetting browser cache/data, restarting the phone/browser, using cellular, and making sure they are not connected to a VPN or using an adblocker.

I’m a bit stuck at this point, the only thing I can think of is to update their phone (they’re on IOS 17) and trying again. Any advice or suggestions are appreciated.

Per Wikipedia (which I know isn’t completely accurate):
Greece: 93% Christian
North Macedonia: 60% Christian 32% Islam
Albania: 50% Islam 16% Christian 17% Irreligion (16% undeclared)
Bulgaria: 65% Christian 16% None 10% Islam
Serbia: 87% Christian
Kosovo: 94% Islam
Montenegro: 75% Christian 20% Islam
Croatia: 87% Christian 6% None
Bosnia and Herzegovina: 51% Islam 46% Christian
Slovenia: 78% Christian 18% None

I’m familiar with some of the history of the region, primarily the long-term Ottoman presence and more recent Greek-Turkish population exchange, but I don’t quite understand why there’s such a difference in the religious demographics. Barring Greece which had a drastic population change, why did some areas adopt much higher levels of Islamic beliefs or retain their ‘original’ Christian beliefs? Did the formation and dissolution of Yugoslavia have some kind of effect on this?

And as a bonus semi-related question, as I don’t know much about the Kosovo-Serbia issue, was religion a strong factor in the secession? It seems striking that Serbia is majority Christian but Kosovo is overwhelmingly Islamic.

Now that we’re a few days into the event, how are people feeling about the format? Personally, while I like the Take2 mode, I’m not a fan of how they adjusted it for the Grand Prix.

The balance and gameplay just feel off, even worse than how Take2 normally is. Sword, Abyss, and Dragon just seem a solid step up compared to the other classes. Not sure why they equalized the redraws and upped the rarity in each set of picks, makes things feel even more swingy/weird (like that one post where the OP had 4 copies of Belial).