Topic on Forum:Wiki Talk

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Now, to bring back up the specific case that TBeholder cited, Valenth is/was a website. I've made the suggestion before that we treat websites as something other than works, because they are almost always repositories of multiple works, and themselves demonstrate only the smallest of trope lists with the most general of tropes, but let's ignore that for the moment..

With Valenth, we're talking something that was a community with what our article claimed was some 100K members, doing some kind of mons-like thing. But that was in 2008 -- ten freakin' years ago. That community and that website are gone, completely. Five minutes' checking with the Wayback Machine confirms that it wasn't just forgetting to re-up their domain reg or getting pwned -- they closed down between January and April of 2014. (Apparently with very little notice, as they were still soliciting new members on the top page in January.) This was then displayed at the website for six months:

Valenth Closed
Valenth is now closed. You can find new content from DNA and Sixar at Leupak.com including an exciting Valentines event!

After which a completely different site -- "VALENTH - Everything On Educational Books, Software and Games" -- appeared at that domain. (That "Valentine's event" suggests it may have shut down mere days after the January copy was archived.)

And BTW, that new site given in the closure notice? Currently an Asian sports site. Nothing at all on it that looks like the old Valenth. Tracking it through the Wayback Machine shows posts from the creator of Valenth complaining essentially of burnout, and never quite implementing anything that looked like the earlier site. And then the new site vanishes in the middle of 2016, to be replaced a few months later by that sports site.

Setting aside the idea that a website isn't a work in and of itself, Valenth simply does not exist in any form that matches that decade-old description. The Wayback Machine essentially saved only the top pages -- if there is any surviving content, I could not find it during my (admittedly brief) investigations. But when every link off a couple different versions of the top page returns a site database error or the Wayback Machine's "oops, we don't have that" message, I think it's reasonable to come to that conclusion.

So someone please tell me -- what value is provided, what purpose is served by keeping a description of something that sounds like a cool place to hang and play, but which doesn't exist any more, and the link to which takes you to someplace that's going to try to sell you something? This is not like a lost fanfic, which may yet still lurk on someone's hard drive somewhere. It's not coming back, ever.