How to archive offsite resources which are linked in questions/ answers?

Question

This Q&A:

Does this trike have a spoiler for downforce?

has some excerpts of offsite resources (images from ebay). The originals are likely to disappear eventually and it would be nice to have a reliable archive to link to instead.

Does Stack Exchange have any mechanism for that? Images within posts seem to have size limits, but maybe there is another SE way. Or is there any recommended non-SE archival website or service that could be used?

I'm aware of https://web.archive.org/ but didn't think the would archive every single ebay listing ever posted (or similar...)

Answer 1

Yes - you're right that link-rot is a problem. For images, one solution is to duplicate the image so it is hosted in imgur.com. Stackexchange has some special setup there, the details of which I haven't located after a short search.

Ebay auctions are cleaned up 100 days (?) after the listing closes, so there is only a short window to drag in the images.

For video, there's little we can do. On the positive side, youtube is unlikely to go away though this could happen someday. This is why one of the suggestions for a good answer is only to use off-site links as supporting information, while answering the question in text format.

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For the given example, OP has already used the linked image directly in the question, and it is posted via imgur, so no changes needed there. If they hadn't, I'd certainly recommend Editing the image into the question/answer.

Your answer's images are already served by i.stack.imgur.com and that's about as good as it can be.

Answer 2

Yes, this is a problem, and it doesn't affect just Bicycles Stack Exchange, but many other sites in the network too. User @Stormblessed posted a feature request Automatically have links archived in the Wayback Machine almost two years ago, and while that is probably a bridge too far, I built a userscript, Stack Exchange Archivist, to deal with this. It adds an 'Archive' button to the post menu:

which you can use archive external content on your own or other users' posts. How good the archived copy is depends on the website; here is the one you linked to. The Archivist is a userscript, which means you need a userscript manager installed in your browser if you don't have one already. Just Google for Violentmonkey or Tampermonkey, how to install them depends on your browser.

If you're worried about a large number of links going stale (e.g. the 111 posts with links to ebay.com), I have a script which can crawl the site for those and archive them. We did so successfully when image hoster tinypic.com shut down: Links to tinypic.com are about to become permanently broken on August 26, 2019.