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The BTG Links PagesDateline: 2nd September, 2005This week I have been mostly updating the Actors links pages. Oh boy! what an undertaking! There are a lot of them, and this is only the start: I am going to go through every single links page and check every single link. And yes, I'm doing it manually. The reason I'm not using a link checker program is that they get things wrong. If you are looking for a page about your favourite actor and it redirected to a porn site, you'd notice immediately (unless your favourite actor is a porn film star, but then we don't list those, so I don't know why I'm writing this. Senility?) but a link checker wouldn't. It would just register that there is a page there and return a positive. The same would happen if the site had been taken over by a link farm or a minor search engine. The link checker wouldn't know but you'd be displeased. In fact, both of these things have happened to quite a number of actor sites - and, I have no doubt, to other sites too - so I shall continue to check manually. And therefore slowly, I'm afraid. It's a slow, time-consuming job and will take weeks, if not months, to complete. There's a lesson for actors to learn from this check, too. Lots of fan sites have disappeared. Most of those that have were for actors who, at the time the sites were started, were big names. Now they are not so big - or are even, in some cases, forgotten - and their fans' sites have vanished. Others continue to work but aren't so high profile, so their sites are either neglected or have gone. Some are still there, but haven't been updated for five, six or even seven years. Some continue to flourish and develop and have become valuable resources. I would say that at least 15% of all the sites I visited (or, rather, attempted to visit) have vanished without trace. Many frankly were not worth bothering about anyway, but some very good ones have gone, too, and that is a real shame. The last time I counted - and it's quite a while ago because the BTG has grown to such an extent that I don't have time to do such things nowadays - we were listing well over 2,000 sites, so I've probably got at least 1200 to check through. But not tonight! I've just done Actors S to W (there are no X or Z) and I've had enough!
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