I have 20,000+ files/pages on gwern.net where I try to fix 404s for over the past 13 years or so that I've been building it, so I am well aware of the difficulty in maintaining links (particularly across very large changes in the website structure), and the perverse ingenuity of bots, scanners, and real users in coming up with brandnew 404s.
> it becomes almost an impossible/full-time job.
That it cannot be solved perfectly in full generality is true, but nevertheless, that is not an excuse to not set a redirect for the very simple and common case of 'mv foo.html bar.html', and all website software should support that.
All good points. I don't think we are disagreeing on anything, it seems I am just more adventurous when it comes to pioneering solutions and learning by doing it. Will continue to learn from this experiment.
I have 20,000+ files/pages on gwern.net where I try to fix 404s for over the past 13 years or so that I've been building it, so I am well aware of the difficulty in maintaining links (particularly across very large changes in the website structure), and the perverse ingenuity of bots, scanners, and real users in coming up with brandnew 404s.
> it becomes almost an impossible/full-time job.
That it cannot be solved perfectly in full generality is true, but nevertheless, that is not an excuse to not set a redirect for the very simple and common case of 'mv foo.html bar.html', and all website software should support that.