Rootsweb transition process is affecting data on sites that are being kept

Question

Today Rootsweb posted notices on its hosted sites about the plans to freeze their content in early 2024, but keep the sites online.

Unfortunately, the posting of the notice seems to be affecting structure of some sites and impeding access to data. I saw this on the Brouwer Genealogy Database, where the indexes/directories of pages no longer work. The page content is still available on pages like https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~brouwergenealogydata/genealogy/p315.htm , but navigation is lost. I have a hunch that navigation on sites like this one will not be restored when Rootsweb freezes the content. The Archive.org Wayback Machine has a copy of the top-level index pages, but apparently it cannot serve intermediate-level indexes like https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~brouwergenealogydata/genealogy/i54.htm

This website  is cited on many WikiTree pages. The last updates were years ago, so I'm not sure the site owner is interested in rebuilding it.

Does anyone know of good workarounds for maintaining access to the indexes on sites like this one?

Answer 1

When you put the url into the Wayback machine and select to Save the page now, make sure that the 'save outlinks' option is selected.  I think that should be including all the links, but not sure how much of them are kept.  I tried to save both links above but it is giving a lot of error messages that some of the linked pages are not working.  Some of the links are working but not all when I checked after they saved.

Many of us tried to save rootsweb forum pages earlier when they said they were freezing that area. Unfortunately, there is no way to know right now what ancestry is planning on doing or is anything will come back or when and then it will be behind their paywall probably.