Scott, this is referring to the following scenario:
- user clicks on a link to summitpost.org/this-page-was-deleted-a-long-time-ago.html
-Summitpost, instead of replying with "this page has been deleted", serves up
summitpost.org/this-page-was-written-later-to-replace-that-deleted-page.html
(Equivalently, Summitpost serves up a dummy summitpost.org/this-page-was-deleted-a-long-time-ago.html that actually contains only a META REDIRECT tag that instructs the user's browser to request summitpost.org/this-page-was-written-later-to-replace-that-deleted-page.html instead .)
The hard part is knowing which pages to serve up as replacements. In the general case, replacement pages won't exist. But there is a number of cases where they do exist, and users could report them in the forum. Matt or Josh could write a tool the elves could use to tell Summitpost which pages replace which others.
I am not a programmer and Matt and Josh have been severely injured, so probably can't make any drastic changes right now (if they can, I'll let them tune in), and this sounds like a good idea, but since pages with summit logs can no longer be deleted and it hasn't been possible to delete them for a few years now, wouldn't it be simpler to post an addition/correction to the page and have the maintainer update the link? If a maintainer is gone, maybe let an elf know, but there should be very few pages that have broken mountain page links as a result of the old owners deleting them. Deleted mountain pages should no longer be a problem, so it doesn't seem worth writing a program for something that is a simple fix. If the programmers disagree and it is an easy change, they can correct me.
