Hey, look, another instance of a website changing shit for no good reason.

[kane_magus]

Looks like PC Gamer changed how their urls work, so every link I ever made to them on my blog over the years now goes to 404. Wonderful. -_-

— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 8, 2016

The gist: they removed all the article dates, which used to be embedded in the urls.

— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 8, 2016

*Why* they did that, I have no fucking clue, since now any old links to those articles are broken.

— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 8, 2016

And I'm not going back through several years of blog entries to try to fix all of that shit, either. I don't care about PC Gamer that much.

— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) April 8, 2016

---

I found out about this while going back through my older posts with the "games" and "game industry stuff" tags to try to convert them over to yearly versions of the same, like "games (2016)" and so on. This is a process which is taking me a long-ass time, because I can only bring myself to do maybe a month or two worth of posts at a time, and then I just lose interest in the whole thing and let it sit for another week or five before going back to it... and if it wasn't for the fact that I occasionally find a post with "games" but not "game industry stuff" or vice versa, I'd probably be better off just combining the two tags into one, since most of them do seem to have both of those. The "games" tag was supposed to be more about games themselves, whereas the "game industry stuff" tag is more about all the crap that goes on behind the scenes (and the tag used to be "game industry shit," for that very reason, before I changed it to the more innocuous "stuff"). Anyway, the reason I'm (slowly) doing this is because those two tags were (and as of right now, still are) by far the most used tags, and if you look at the entries for them, the "previous 10" links only go back so far, before it arbitrarily switches over to day-by-day archive crawling links, which kind of defeats the purpose of having tags in the first place. (Not that I really think anybody else besides me actually gives the slightest shit about this, but it bothers me [somewhat] so that's mostly why I'm doing it [off and on, when I can actually bring myself to give something of a shit about it myself].) The main point I'm trying to make is that I seem to have written way too much bullshit about video games on here.

So yeah, to get back to the original rant from the Twitter embeds above, given that I stopped reading PC Gamer entirely over a year ago anyway, except on the rare occasions when I'm linked to it by someone else, I don't really give a fuck. I did fix a few links during the above mentioned process (for posts during the months of September and October 2014), but I soon realized that I'd be fixing a metric shit-ton of their links if I really was going to fix all of them, so I just said fuck that and stopped. It's PC Gamer's fault that shit's broken now, because they arbitrarily decided to change that shit, for no good reason that I can see. The links will just have to go to a 404 page now, that's all.

And the farther I go back, the more and more I'm finding broken links to other shit, too, either because shit got changed, or (in the case of Youtube links and the like) because shit got deleted due to copyright bullshit or whatever. It's kind of sort of depressing, in its own way.

Truly, I do not understand and have never understood why websites feel the need to do random, pointless, arbitrary shit like this. I know that I've ranted about this subject in previous entries already, though, so I won't go into all of that shit yet again (aside from what I've already gone into it, I guess). And if I'm breaking anyone else's links to my "games" or "game industry stuff" posts, then I'm sorry. (Yeah, who am I trying to kid? Nobody has linked to my shit, ha ha.)

Comments

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

I noticed the PC Gamer website change myself - happened only last week I think. I can't say I really cared for the design of the website before the change either so it's kinda meh to me. All I do is quickly browse the top half of the page's article headlines and move on unless something catches my eye.

I'd probably consider it better than Kotaku's design change from a few years back. THAT change made me remove Kotaku from my bookmarks. At this point I only go there if someone links me or if it comes up on the google search results when I'm trying to find something in particular.

(As for them changing all the links and shit, yeah that sucks. I doubt I'd bother with going back over my own journal to fix any though.)

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

One thing I've noticed while looking through old links in my LJ is that Australia's version of Kotaku (http://www.kotaku.com.au/) is still more similar to the old, less shitty layout than the current version of the North American Kotaku site (http://kotaku.com/)... so that's something, I guess. Compare the same article on one (http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/a-minecraft-tribute-to-monument-valley/) with the other (http://kotaku.com/a-minecraft-tribute-to-monument-valley-1769573538) (though I'm using the word "article" pretty loosely in this particular case, since it's mostly just a bunch of screenshots). I still don't think it's exactly the same as the original, non-shitty layout, but it's closer than America's Kotaku is. And another plus... hardly anybody seems to ever comment on the .au articles. ^_^v (As opposed to America's Kotaku, of course, which is invariably full of spew from idiots in the comments of pretty much every article.)

I can't even find a separate Canada-specific version of Kotaku anymore, though, which is what I used to use after they shifted the US version to the shitty new format, iirc.