Hi, this is concerning tutorials on the site that are no longer functional. The ones I most often use are the build-mode tutorials, and while many are in perfect working order, others have issues: some have instructions posted right on the forum, but have bad picture links, which is a little annoying, but understandable. However, others have links to 3rd party sites that no longer exist, where the entire tutorial was once hosted. I make no comment on the quality or clarity of any one tutorial; after all, what makes sense to one person may be total gibberish to someone else. But for the tutorials that are already posted and available for users to reference, I feel it's a reasonable expectation that they should all be at least accessible, with working links... and there's enough problematic ones up there where I think it may be time to take a look at them.

While some of the forums on MTS are more like community bulletin boards: a constantly evolving soup of questions, answers and advice, I tend to think of the tutorial section as a sort of reference library: When your copy of the World Book Encyclopedia on hand is from 1953, with outdated info, a broken spine, water damage and missing pages... you toss it out, so it's not taking up shelf space.

I realize your admins are all volunteers, for whom the maintenance of the site is a labor of love, but I think I speak for others when I say this is one section worth sorting through and auditing. I'd be willing to go through those build-mode ones and make a list of issues, if that would help... a moderator can PM me if they're interested in my assistance.

I'm unsure what you would like us to do? We have no control over off site hosted images, nor do we have any type of backup of those. The tutorials were made by members of the community, not staff.

Since the tutorials also have text, it wouldn't make sense to delete them. For fully off site hosted ones, the best best would be to use the wayback machine. Staff is not going to use the wayback and repost them here, as they belong to the original creator.

No, you're right - it's not the responsibility of the staff to edit things that other members have written... and in some cases, the issues could be beyond the control of those members, anyway. I guess what I'm really saying is that I don't think it would hurt anything to request that the community members who have posted instructional materials to take a few minutes to review those posts, just to make sure they're still viable. Even assuming that only half of them are still active, and that only half of those would think it necessary to check (both conservative estimates, I would think) - and that only a fraction of those posts would have anything wrong with them... at least a few issues might be resolved, possibly. Some people may even read what they wrote - ten, fifteen years ago - and say "wow, I know so much more about this now: time for an update!" Yeah, some people probably do this regularly anyway... but some may not have thought to do it. And... every so often, you do run into web pages that can't be accessed, even via the Wayback Machine. You never know, a few authors may even be inspired to resurrect valuable tutorials that have disappeared due to link rot, or what have you. I dunno, just an idea.

What could be done though- sort of related- is to take out the bad links from the 'post new thread' messages. You know, like the one you get if you try to post here, in site issues.
https://modthesims.info/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=24
Frequently Asked Site Issues (Read before posting!)

And so on. Most of the links there are broken. Perhaps they could be removed? A lot of the game help wiki articles are outdated too, and users are directed there before posting in the Game help forum.