by Lloyd A. de Vries

Web links often long outlive their usefulness. For several years, we in The Virtual Stamp Club have been wondering why people were asking about collections they'd inherited in a discussion from 1997 titled "Movie Monsters." After some patient detective work (not mine!), we found that Mike Mills' Glassine Surfer site had that discussion on a links page as a place to ask about inherited collections.

We kept moving the messages out of "Movie Monsters," but now we've re-titled the discussion "Help For Inherited Collections." However, if someone goes to the first few messages in the thread, they'll find not advice for evaluating a collection, but a discussion of Frankenstein and Dracula on stamps!

Likewise, our 1997 U.S. Stamp Schedule still gets hits. While some might be attributed to scholars seeking artifacts from 8 years ago, chances are most of the visitors are clicking on a link that simply promises "the U.S. Stamp Schedule."

Rather than tracking down everyone linking to 1997, we just added links on that page and every other stamp schedule to every other stamp schedule page. Some of those sites that link to us are still on the Internet but long abandoned by their creators, so there's no one to fix them.

"The evil that men do lives after them," wrote William Shakespeare. So apparently do web links.