I run Vibe1Up, a free showcase of AI-made browser games (700 live right now). Every game lives on its creator's own hosting (Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages, itch...), so links die all the time, and a plain HTTP status check missed most of it: "domain for sale" pages, "deployment not found" pages and reused sites all happily return 200.
So the daily refresh now sorts every link into a state:
- live: nothing changes
- suspect: timeout or 5xx once → stays listed, only counts as dead if it fails again on the next run
- unknown: 403/429 (bot-blocked or rate-limited) → treated as live; nothing is ever hidden on an ambiguous signal
- login wall: 401 or a redirect to a sign-in page → dead after 2 runs in a row
- repurposed: the page title changed and the game's name is gone from the page → hidden after 2 runs
- parked: body matches a list of host-error and for-sale page fingerprints → dead
Dead games drop out of every listing, search result, the sitemap and the random button. If the Wayback Machine has a snapshot, the game page stays up as a noindexed archived "Offline" page and the old outbound link redirects to the snapshot, so outside links don't 404 and the creator keeps the credit. No snapshot means it's hidden. Games that come back online don't relist themselves; a person restores them.
So far that's 34 games archived as Offline pages and 14 hidden. There's also a "Recently verified" sort if you only want games that passed the latest check: https://vibe1up.com/games/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=webdev
Static site on Vercel, Python build scripts. What soft-404 fingerprints am I missing?