Wayback Filter

As articles age, their links break. This module offers the reader a working link to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine in addition to the old and probably broken links.

Wayback Filter was featured in The Drop Times, October 2025 and When the Evidence Disappears tells you why it's an important module.

Drupal 8, 9, 10 and 11: Installation and configuration

How do I install it?
As any other module.

How do I set it up well?
1. Go to the config page (/admin/config/content/wayback_filter) and decide when the links should appear and how they should look. Remember to save.
2. If you're very keen to see it in action, you can set the "Place Wayback links on nodes older than..." to 0 years. Then all links will have trailing Wayback Links.
3. Go to the config for a text format (/admin/config/content/formats), enable Wayback filter and place it as one of the last filters in the Filter processing order. Remember to save.
4. Adding Wayback links to link fields is experimental. Read about it later in this file.

How do I test it?
1. Go to a very old node (with some links in the body text) employing the text format you've just set up. It'll show Wayback Links trailing the existing links.
2. Rejoice or
2. Flush your caches and rejoice (with Drupal 8+ you can never flush your caches too often).

What if the Wayback links do not show?
1. The node you're looking at is maybe not that old? Edit it to find out. If you wish, you can temporarily change the date of the node to 01.01.2000.
2. The node might not be using the text format you just spent some time setting up so well with Wayback links. Choose another node or make a new node with an old date from scratch.

I don't get exactly the archived version I want.
It probably doesn't exist at archive.org. The Internet Archive does not archive all the pages on the Internet every day.

Wayback Filter has a look at the created date of your node, and links to the archived version of your link destination on created date. If an archived version doesn't exist (it seldom does), you get the closest match.
If you want to be absolutely sure that a great, archived version of your link destination exists, use the relevant browser extension at the Wayback Machine (look under Tools) to manually produce a 1-click archived version.

How do I make the trailing Wayback links look even more attractive?
Add .wayback-link a {font-size: 4rem;} somewhere in your stylesheet. Flush some caches. Using the Wayback filter settings form and CSS, you should be able to make it look awesome.

The great External Links module adds an icon to my Wayback links. I don't want that!
Add .wayback-link svg {display: none;} to your stylesheet. Another (and most probably inferior) way is to go to /admin/config/user-interface/extlink click Pattern Matching and, under Exclude links matching the pattern, write web\.archive\.org.

Can I add Wayback Links to my link fields?
If you're able to write a correct machine name on the Wayback Links configuration page, you might have some luck.

Drupal 7: Installation and configuration

Install the module by adding its folder to sites/all/modules, sites/all/modules/contrib or wherever you store your contributed modules. Go to the modules list and activate Wayback Filter.

On the modules page, there'll now be a link to Permission and Configuration next to the Wayback Filter on/off switch.

Give the right user group the permission to configure Wayback Filter and hurry to Configuration to set either the relative age an article should have in order to get Wayback links (i.e. 3 years) or a set date where you consider articles old enough to get Wayback links (i.e. 2010-01-01).

Wayback Filter is a text filter. So go to the text format page admin/config/content/formats on your site, configure a text format (i.e. admin/config/content/formats/1) and select Add Wayback links.

Your old articles will now be enhanced with Wayback links.

Troubleshooting

If the Wayback links show up in a weird way or cause trouble, change the Filter processing order of the relevant text format.

See it in action

Linkrot is a solved problem.