What link types are persistent and safe to link to?
The old ISFDB was compiled, which meant that the indices changed with every build. The new ISFDB uses a MySQL database, so many of the records can be permanently referred to. Safety of likely links are: • ea.cgi – This takes a canonical author name as an argument. Since the names are canonical, they’re not likely to change in the future. There is a possibility of change for young authors as they establish their careers and writing names. • title.cgi – This takes a record number argument, which makes it very persistent. The only activity that could deprecate a title record would be if it is merged with another title. When this happens, the merging tool will retain the lowest-numbered record (that is, if a merge is done between record 503 and 15617, record 503 will survive and 15617 will be deleted). So if you want to link to a title, but there is more than one choice on the author’s bibliography (it hasn’t been merged yet), then link to the lowest numbered title. • pe.cgi – This display
