Services like archive.org saves web pages among other things and help address link rot directly. But saving individual pages protected by captcha are not scalable and to address this archive.org provides couple of solutions:
- ArchiveBot; An IRC bot which saves entire website upon request.
- API; To programmatically archive content.
I've used ArchiveBot to save entire websites with hundreds and thousands of URLs before and yet to try the API to address the aforementioned problem.
Even if URLs are archived in real-time, Identifying and replacing the URL when it's not accessible anymore requires additional work. So there's a need for for an end-to-end solution for identifying and addressing link rot.