Why are so many Hugo themes going 404?

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I was going through my favourite bookmarked “Best Hugo themes” from https://themes.gohugo.io/, and I noticed a good chunk of them are now 404, and I had to use Archive.org to get links to the (still existing) Github pages and fork them.

What’s going on? Has there been a lot of breakage or are they being culled as unmaintained? A bunch were last updated 2019, which I’d hardly call unmaintained. The Hugo themes index is kinda bad as-is*, why make it worse by making it an incomplete list? Best Hugo Themes seems to have a pretty good list, but no idea of its affiliation with the main project.

* Issues: no user ratings, a lot of junk themes with no way of prioritising, irrelevant tags, no “officially recommended”, “recommended by official tutorials” or “extremely active” tags, no apparent way of submitting themes to the index, “Download” button does not download (bad accessibility, should be relabelled “GitHub” or point to a DDL link), etc.

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Has there been a lot of breakage or are they being culled as unmaintained?

If the links no longer work I would say that the developers of the respective themes did this deliberately.

One reason could be that they just don’t feel like maintaining the theme anymore. Another possibility could be that they switched their repository from, for example, Github to Codeberg.

In all cases, however, it would be good if the respective developers would send a corresponding information, so that links could be removed or adjusted.

A bunch were last updated 2019, which I’d hardly call unmaintained.

Since 2019, I think some things have changed at Hugo which also requires changes to the themes. Because not everyone who has created a theme also has the necessary time and or desire to make these changes. Some will therefore simply have deleted their theme.

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