Broken Links - If you find a broken link in a post, Please Report the Post

[Atul Khandekar]

Marc,
There are quite a few broken www links in the forum esp. in the older threads. External links posted by people no longer available and so result in a 404.

I know it is impossible/unthinkable to manually check all links from time to time. Does this forum software have any way of automatically parsing all threads for broken links?

Rgds,

-Atul.

[Marc]

Nope. The fact is there are some old messages here and it would be a long, manual process to review each of the Threads: (about 4,233 right now) and each post (about 28,177 right now).

The fact is, the internet evolves and many sites bellied up. I've kept this site online and evolving since 5 January 1996. There are many links to threads in the last forums (UltimateBB - all the threads from which were imported into this database) and there are the 1997 forums threads (not imported - no importer script). Yup - there are some broken links here and there.

When you get a 404 message from this site, or from another site from a link in a post, you could help out by reporting the post.

There's a link on each individual post in each thread to report the specific post. You can report a post to a moderator for any reason - including to report broken links.

It will ask you for a reason for reporting the post and explain that there is a broken link in it and any other comment you want to make. I (or one of the moderators) will look at the post and see if there's anything we can do.

So - my answer is:

Support Your Local Moderators!
Do Your Part!
Report Broken Links!

Oh! And if you find a broken link in any part of the rest of the site, just shoot me an e-mail with the url (page) the link is on as well as the url (or other way to identify the broken link) of the broken link.

[Marc]

By the way, Atul, I didn't mean the above to be mean. Actually I did spend about a month going through old threads last winter. You will see evidence of it in many threads where I put in a statement like "Hey - there's too many to re-link so best of luck". The many, many I did look up and change the links from the old forums to the thread in the new forums aren't evident because - well, the link is change so you wouldn't notice it. As far as links outside the site I checked and deleted or orrected many of them as well as I reviewed threads.

There is also the issue of my combining some threads from time to time (merging) which are very closely related or where it's the exact same question / topic. Sometimes this has consequences I don't forsee one of which is the possibility of broken links to thread references in other posts.

The bottom line is really - if folks will report broken links in posts I'll be happy to look at them.

No - there is no automatic link check software. I'd have to write a database query and dump all the urls in all the posts and then find a link processor to run them through. I'm not that MySQL savvy. I would have to hire a professional at a pretty good fee to do something like that. Unless you want to volunteer...

By the way, broken links in the oldest forums, (pre-June 1998) are dead. The forums are too old and there are too many screwed up links in those to even considere. And so far I have not found a script to import the threads from the pre-1998 forums into the vBulletin forums database. Oh, well!!!

[Atul Khandekar]

Marc,

Thanx for the reply.

Try this one:
Web Site Validation and Promotion Services for free link checking service.

- Atul

[Atul Khandekar]

Marc,
Yes, I would love to volunteer and help you in any way I can.

Not knowing your database structure and not having access to it, it would be difficult to do. However let me see if I can rig up some kind of a 'spider' that can request pages from the database on the basis of forumID, threadID and postID etc. , then parse the page to check for broken links...

In any case you can expect more 'reports' from me about broken links.

rgds,
-Atul

[Marc]

I'll check these folks out, but typically these companies can't spider .php sites and forums.

Marc,

This latest look is fantastic on the eyes. Us old dudes need all the help we can get. I'm talking "comfort zone" here.

Later, Cheech

[Marc]

Does this mean you're going to help report broken links?