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]

Report Broken Links

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!!! :thedeal:

 

[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.

 

[energy]

Really like it

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?

 

[Atul Khandekar]

typically these companies can't spider .php sites and forums.

Marc,

You're right. Since this forum doesn't have 'static' web pages these spiders will fail.

 

[Marc]

Just to remind everyone to Report Broken Links in Posts, I've 'bumped' this thread. I have been going through threads for quite a while now looking for broken links and have, over the last year in particular, found a lot of them and deleted them.

I appreciate all reports of broken links.