Suddenly multiple sites show all links to Facebook.com as 400 Bad Request. Some of these links have been there for years, if not a decade and were OK until yesterday.
Is Facebook now blocking Broken Link Checker testing? If so, is there a way around it?
The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]
I added some Facebook links to my lab site and ran the Broken Link Checker scan a few times but couldn’t replicate this issue, Maybe there was a temporary blockage by Facebook and it was fixed already. Can you please confirm if you are the cloud version of Broken Link Checker?
I suggest running a new scan and if you still have issues please share some example links so we can run further tests on our end.
Hello, @grandfakir and @pantor Could you kindly create a separate support thread for yourself so we can help you further, your issues could be happening due to a different reason.
On this page there are 4 links to Facebook, all of them are 400 Bad Request. I clicked Recheck and they are still 400. There are 5 more FB links on other pages on the site. ALL of the Facebook links are 400. https://www.towsoncommunities.org/members/
Hope this message finds you well, and thanks for sharing the links.
I was able to reproduce the issue on my site using your links, in such a case, I reported this to our BLC team, and they will provide further information, since they work on very complex issues, getting a reply from them could take longer than usual, we will back to this topic once we get an update from them.
I have also been receiving both 400 and 403 errors for the past week or so. I have been receiving them for links to Facebook, Quora, and my own websites.
I would like to update you regarding the current issue, we confirmed it is a bug in the plugin and happens due to our Broken link checker user agent being blocked by Facebook for some reason, unfortunately, the fix requires updating the plugin code but we already reported it to our developers.
Since the bug was acknowledged, reported, and tasked to be fixed, we are marking this as resolved, but feel free to let us know if you have any additional questions.
Yesterday I received email notification from the Broken Link Checker plugin that one of my blogs had 244 links with 400 or 403 errors plus another 173 links with 403 quotaExceeded errors.
I ran that site through the Online Broken Link Checker, which didn’t come up with a single error.
Needless to say, I deactivated the BLC plugin.
I will keep an eye an the WordPress Directory for updates on fixing the problem.
My team identified the issue with the local version of the broken link checker, the cloud version should be working fine since it uses a different engine and scan method.
