Marco Beierer

Hi @pgilpat

I will have a look.

Hi @tripledm

I have just published version 1.16.0 of the Link Checker. The new version has an ‘edit’ button next to each URL that could be assigned to a post. With a click on the button, the default editor (with the post loaded) is opened in a new browser tab.

May you have a look at this and let me know if it helps?

Best regards and have a nice weekend,
Marco

Hi @tripledm

Sorry I did not reply earlier, I was very busy the last days.

I have thought about it and an auto remove function will not come anytime soon.

The problem with it is that it is very time consuming to implement and I would have to invest approximately at least 50 to 100 hours to get it right. The main reason for this is that many sites have invalid or badly formatted HTML code and manipulating such code is very hard and it’s also hard to detect where a broken link comes from in the database.

It’s also high risk because if I just introduce a small bug, it could break sites irrecoverably if no backup is available. And if the plugin just gets one review that states that it broke a site, it’s probably dead.

50 to 100 hours is much for me because the Link Checker is still a side project that barely makes any money despite the large user base. And I have lots of items on my ToDo list that bring benefits to a larger group of users.

I also belief that just removing broken links is not a good solution in the most cases. In many situations it is necessary to rewrite or restructure the content. If the links are just removed the content would loose quality…

However, a function that allows easier editing of the broken links will definitely come, I can just not say when exactly.

Sorry for that.

Best regards
Marco

Hi Kenner82

Thank you for your interest in the plugin.

I’m sorry, but there is no function to quickly edit the broken or redirected links currently.

Implementing such a function is very challenging because of how the Link Checker works.

The Broken Link Checker works by directly loading and processing the posts and other content from the database. Thus the plugin exactly know where the broken links were found internally. Therefore it could provide easy editing. But one disadvantage is that it can only check links that occur in known structures and for example if a plugin uses its own database tables to store content, the Broken Link Checker cannot check these links.

My Link Checker crawls the whole website and can thus check all links, but has no knowledge of the internal structure (database tables) of the site. Therefore it is difficult to provide editing functionality.

The plugin could search the broken or redirected links it found in the database to locate for example the post, but full text searches in the database are not cheap and thus very bad performance wise.

There are two ways I could tackle this problem:

1. One way would be to lookup the post by the permalink of the page where a broken or redirected link was found. However, this would only work for some pages and for example would not work if the broken link was found in the menu or footer of the page.

2. The other approach I have in mind is to provide an overlay over your website that highlights the broken or redirected links. Thus you would have a link to your own site for each page of your site in the Link Checker result. And if you click on the link, a modal opens that shows your page with the broken or redirected links highlighted.

Instead of the overlay, I may can even create screenshots with the highlighted links and show them directly in the result. This would be much more complicated, but maybe worth to consider.

This approach would help you locate the links, but also cannot provide easy editing like the Broken Link Checker does.

—

Does one of the proposed approaches sound helpful to you?

Best regards
Marco

Hi Jan @jdembowski

Mmh, but is the intention of reviews not to help interested users make a decision? From this point of view, such a review doesn’t add any value and a comparison would be much better for the users so that they can make a decision easier?

For example if @avanceinno says that my generator does not have feature x, but generator y does, everybody who needs x knows, that he/she has not to try my generator at all.

And such a review would also give me the change to highlight the advantages of the generator compared to generator y.

A review without explanation just harms my generator but doesn’t add any value at all…

All right, no problem.

Thank you for your reply.

Both browser should work fine and the link you see is fine.

Can you have a look in the browsers developer console and see if there is an error logged? The best way to do this would be to open the developer console (F12 on the keyboard), switch to the ‘Console’ tab and then reload the page. If it is a conflict, you should normally see something there.