August 15, 2024: broken links and missing pages

Expected behavior

Links in the markdown pages in the TTS Handbook ought to point to resources (files, pages, etc.) that exist (i.e., requesting them does not return a 404 page not found error); domain names should resolve, etc..

Current behavior

There are several broken links throughout the TTS Handbook. The attached file -- textual output of running markdown-link-check on the repository -- shows links that are broken (i.e., they return 404 (page not found), 50x (server-side error), 0 (typically meaning the hostname didn't resolve).

markdown-link-check-output-only-errors.txt

Possible solutions

Attached is a copy of the configuration file I used when scanning the repository. The command I used was:

# install the Node package
npm install -g markdown-link-check

# run this command from the repository root and put all of the output into a text file
time markdown-link-check --quiet --config .markdown-link-check.json pages/**/*.md 2>&1 | tee markdown-link-check-output-only-errors.txt

.markdown-link-check.json

It's possible to run this tool -- which only finds but does not fix -- via GitHub Action, pre-commit hook, or as a part of more in-depth CI/CD tooling (e.g., MegaLinter)

Steps to reproduce (for bugs)

Click on a broken link and see that the anticipated resource is not retrieved.

Context

I'm trying to use the TTS Handbook to find information that's relevant to my role as a technologist working at TTS. I was able to detect some of the broken links I saw by clicking on them with my web browser (Brave v1.168.137 which is built on top of Chromium v127.0.6533.100).

I added the "info is outdated / incorrect" label to this issue as the links mentioned in the report used to work just fine -- they're just no longer correct, likely as a result of resources to which the links point moving.

Your environment

The markdown lint checker (v3.12.2) was run on a Linux system (Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS) with Node (v18.19.0).

18F / handbook