Allow users to check & fix broken links directly in the interface

pressbooks / ideas

Ideas for Pressbooks.

GNU General Public License v3.0

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Allow users to check & fix broken links directly in the interface #185

Open SteelWagstaff opened 5 years ago

SteelWagstaff commented 5 years ago

Feature Description

As an author or book administrator, I'd like to be able to check my book for broken links and quickly fix/update them, when found.

Other Notes

This WP plugin is popular, but was too much of a resource hog to permit on our hosted networks when last evaluated in 2020: https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/. Much of what it does would be of real interest to authors, however. This well-reviewed open source plugin also looks as though it may be of interest, but has not yet been evaluated for server load and other potential issues: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-link-status/ (no longer maintained).

Other widely recommended options include:

Google Search Console (must be set up for each individual book title, I think?)
Ahref's free tools: https://ahrefs.com/broken-link-checker

SteelWagstaff commented 4 years ago

FYI @weevie833 and @colomet, we did some internal testing of both https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-link-status/ and https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker in November but weren't happy about the server load produced by either. Happy to keep looking/testing, though if anyone has other ideas?

pb-amy commented 4 years ago

If this ticket gets updated or has progress, please follow up on this thread: https://pressbooks.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/2168 (internal)

This zendesk ticket was sent in on September 15th, 2020 addressing this Issue

SteelWagstaff commented 3 years ago

Os suggested using python or Node -- build a crawler and control with a Lambda function or CLI command. We could add an authenticated endpoint to Pressbooks which was capable of receiving a report and emailing the book admin. Put it on a schedule and provide periodic notifications as a service for Pressbooks users on hosted networks.

allisonpbrown commented 2 years ago

Has there been any progress on this front? I'm extremely interested in a link checking tool, and am about to have an employee embark on a large manual link checking project unless a solution is on the horizon...

SteelWagstaff commented 1 year ago

@allisonpbrown nothing new to share in the past year, but we are gearing up to take this on as a research task in the next 6 months on behalf of eCampusOntario. Hopefully we'll have better news to share for our enterprise users before too long.

SteelWagstaff commented 1 year ago

WPMU's plugin documentation (https://wpmudev.com/docs/wpmu-dev-plugins/broken-link-checker/) notes that

Broken Link Checker on Multisites Due to complications in scanning multisite, the new BLC cloud version will only be available on the main site when network-activated in a multisite installation. Subsites will continue to use the BLC Local version.

SteelWagstaff commented 1 month ago

Fanshawe College has built a broken link checker for Pressbooks: https://github.com/FanshaweOERDesign/Pressbooks_LinkChecker

This tool can check for broken links based on the following input:

the URL to the page of a published Pressbooks resource

pasted or typed HTML text

this tool is customized to be used with Pressbooks ... it does not check text anchors or the internal link structure of Pressbooks, beyond the Table of Contents - the focus is on the links provided as part of the page content.

Any potential problems are displayed in a list that can be exported to a .csv file. Clicking on any row of the list will display a popup containing more detailed info about the error received.