Version 10 of Broken Link Report

http://www.tcl.tk has a lot of broken links. I ran TclLinkCheck against it, and put the results up here:

http://www.dedasys.com/report.html

I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to do this with the Wiki, as well.

Would it be an idea to integrate this into wikit - or run it periodically on the same site? -jcw

If it were integrated, it could be much more efficient. I think it makes a lot of sense - there are too many dead links in the Tcl world:-(

jcw - Ok, let's try to sketch the logic - the link checker runs once in a while. What should it do?

create a page with broken links and page refs (might be quite large)?
have a mechanism to only declare a link broken if several checks failed?
alter the page, perhaps simply add "[Broken link]"?
...

davidw - If I had to implement it, I would do something like this:

1) Create a page which references all the pages with broken links - but don't include the broken links themselves, at least for now - I think it would be huge.

2) Do a weekly cron job that goes through each page and tests its external links, and updates the page with some kind of broken link tag. The original URL should not dissappear, because it might be useful in tracking down the correct URL, especially in cases where it's just a spelling mistake. This could even be monthly, as, after the initial run, its main purpose would be to turn up links that have gone stale in the meantime, which hopefully won't be happening every day.

3) Maybe each night check the pages that were changed that day, to make sure we're feeding good data into the wiki.

AK: Consider an image for the [Broken Link] tag in addition to the text broken link. Text for 'search', Image for visual search when looking at the page.

jcw - Ok, how about marking bad links thus: some text, a link http://blah.blah with some more text. With an "align=middle" and "alt=BADURL" tag, this would not exceed line heights, and be easy to search for? It can done for verbatim (fixed font) text too (where URLs are auto-converted to links as well), but I can't show that here.