Broken Link Checker for WordPress
Sometimes, links get broken. A page is deleted, a subdirectory forgotten, a site moved to a different domain. Most likely many of your blog posts contain links. It is almost inevitable that over time some of them will lead to a “404 Not Found” error page. Obviously you don’t want your readers to be annoyed by clicking a link that leads nowhere. You can check the links yourself but that might be quite a task if you have a lot of posts. You could use your webserver’s stats but that only works for local links.
So I’ve made a plugin for WordPress that will check your posts (and pages), looking for broken links, and let you know if any are found.
Download it now! (40 KB)
Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details). I’ll get around to updating this page eventually.
Features
- Checks your posts (and pages) in the background (whenever the WP admin panel is open ).
- Detects links that don’t work and missing images. Checks both internal and outbound links.
- Notifies you on the Dashboard if any problems are found.
- Link checking intervals can be configured.
- New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
The broken links show up in the Manage -> Broken Links tab. If any invalid URLs are found a notification will also show up in the sidebar on the Dashboard.
The Broken Links tab displays a list of invalid URLs found along with the relevant posts and the anchor text of the links. “View” and “Edit Post” do exactly what they say and “Discard” will remove the message about a broken link, but not the link itself (so it will show up again later unless you fix it; this plugin doesn’t modify your links).
By default all old posts/links are re-checked every 72 hours, or you can set a different time period.
Notes (Semi-Technical)
I realize there’s a lot of features that could be added to improve this plugin considerably. However, this release is intended to “test the waters” and see if there’s demand for a plugin like this, so I only implemented the most basic functions. The plugin has been upgraded to be slightly beyond “basic” 
I thought about using WP’s pseudo-cron to run the link checker by schedule and decided against it. AFAIK the cronjobs execute when a page is requested; since this plugin does some lengthy processing it may increase page load times unacceptably when used in this manner. That’s why I set it to run the checks asynchronously (AJAX) and invisibly in the admin panel.
Installation
Just like any other WordPress plugin –
- Download (see below).
- Unzip.
- Upload the broken-link-checker folder to you wp-content/plugins directory.
- Activate the plugin in the Plugins tab.
Upgrading
- Deactivate the plugin (important!).
- Do steps 1.-3. from “Installation”.
- Upload the broken-link-checker folder to you wp-content/plugins directory.
- Re-activate the plugin in the Plugins tab.
Download
Version 0.5.3 : broken-link-checker.zip (40 Kb)
Compatibility : Starting with version 0.5 this plugin is only compatible with WordPress 2.7 and up. Older versions (e.g. ver. 0.4.14) should work with WP 2.1 – 2.6.x.
This is my first post
just saying HI
[...] Broken Link Checker Checks your posts for non-working links and lets you know (on the dashboard) if any are found. It’s of the “set and forget” kind, as it does the checks in background. Sometimes generates “false alerts”, probably because no site is up 100% of the time. And yes, this is one of my creations [...]
thx!! i’m going to try it
[...] Broken Link Checker Wordpress plugin has been updated to version 0.2! Here’s what’s new [...]
[...] you could also launch the script from the client side by using AJAX. This is what I do in my link checker plugin for WordPress. Another possibility is to store the tasks that need to be done in a database [...]
WordPress database error: [Unknown column 'hidden' in 'where clause']
SELECT count(*) FROM wp_blc_linkdata WHERE broken=1 AND hidden=0
No broken links found
WordPress database error: [Unknown column 'a.hidden' in 'where clause']
SELECT b.post_title, a.* FROM wp_blc_linkdata a, wp_posts b WHERE a.post_id=b.id AND a.broken=1 AND a.hidden=0 ORDER BY a.last_check DESC
tony : Try deactivating the plugin and activating it again.
[...] you could also launch the script from the client side by using AJAX. This is what I do in my link checker plugin for WordPress. Another possibility is to store the tasks that need to be done in a database [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker Wordpress plugin has been updated to version 0.2! Here’s what’s new [...]
I’m not sure if my previous message made it through, but I cannot get your latest, 0.2.2, version to work on my WP 2.3 installation. I can configure the settings, and the database does get your two tables, but it never actually checks the links. I’ve activated and deactivated and I have the same problem.
Peace,
Gene
I responded to your first comment here.
[...] In Wordpress? Our secret weapon to maintain our outgoing links in wordpress will be using this Broken Links Wordpress Plugin. This plugin allow you to set an option to check all your links within X hours and report back to [...]
Thanks for creating this plug-in – after installing WordPress I simply couldn’t understand why such a basic maintenance function is not included in the base package. Fortunately I stumbled upon your plug-in.
I upgraded to version 0.2.3 this morning but unfortunately it behaves just as erratically as the previous release – showing numerous (103 right now) and always changing ‘broken links’ that work just fine.
I cannot find any sensible explanation except that the plug-in might use time-outs to determine if a link is not there and that my site doesn’t respond fast enough. Could this be the case?
Yes, it does use timeouts – it has to set some limits so that the server isn’t overwhelmed by dozens of processes waiting for a page that might or might not load.
Currently the timeouts can only be changed by editing the plugin files. If you want to do this, look in the file wsblc_ajax.php, lines 229 – 230 (they contain the word “timeout”). The first number is the connection timeout (default = 15 seconds), the second is an “overall” timeout (default = 25 seconds). You can try setting higher timeouts.
If you give me a few examples of links that are reported as broken and yet work fine, I’ll try to find out what the problem is.
BTW, the list of broken links is always changing because existing links are re-checked every once in a while, plus links that are reported as broken are being rechecked several times to (hopefully) get rid of most false positives.
Eh, bugs :/
http://www.prepressure.com/postscript/troubleshooting/errors
There are loads of ‘missing links’ on this page but I am fairly certain the page is OK
I doubled those two time-out values but this does not solve the problem.
I am also troubled by ‘Error 500′ issues when using the ‘Broken links’ plug-in. This forces me to log-out of my Wordpress session – pretty annoying!
Forgot to mention that there is indeed a constant in the incorrect reporting of broken links: it typically happens on pages with 20+ links in them. Problem is that I have a few dozen of those on my site – with the above page holding over 100 links.
Of course I wouldn’t need your plug-in if I didn’t have loads of links on my site
Okay, I took some links from the page you mention and fed them into my local copy of the plugin… some of them turned out saying “broken”. I decreased the number of links in a single post to around 30 and they all checked out as not broken then… not good.
Some kind of timeout still seems likely. In addition to the network timeouts there’s also the script execution timeout, often enforced on shared servers – this causes any scripts that run for longer than X seconds be terminated. If the plugin is running over this limit it might behave inconsistently. I’ll look into it (might take some time). Meanwhile, set the timeouts you changed back to the defaults and see if changing the “session length” in the options tab to something in the range of 10 – 15 seconds is any help.
What about “Error 500″? How/when do you get those? I’ve never seen the plugin cause them myself.
The ‘Error 500′ messages appear at random but frankly scare the hell out of me.
Looking at temporary alternative solutions to check links I tried an online service (http://www.dead-links.com) a few minutes ago but that also reports error 500 issues!
I have deactivated your plug-in. As a fairly unexperienced Wordpress user, I have no idea what exactly is going on and don’t want to run into a situation that I cannot possibly fix myself without reinstalling. I guess it is better for me to stay away from beta plug-ins but once it gets a bit more reliable I’ll be back.
Eh, I usually try to fix any reported bugs, but diagnosing a random error on somebody elses site is, as you can probably imagine, very hard. So no guarantees.
I suspect third-party/hobbyist plugins in general tend to remain in “eternal beta”
Thanks – it works perfectly!
Suggestion:
Add a field/column: Status (published/ draft/ private/ pending moderation/ …)
Perhaps also allow filtering by status.
I have 211 broken links, but 175 are from 7 draft emails.
(They were published, but I had already found they were a mess, so the proper status is un-published – I wish we could designate them as such, not as drafts, but sorry, that’s not about your plugin.)
It would be easier to deal with the broken links if I could only address the published ones.
OR
Add an ignore list, so I can check a box, or copy and paste something, or if need be enter the post id#, so that those broken links won’t display, but a note will, reminding: “the following posts/pages are on your ignore list – they may contain broken links not listed above”.
Thanks again.
Thanks, and I’ve noted your suggestion. Though with the Christmas/etc coming closer I’m getting lazy, so don’t expect it to be implemented anytime soon
Here are a few false positives – the checker says these are broken, but they aren’t.
http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Organic-Gardening-Prince-Charles/dp/0297844164/ref=sr_1_1/002-6538492-7010462?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190925978&sr=8-1
http://astore.amazon.com/gristmagazine/detail/1576753611/102-1183543-3665742
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090798/
http://www.louvre.fr/anglais/collec/peint/inv0054/peint_f.htm
http://www.algds.com/
http://pressroom.pbs.org/photos/brain_fitness_merzenich?programid=the_brain_fitness_program_with_dr_michael_merzenich
(205 links correctly identified as broken, 6 falsely identified.)
On the wp-admin/options …, I selected Link Checker, then clicked “Recheck”. It returned “No broken links found”. Surely it should say “No new broken links found”.
Then I checked Manage – Broken Links, and this time it only showed 3 broken links. I re-loaded the page, and it showed 6, then 11, then 60 then 139, then 181, then 189.
All the above false positives appeared again.
And there’s one new false positive:
http://www.imagiscape.ca/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Breakfast+of+Champions
I checked some of these false positives and concluded they occur due to a bug. It was a relatively simple one and I think I have fixed it now. You can download the new version from this post (above). Or you could wait for the update notification which will appear in a few hours.
[...] Plugin nennt sich Broken-Link-Check Bookmarken [...]
[...] just found a fantastic WordPress plugin to check for broken links. I’ve installed it and it’s checking my blog as I type this. It’s found nine [...]
[...] Broken Links Auf dieses Plugin möchte ich nicht mehr verzichten. Nichts ist schlimmer, als seine Leser mit nicht erreichbaren Links zu versorgen. Dieses Plugin prüft alle Links und meldet Fehlerhafte. Damit man nicht lange suchen muss, wird angezeigt, welcher Link in welchem Beitrag den Fehler hervorruft und kann mit einem Klick auf Edit, diesen händisch bereinigen. [...]
Sunday Stroll…
Tamar Weinberg over at LifeHacker pulls out a post from Mother Tongue Annoyances that strives to help us all with that big Public Speaking Fear. Follow this advice and then come practice it at Toastmasters.
Found out about a great new WordPress Plugin …
Hi!
The link “View” at the broken-links don’t work to me.
I fix this with:
Please apply this patch to your next release.
$ cat broken-link-checker.php.patch
347c347
< post_id’ class=’edit’>View
—
> post_id).”‘ class=’edit’>View
I don’t see why it wouldn’t work as it is (it does on this site), but I’ll change it anyway – it won’t harm anything
Does it works on WordPress 2.3.2?
thanks…
Yes, it does. In fact, I just upgraded to 2.3.3 and it seems to be working okay.
[...] visitors to older posts have been running into the odd dead link, I searched for and easily found another great WordPress plugin that folds neatly into the blog’s administration and compiles a list of broken links, both [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker 0.2.5 (Janis Elsts) :ce plugin vous permet de vérifier que vous ne proposez pas de lien mort sur votre blog. Un plugin de ce type est indispensable à quiconque est soucieux de proposer un contenu à jour. Un de ces services que l’on devrait absolument trouver en standard sur WP. [...]
[...] like to click on a broken link? There are a few ways to remedy this solution, but I found this broken link checker for WordPress that does the job extremely well and is completely free. You do not want your readers to be annoyed [...]
[...] Link Checker Plugin Version 0.3 I’ve gotten some interesting feature suggestions for my link checker WordPress plugin since I released the last version several months ago. During the last week I finally got around to [...]
[...] Wordpress Plugin Broken Links, welches ich vor ein paar Tagen aufgenommen habe, ist ein unverzichtbarer Link Checker. Dieses [...]
[...] So we had to go through all of our links to fix them one by one. (We are using a broken link checker plugin which identifies the posts where the broken links are hiding in, however, we still have to [...]
I want complain on XHTML validation when enabling this plugin with broken link CSS turned on. It says that broken-link bla-bla is not valid.
Here is the solution (may be author would add this to further versions):
1. Open broken-link-checker.php.
2. Find there string:
echo ”,$this->options['broken_link_css'],”;
3. Replace it with:
echo ”,$this->options['broken_link_css'],”;
4. Save and upload changed file on server.
Thats all! Thank you for your attention. =)
I TOTALLY LOVE this plugin… which is one of the most useful WordPress plugins I’ve come acrossed. I wish it would check broken links in comments… That would make it even more better.
[...] Broken Link Checker – Checks your posts (and pages), looking for broken links and lets you know if any are found. Email this to a friend [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker: Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. By Janis Elsts. [...]
FYI: I changed my blog permalink structure and I use .htaccess file to redirect 301 all pages with the old permalink structure targetting to the new permalink structure, then I install BrokenLinkChecker.
BLC installed successfully BUT, this URL:
http://www.averagecoder.net/programming-tips/wordpress/how-to-easily-display-a-cute-google-map-inside-your-wordpress-post/
Which is working when you access it via web browser is identified as broken link by BLC.
I think it’s a good idea if BLC can works in conjunction with .htaccess rewrite rules.
_______________
Daniel
I’m not entirely sure why it showed up as broken in your blog. Nevertheless, I’ve made some tweaks to the plugin and it should now handle that URL correctly. At least it does on my test blog
@White Shadow: You’re right, it seems to be working as expected. I am not sure why it reported false broken links before. I will keep monitoring the behavior .
_______________
Daniel
Strange, it was working fine with older plugin version… then I updated to 0.3.2 today. Then it falsely reported 132 broken links. I checked all of of them and none of them were broken.
Even weirder, after activating the plugin, my WordPress Dashboard started loading very slowly, so I deactivated the plugin then “tried” to activate again and now I can’t activate at all… because I now keep getting this message:
“Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”
But now my WordPress Dashboard (2.3.3) is loading fine and fast. Hmm.
Strange. I suppose it could cause a slowdown in very specific circumstances (AJAX/broser/server configuration) while the links are checked.
Though I don’t see how it could “trigger a fatal error”. Hmm.
I updated to 0.3.2 and suddenly every link on my site became “broken” according to the plugin, but when I tried them, they all worked perfectly.
Nothing else changed apart from this update. The previous version worked perfectly.
Seems you’re not the only one to experience this. I’ll download 0.3.1 and 0.3.0 from the WP plugin database (there’s a link for “Other versions”) and try to find which change might have caused it.
On a related note, it seems that this plugin is now getting blocked by Bad Behaviour. Maybe that’s at least part of the problem?….
Hi. I installed the plugin and it appears to work fine with one exception. Once the plugin is activated, my system slows down to a crawl when navigating in the WordPress environment. As soon as I deactivate the plugin, everything is normal again.
It I’m using Version 2.3.3. Any help will be greatly appreciated!
Dana Betz
Oops. Just realized others are experiencing similar problems. Thanks again for any help.
Dana
I don’t know why this happens, but my guess would be it’s something to do with the web browser. Try a different browser and see if it helps.
Graeme Says: March 13th, 2008 at 6:55 am
I updated to 0.3.2 and suddenly every link on my site became “broken” according to the plugin, but when I tried them, they all worked perfectly. Nothing else changed apart from this update. The previous version worked perfectly.
<<< Ditto me
Do you have any plugins/server modules that block bots? Some of them identify this plugin as a malicious bot, and will cause all of your links show up as broken.
Also, try the 0.3.3 version that I just uploaded.
<<>> yes- if Akismet and BadBehavior are what you mean… and it is imperative they stay as well.
<<>> where, please? at this writing 3.2 is linked above and on the WP Plugins Page http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/
thx
RH
Damn, I suspected I had forgotten something. I uploaded the changes, but didn’t update the version information. It’s up now (wordpress.org will take 10-20 minutes to refresh).
I’ve got nothing against Bad Behaviour (which is probably the culprit here). However, I don’t think I’d be able to “fool” it into treating the plugin as harmless, now that BB has started blocking it.
0.3.3 is at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/ now – thx
0.3.3 is working ok for me – no apparent conflicts w BB –
thx
RH
Hi, I’d previously reported issues above that other people experienced (slow crawl, false broken links, etc.). Incidentally, I also have Bad Behavior plugin installed, so maybe that was a reason…
Anyway, you’ll be glad to know that I tried latest 0.3.3 and it seems to be working fine now…. for me. No false broken links, no weird activation issue (message that it could not be activated because it caused “fatal error”), etc. Great.
Thanks for the fixes. And thanks for releasing one of the most useful plugins that has ever been created for WordPress! It should be part of WordPress!
I just wish there was a feature/plugin that would check author links/any links in comments. I hate promoting broken links.
0.3.3 solved the problem. Only showing the one broken link that is actually broken, no false alarms and the admin pages speed seems fine in Firefox for me. Running several bot-blockers BB, Sabre, etc. and nothing clashing. Yeay
I tried this plugin but its giving me 408 Request Timeout all the time. What am I doing wrong? I mean its taking down my entire website. Any help would be appreciated.
moserw
http://www.nela.in/
@moserw : Maybe your hosting just can’t handle it. I don’t know of anyone who’s had a similar problem :/
[...] Broken Link Checker 0.3.3 – Scanează tot blogul după linkurile care nu mai sunt bune.In felul acesta pot să vad ce nu mere şi ce merge pe site incât să fac blogul fara probleme. [...]
[...] Alex King seems to be a much better programmer than Denis de Bernardy). I combine that with the broken-link-checker plugin to provide the functionality I was always missing with smartlink – an ability to automagically [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker 0.3.3: Does what it says. When I began, I did not know Yahoo didn’t keep its URLs, and the Marines don’t either. So, I have a lot of broken links. Nice thing is, if the link is broken, it displays with a line through it. [...]
it might be an idea to add a notice or remove the download link, of the older version … it had me confused for a bit !
blc is great but its shows me every email-adress as broken link. Is there a feature not to look for emails but only for homepages?
Not yet, but I’ll add something soon. I’ll just make it ignore “mailto:” links.
[...] Dịch từ: http://w-shadow.com [...]
this is a wonderful idea !
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress Plugin (tags: wordpress plugin wp-plugins) [...]
A very useful plugin!
I have found one small hitch though: I have a number of code examples (enclosed in
Thanks.
Yes, that seems doable. I’ll add it in the next version.
By the way, if you want the <code> tags show up in the comments here, you’ll have to write the angle brackets as < and >
While I don’t have the means to donate, I have put this plugin on my ‘whats new’ page and suggested WP users get it and install it.
I had to reinstall wp a few months ago after I hiccuped the mysql database. Many of my pages have links on the page to other parts of the blog. I felt just the category listing would mean too many clicks for viewers. So… the static links I had were out of sequence. I had corrected over 100 by hand over 3 months. This plugin found all of the remaining bad links I had been searching for in less than a day, 120 of them.
Thanks for a great plugin !
Thank you
[...] currently into the broken link hunt here at Deuts.NET. Thanks to the Broken Link Checker plugin by Janis Elsts, finding those broken links is a breeze. Two years into blogging, there will [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker der im gesamten Blog auf defekte Links prüft, funktioniert leider noch nicht. Er lässt [...]
Truly excellent. A sincere thank-you.
[...] Broken Link Checker [...]
I had moved a lot of my photos in my gallery which my blog has about 100 links to, therefore I probably have about 100 broken links. However there seems to be a limit to how many you can see on the broken link page. After you have fixed those it doesn’t show the other broken links.
So right now it says I have 26 broken links but my broken links page is blank. I did fixed 20 of them yesterday (it said there was 46 broken links then). I tried clearing cache and logging out but the page is still blank. So how do I fix the other 26 broken links?
[...] tome diversas ações a respeito. Trata-se do “Broken Link Checker“, desenvolvido pelo W-Shadow.com, o qual já está instalado e funcionando aqui no Open2Tech. [...]
There is no hard-wired limit to how many links the page will display.
Do you mean that it says somewhere that you have 26 broken links, but doesn’t display them on the “Broken Links” page (even after you refresh it)? I can’t think of any way that could happen.
A few things that might provide some clues :
* If you delete a post, all the broken links from that post will be gone, too (as you’d expect).
* When you edit a post all of it’s links (even those that you didn’t change) are removed from the “Broken Link” list and re-checked as soon as possible. This may take a while if there are a lot of links to check.
* Theoretically, in very rare circumstances, it is possible for the broken link table become desynchronized from the “posts” table. In this case, deactivate the plugin, activate it again and click “Recheck All Links” in the “Options -> Link Checker” page. This is pretty much the same thing as reinstalling the plugin, and should fix any discrepancies.
[...] Broken Link Checker 0.3.5 » Janis Elsts (url) Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. [...]
Hi
I am getting an internal error 500 since upgrading to the new version of broken links. It shows all over the palce in admin panel. I had no problems with plugin until recently it worked like a dream – see error below:
[www.lets-makemoney.co.uk] [Sun Apr 13 18:19:04 2008] [error] [client 86.146.73.230] Premature end of script headers: wsblc_ajax.php, referer: http://www.lets-makemoney.co.uk/wordpress/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=broken-link-checker/broken-link-checker.php&updated=true
I have had vaiorus problems wit the plugin dashboad too like plugins not auto updating on request and activating a plugin and going back to find it deactivated? I am using wp 2.5.
Some strange behaviuor which from the sounds of this board otehrs have experienced too? Any ideas? thanks muchly
I think I made no changes to the wsblc_ajax.php file in the new version, so it shouldn’t be suddenly crashing now. The error message also doesn’t explain much. If it wasn’t linked to the update I’d suspect server configuration or some kind of incompatibility…
[...] Broken Link Checker—A perennial problem on my (and any other) site is that it has links to many other web sites, and those web sites change over time. The Broken Link Checker scans all new posts (and periodically scans all old posts) and reports any broken links to me, giving me the opportunity to either remove or change those links so my readers don’t get 404 errors. Very cool. [...]
Great plugin. One problem – when I activate it, the drag & drop feature of some of my other plugins (pageMash, FAQ-tastic) stop working. Any idea why?
I guess there’s some kind of JavaScript conflict (Prototype vs JQuery). I’ll see if I can find it.
I move my data to new host and lot of images links missing, thank to Broken Link Checker that solve my problem, thanks author for your great job.
Great plugin. Found a bunch of false positives, all of which are links to wikipedia, but a couple other links that were actually broken. Well worth the trade off of occasionally getting a false positive.
175 and counting (but I have > 12,000 posts going back 4-1/2 years).
I’m certain I’m just missing it, but I can’t find where I “can set a different time period.” Not that I want to, I just wondered.
Also I don’t see the strike out, which is cool, documented. Am I just missing that too?
Good work. Thanks.
All of the options are found under Options -> Link Checker (or Settings -> Link checker if you have WP 2.5).
The “time period” option is on that same page and is called “Check Every Post Every [X] hours”. To get the strikethrough effect you need to enable the “Broken Link CSS” option, too (I think it should be on by default) and, if you have any caching plugins, make sure the cache is refreshed.
That should do it
[...] plugin-nya Broken Link Checker, pekerja keras yang akan mengecek semua artikel blog kita dari tautan rusak dan gambar hilang, dan [...]
I get Error: Couldn’t update the post (DB error)
on almost every second thing I want to “unlink”.
besides, great plugin!
jez, I don’t see anything in the code that could cause this. In fact, you should never see that error message, except when the post containing the link no longer exists at the moment you click “Unlink”.
I’ll make the error reporting a bit more verbose in the next version, but that’s all I can do for now.
I do now get “Error: Couldn’t update the post” (with the brand new version)
If you really have the new version there should be a more detailed error message in parentheses after the basic message. Or just empty parentheses if the error was that there is no error
Eh, I don’t know.
Hi, Great plugin. But it seems not to be working with wikipedia links.
The following link is detected broken
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Richardson
Hi
I spoke to my host and figured why i was getting error500 with this plugi. they say they do not support AJAX at moment ???? Thing is the plugin did use to work, can i revert back to an old version. Is AJAX for recent versions? I am puzzelled. All i know is it used to work and the host are saying that they have never allowed AJAX so they dont know why it did? Can you advise pelase ?
Thanks
@Abi : The plugin has always used AJAX, since the very first version. I also find it highly unlikely that your host “doesn’t support AJAX”. After all, AJAX isn’t something that you need to enable or install server-side. Anyway, you could try to install an older version of the plugin and see if that works. You can find the previous versions here.
@Jandry : I’ll check the link on my blog. We’ll see how this goes.
I can confirm the wiki issue.
Right this is strange, i went all the way back to original version and uploaded it and it worked fine. No error 500 so i thought i would test for you all way through to see what version broke. I got all the way to the newest version which is now appearring to work fine so far??? In doing this i completely deleted the borken links directory before uploading the new version? Has this had anything to do with it now working?
To be honest, I don’t know. Maybe some of the plugin files were corrupted and reinstalling fixed it. Or maybe it’s the full moon that makes it work
@Jez, Jandry : The Wiki link works on my blog. Maybe Wikipedia is blocking automated access from your site (some sites tend to do that).
Hey White Shadow, first of all thanks for the plug in! The only problem is I have 160 broken links (I changed my domain name…heh) and so it becomes a hassle having to click ‘Edit Post’ for each broken link and search for the link within the post. I’m sure the majority of the people if not everyone using your plugin have around the same amount of broken links if not more, after all if it weren’t that many they wouldn’t have a use for this plugin in the first place.
For this reason I’m wondering how feasible it would be to implement a feature with AJAX where, within the broken link list, one can click the broken link URL or something and it becomes a text box, and then once someone clicks outside of the box or a button, it changes the link that way. It would be tremendously helpful. I would do it myself but I’ve no AJAX experience let alone Javascript experience (I just occasionally hack away with my knowledge of other languages). However if you do (And I really hope you do) choose to try to implement this, I would be glad to test this it for you if you need testers. Just wondering if you’ve ever thought about that, I’m positive everyone using this plug in would benefit from this.
My AJAX experience is a bit limited, but the idea seems doable and useful. I’ll add it to my “idea file” (aptly named arrgh.txt), though I make no promises as to when it’ll be implemented.
You see, if I immediately went after every suggestion I get for my programs, scripts and plugins, I would never get anything new done (well, I do usually fix reported bugs ASAP). So it might take a while for me to get around to it. I’m sure you understand
Yeah I do, maybe in that time I’d have learned AJAX and done it myself
But I’m glad you think it’s a good idea anyways and have added it to your todo list, though I’m curious as to how you couldn’t have thought of it before 
Really though, it’s obvious that it would make your plugin truly complete. Thanks for the consideration!
Complete, you say? Ah no, not even close. To be “complete” it would need to do at least the following :
* Also check for missing CSS files.
* And missing JavaScript.
* Check blogroll links.
* Check links in comments.
* Actually, check all links.
* Have a link checking function that doesn’t trigger any bot detectors.
* Gracefully handle “soft” 404 – when a site doesn’t send the expected 404 Not Found HTTP response, but displays a search page or something like that instead.
* Work without CURL (for compatibility).
* And so on (ad infinitum?).
There are always more ideas than there is time (or enthusiasm, or skill)
”
* Also check for missing CSS files.
* And missing JavaScript.”
I understand your enthusiasm but this doesn’t necessarily have to be in a broken LINK checker, as broken link checker implies hyperlinks, nevertheless it would be a great feature.
Really though, not trying to nag you or anything, but wouldn’t this be a simple thing to do? Just take a look at the code in 2.5 that handles the following: when you go to write a post, it automatically generates a post slug under the post title. You can click on this slug and it’ll turn into a box with which you can change the post slug. Just use this same code to do the box thing. Then in the manner that you found the link within the post (Regex? Or did you hook onto a WP function? I’ll look at the plugin code later), change the link within the post.
I might try and hack something together later, I’ll give you whatever I could come up with, if anything.
It’s regexps + some hooks to know when a post if modified. You’d probably need to access the DB directly to modify a post (there’s probably an internal function for that, but I’ve found the documentation pretty spares in this regard).
I have a general idea of how to do the box thing at the moment… And sure, feel free to send me any code you might come up with.
Thank you very much!
This is a great plugin and made possible to for me to check and fix more than 3000 pages with 9000 links.
Is there a possibility to start it as cron job?
Not in the current version, but if you know PHP, it should be pretty easy to modify wsblc_ajax.php to work with cron. You’d need to slightly modify it so that wsblc_ajax.php?action=run_check doesn’t require the user to be logged in.
I’m not going to add official cron support to the plugin because many users don’t have the option to use cron.
Thank you a lot! I will do it with wsblc_ajax.php. Have a nice weekend!
Hello,
First off thank you very much for writng this plugin, great idea! The plugin was working great. But now the pages are not redirecting. In Explorer the pages gets hung up indefinitely, in Firefox it gives this error.
The page isn’t redirecting properly
Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
* This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept
cookies.
Any ideas of what could have happen? Are there plugins not compactable with Link Cloaker?
Thank you VERY MUCH for your time.
Bert
[...] using any widgets, but… I am using a few plugins: the Broken Link Checker and the Dashboard Widget Manager. (The latter let’s you clear stuff you don’t want to look at out [...]
At what interval does it check ? I have it set to 5 seconds for how long it checks, but my blog slows way down for a page request when it is running. If I could set this plugin to run for 5 seconds once every 60 seconds that would be great. This page slowdown is only there when the plugin is active and I’m in the admin panel. I think.
I broke my site during the wp2.5.1 upgrade, reloaded and now the database links have shuffled. So I probably have many broken links or static links that go to the wrong post. I had deleted old posts here and there, and when I reuploaded the database backup, mysql redid the post numbers filling in the blank spots.
Thanks,
D.J.
The option that you can set is how often the plugin is invoked (how often it runs). So if you have it at 5 seconds, it will
1) start up every five seconds (launched by JavaScript from the admin panel)
2) run for five seconds (approximate)
3) repeat from 1. while there are links to check
The intention is to use all the alloted time, so in an ideal case the plugin will run continuously – until there are no more links to check.
If it slows down you dashboard too much, try setting it to very long intervals instead.
thanks, I’ll try that.
White Shadow, you already have everything you need to implement what I mentioned (The click on the link and it shows an input box for faster link fixing). You already have the Regular Expressions in the wsblc_ajax.php file, just make a callback like unlink_link_callback and use a different $matches variable (Maybe $matches[0] I think is the href, not positive), the SQL queries already seem to be fine. The only major change will be adding the input box and all of that, and you can see an example of that in the wp-admin\js\slug.js file, the first function, edit_permalink. This function is the one that shows the input box and all of that.
I’m not trying to say it’s absolutely easy and bashing you for not doing it or anything, I would do it if I had a better understanding of this, just trying to help you out with some clarifications. If you ever want to give it a try, I’ll be glad to test it out for you. Like I said earlier, I’m /positive/ that every one of your users will benefit from this. It’d definitely be faster than having to click edit post for each post and look through the long post to find the link. Not trying to nag or anything though I know it’ll probably seem this way, just trying to show that I really care about this feature enough to investigate.
Ahem. It definitely isn’t easy. I tried, and got weird and unusual MySQL errors that I couldn’t trace to any particular source. Still, I’ve uploaded an experimental implementation to wordpress.org (you should get an “upgrade available” notice in your “Plugins” tab).
Hmm…don’t know what errors you’re talking about, where do you get them and when? I’ve tried the new plugin and it works perfectly, really, I’ve tried it multiple times.
One weird thing is that when I click view post on some of them, it uses my old domain name, only on posts that were created when I had that domain name, but I’m not sure if it’s your plugin’s own doing.
Well, you never know when a bug might crop up
The plugin gets the URL for the “View” link from the WordPress database (using the “guid” filed). Some of your older posts probably have outdated database info. I think.
Yeah I figured that out by viewing your plugin’s source, I simply ran a REPLACE query on the guid table so that’s fixed now. The only problem is that some of the guid’s are of when I used different permalinks (for example /p?=432) and as far as I can tell there’s no way of fixing that (I already tried update permalinks). Oh well, but hey at least your plugin is working perfectly fine. If I ever notice anything then I’ll hit you up.
You should announce this new feature man, I’m positive you’ll get a lot of attention for it and many people will love it. It would’ve been neater if you could do it like the slug editing is: The URL is just text and when one clicks on it it becomes the textbox and when one clicks outside of it or on the save link/button it saves it (If not the former then at least the latter). This would be a lot more intuitive and make for a smoother process. But hey at least it’s working now, perfectly fine too! This suggestion is just as a touch up.
I’ll let you know if anything happens but so far the plugin is working great. If you need anything let me know!
I suspect nearly 30% of my posts are about new plugins/features. So I’d rather skip posting about small updates
Hi,
Thanks for your amazing plugin!
I have a request for an enhancement.
I went through the source code and noticed that the “View” links are generated according to the the GUIDs. This may cause problems on non-English blogs, such as my blog in Chinese. I think using permalinks is a better approach. Hope this helps!
Thanks again.
Regards
Leo
Ahha, and how do I get the permalinks? (It’s probably not extremely hard, but I didn’t figure it out when writing that code)
You can probably use get_permalink, giving it the post’s ID as the parameter. This function is provided by WordPress core.
Anyway I’ve not tried that yet. Good luck with that! We can find a way out together if you are faced with any coding problem.
Interesting, that seems to work. I’ll have a new version up soon, thanks
Yeah I was about to tell you to do what Leo said, it’s definitely better and more logical.
hey white shadow, as mentioned in my pioneer (around 10 to 20) comment earlier in the development of your genius plugin – I do still get the unlink error.
only occurs with images (wikipedia and my own), do you have any idea how to fix that?
cheers,
jez
I didn’t figure it out at first, but now I know it doesn’t work because I haven’t added any specific “image-unlinking” code. So the “Unlink” button only works for links.
Maybe one day
[...] noarchive) along with Nofollow Case by Case. Add in Google XML Sitemaps, Ozh’ Better Feed, Broken Link Checker and PagerFix if/as applicable, for bonus [...]
This is a very cool plug-in but I’m having some trouble with it. It’s constantly reporting many valid URLs as if they were invalid, aside from catching the occasional invalid one. I’ve experimented with the settings to no avail. I’m running 2.5… Any suggestions? Thanks
It’s possible that those links that are incorrectly reported as broken point to websites that employ some kind of anti-bot protection, which might block the link checker. This has already happened before.
Another possibility is that the “broken” links load very slowly, so the connection times out and the plugin assumes the links don’t work.
Yeah… I’m seeing it happening now on multiple blogs, each of which aren’t having load time issues and are also running plug-ins like Bad Behavior, AntiLeech and/or others (many of the URLs reported as invalid are internal)… I’ll play with different configurations to try to pin down where the incompatibility lies. thx
[...] Broken Link Checker: And lastly I like this plugin because it shows me what posts have broken links on them so I can correct the problems and eliminate future seo problems because of missing pages! Last 10 posts in Readers QuestionsQuestions Need Answers #1 – May 24th, 2008Advertisments For Technology – April 14th, 2008What Are Authority Sites? – April 3rd, 2008Readers Questions – February 4th, 2008 Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
Nice plugin! Thanks a lot! I hope that in future version could check broken links in comments too.
I’m testing comments to see if the DNS issue is on my end, or somewhere else.
Hi,
How can i use link checker for rapidshare or mu links?
Is it work for those?
@Piklog – I suppose it should work for those as well, but I haven’t tested it.
I’m new wp user, can you test it for me?
I think RS, MU links are different from direct link checking.
It’s different.
thanks
@Piklog – Ah okay, you’re just being lazy here, how hard would it be to add a RS link to a post and see if the link checker catches it?
Anyway, I tested it, and it doesn’t work for them. Apparently RS won’t report the standard 404 HTTP code when a file is missing. Shame on them.
[...] 4. Broken Link Checker [...]
Hello! I made the Broken Link Checker translatable.
It’s here – http://mistress.hweia.ru/2008/06/broken-link-checker/ (the post is in russian, but it’s the only .zip there, hard to miss
@Anna – Thanks. I fixed a few things (that shouldn’t have been translater) and will upload a new version soon.
By the way, I understand Russian just fine, though I’m not russian myself.
[...] should thank W-Shadow for providing us with this automatic broken link checker plugin for WordPress. And you may also want to check outgoing links using bad neighborhood checker [...]
After activating I get this:
Aborting: WordPress API Malfunction
For some reason the function get_currentuserinfo() did not behave as expected. Your user_level seems to be null. This can be resolved by navigationg to the Users section of the WordPress administrative interface. In this section check the user that you use for administrative purposes. Then under the drop down labled “change role to…” select administrator. Now click the change button. Should you still recieve this error please report this bug to the plug-in author. In your report please specify your WordPress version, PHP version, Apache (or whatever HTTP server you are using) verion, and the version of the plug-in you are using.
WordPress version: 2.5.1
PHP version: 4.4.7
Plug-in version: 2.1.2
@tino – I don’t have the slightest idea why that happens. Also, I think you’ve got something wrong here, as none of my plugins are currently on ver. 2.1.2
I had similar problems as Tino, but mine actually have to do with your plug-in. Despite the fact that I can’t find a post on your site referencing the new version 0.4, I received an update notice on my WP Plugins page. I applied the automatic upgrade and it instantly started kicking out SQL errors about my All-in-one-SEO plugin, which I’ve been using for a long time in conjunction with Broken Link Checker. These errors started the moment I upgraded your plugin, so it appears it conflicts with All-in-one-SEO. I wish it weren’t the case, but as soon as I deleted your plugin off of my server (because I couldn’t access my admin to deactivate first), the SQL errors disappeared. Bummer, ’cause I like your plugin a lot…
@Cody – It’s all probably caused by the internatialization code which was contributed by someone else (see a few comments below). I don’t know anything about debugging this aspect of WP plugins, so I’m tempted to simply “downgrade” the public version to the code that was in 0.3.9…
@White Shadow – Err, I put an internationalisation in, but i18n-ing is just a special markup of text strings and one extra function to tell wordpress where the translation file is. I use All-In-One SEO too and I had no problems with SQL… WTF?
@Anna – Yes, but it still caused problems for Cody and I, too, have no idea why. I’m quite sure there were no other changes in the plugin aside from i18n-related stuff.
@White Shadow – Maybe Cody’s update went wrong – connection errors, access rights or smth like that…
Maybe, but it doesn’t seem very likely. If the download was corrupted he wouldn’t have been able to extract the ZIP archive (at least not with WP’s automatic upgrade). The plugin worked before, so access rights were okay; there’s most likely no reason why the should have changed with the update.
does it checks rapidshare links if they are alive or files have been deleted?
@koullis – nope, as I mentioned before, it doesn’t work with RS. It would always treat those links as working.
@White Shadow –
thnx for your reply
do you know other plugin which checks RS links?
@koullis – Nope, haven’t heard of any.
[...] Broken Link Checker: Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found. [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress – As your blog gets more and more posts, it can be difficult to go back and look for what has broken with time. This plugin will check images and links and notify you via the dashboard when it locates something. [...]
I have a website that contains about 3500 posts all of which contain a link to a news article. I used to check for broken links manually every month – in May, for example, I would go through all the posts for May for each year. Lately, however, I have been unable to keep up with this. Will this plugin work efficiently with this many posts?
Thank you.
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress : Lorsque votre blog devient de plus en plus riche en contenu, il devient difficile de retourner en arrière pour chercher les liens cassés. Ce plugin va faire le travail à votre place en vérifiant les images et les liens. Une notification sera visible sur votre tableau de bord. [...]
@Kim Woodbridge – It will work, but I can’t say how well it will work. It might take a long time to check all the posts.
[...] Broken link checker [...]
@White Shadow – thanks! I will try and see what happens … after the first pass wouldn’t it be quicker because there won’t be so many broken links or will it always be slow because there are just so many links to check? I’m also looking into using a standalone program such as Xenu to deal with this my broken links.
@Kim Woodbridge – It should be a bit quicker after the first pass, but with that amount of posts it will always take time to check them all.
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress – As your blog gets more and more posts, it can be difficult to go back and look for what has broken with time. This plugin will check images and links and notify you via the dashboard when it locates something. [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress | W-Shadow.com [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress – As your blog gets more and more posts, it can be difficult to go back and look for what has broken with time. This plugin will check images and links and notify you via the dashboard when it locates something. [...]
Well, I installed it and have it running now in a separate browser window. It’s slowish but is running without any problems at all. It’s gotten about halfway through the 3500 posts in 1.5 hours and has found 82 broken links so far. I immediately changed the checking schedule to weekly and may even change it to monthly. So, even if this does take 3 hours it is still so much faster than I can do it manually. So, thanks for a great plugin and we now know it can handle an unusually high number of posts
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress – Links und Foto-URLs überprüfen. [...]
@Kim Woodbridge – Welcome
[...] Broken Link Checker Like the name describes, this plugin makes sure you don’t have any annoying broken links. A good plugin to use to ensure your blog is the best it can be. Tags: Blogging, business, entrepreneur, grow, help, Innerpreneur, links, marketing, seo, share, small, tips, WordPress [...]
[...] Mashable posted an article on the 20 best Wordpress plugins for version 2.5. One on the list was Broken Link Checker. I had an ah-ha moment and immediately went to the site and read about the plugin. I was a little [...]
I got this on my dashboard after I installed it: Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in /home/igneous/public_html/wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/wsblc_ajax.php on line 292
@bob cobb – your server doesn’t have CURL installed, and this plugin will not work. There is no workaround except for installing CURL.
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress – As your blog gets more and more posts, it can be difficult to go back and look for what has broken with time. This plugin will check images and links and notify you via the dashboard when it locates something. [...]
Hello, can you create a plugin that report the videos removed from youtube?
That would be impressive!
Thank you.!
@Jvista – You mean embedded videos, right? That’d depend on how they’re inserted in the post – just the HMTL or via some plugin.
[...] like to click on a broken link? There are a few ways to remedy this solution, but I found this broken link checker for WordPress that does the job extremely well and is completely free. You do not want your readers [...]
Hello, Yeah, as the plugin “Broken Links”, but than report videos of youtube deleted or removed, inserted for Embed direct in wordpress, as:
==============
==============
So bloggers we can always know when a video has been removed, and can us update it.
maybe rename to “Yotube Broken Links” or “Youtube Broken Embed”,
Well, Thanks! for “Broken Links”, is a exelent plugin!
Good Luck!.
Sorry for my english, I don´t speak english. =/
Hi. Thanks for your great plugin! It’s making trouble with WP 2.6, though: If I click “unlink” it tells me that it cannot edit the post (in a popup).
@Eric – I’ve upgraded to WP 2.6 and seems to be working for me still. Maybe you tried to “unlink” an image? That would produce the popup you mention.
@Jvista – maybe someday
Works fine with WP 2.6!
On one of my projects, images and links are added in custom fields. Coould you please consider as an option a check in custom fields? Thanks
@Razvan Antonescu – I’ll add that to my idea list. Though I can’t promise you’ll see it implemented anytime soon.
Oh well, I can understand that that is not a very common use and priority must be given to regular users. So if it’s on your list is more then enough for me
I had huge problems with this plugin eating up lots of resources on the server, leading to 500-er “internal server” errors after I upgraded to WP 2.6. Therefore I had to disabled the plugin for now. this is using the latest plugin version.
Excellent plugin.
Two suggestions:
- exclude ‘revisions’ and ‘autosave’.
- include an option for ‘orphaned pages’ (I have so many pages and can’t really tell which ones are actually being linked to…)
@Karel – okay, it makes sense to exclude revisions & autosave. I’ll add this right now.
Also, Eric, this might be the cause for the unexpected server load you experienced (maybe
), so the next version might work better.
Nope, same problem (error 500) also with version 0.4.3.
I’m running WordPress 2.6 and just installed Broken Link Checker 0.4.3. I thought this was working beautifully on two different sites but I just noticed a Fatal Error message at the bottom of the Write Post page on one of the sites (not the other one, which is a different ISP):
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: curl_init() in /wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/wsblc_ajax.php on line 294
Can you issue a modification that doesn’t use Curl?
@Cynthia – that would be a pretty complex task. Not likely in the foreseeable future.
Looks like I found a bug. The broken link checker 0.4.3 records a URL which returns a 401 as a broken link. These are NOT broken links. They’re sites that require a login. Example is http://www.totalfark.com/
@Michael Hampton – Hmm, good point. I’ll update the plugin.
[...] Broken Link Checker [...]
[...] was made possible by the Broken Links Checker plugin for WordPress, which made the process very easy and helped me to detect/repair links in all of the posts on the [...]
Oops, I think I found another one. If there are two or more links to the same URL in the same page, editing, discarding or unlinking affects all of them. This isn’t necessarily desirable. In my case I wanted to edit one and unlink the other, but both of them got unlinked and I had to put one back in.
And if you hit Discard, then while all of them get discarded, only one of them is removed from the listing via AJAX.
@Michael Hampton – I think it makes sense to change/remove all broken links, so I won’t change that. I’ll look into fixing the Discard/AJAX issue though.
[...] der englische Name des Plugins schon erahnen lässt, untersucht “Broken Link Checker” Ihren Wordpress-Blog automatisch nach so genannten toten bzw. verweisten Links. Sollte die [...]
[...] stolper ich über das WordPress-Plugin Broken Link Checker. Das ist gut, denk ich. Der Checker entfernt die toten Links nicht gleich, der checkt die [...]
[...] der englische Name des Plugins schon erahnen lässt, untersucht “Broken Link Checker” Ihren Wordpress-Blog automatisch nach so genannten toten bzw. verweisten Links. Sollte die [...]
i have the problem that my wordpress blog is now running on new webspace and of course your plugin found morgen than 500 broken links.
so it would be great to change all broken links at the same time.
http://www.xyz.de/wordpress to http://www.123.de/wordpress
so maybe you can include this possibility to your plugin!
would be great!
change all xyz to 123 !
@Rob Vegas – That’s a good idea, but I think there are already plugins that can do this. I’m pretty certain I’ve seen some “global search & replace” plugins before, Google may turn some up.
Hey, I’ve got some oddball stuff going on here with version 0.3.5. Specifically it seems to run for a while, and then gets stuck at, for instance, “3 posts and 9278 links in the work queue.” It’s been sitting here for four days, despite having the setting to recheck everything every 72 hours. Any idea how I can figure out what’s going on?
Er, excuse me, I seem to have version 0.4.4. not 0.3.5.
@Michael Hampton – I’ve thought about your problem for a while and haven’t thought up anything useful. I don’t know why it’s stalling. I’ll let you know if I get any ideas.
I think this is an excellent plugin, thanks so much for your work on it.
Our blog has many levels of users. We’d like to allow editors to use the Broken Link Checker, but they have “insufficient permissions.” Is there a way to extend permissions beyond just administrators? Thank you.
@Kate – It’s not easily extendable – you’d need to edit the source code. If you’re up for that, what you need to do is replace two references to ‘manage_options’ (around line 340) with ‘edit_others_posts’. This should give editor-level users access to the plugin.
Hello! I think that this plugin is really useful… However, I noticed that with wordpress 2.6 can give some problems. Watch this post in my blog:aggiornamento-a-wordpress-26
I think this can help to solve the problem.
Thank you and see you soon,
Denis
@Denis – Riiight. I can’t really read that (as I don’t know the language), but if you mean the “Internal Server Error” thing it’s probably caused by some tricky server configuration conflict. For example, it could be some security-related Apache module that causes this, or a .htaccess thing.
@White Shadow – @White Shadow – Sure, it’s italian
However if I deactive the plugin, all things works right again… See you
[...] for almost 6 years and have not made many changes to it recently. I had, however, installed the Broken Link Checker plugin and thought that was the culprit. Anyway, I told my host that I would remove the problematic [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker – This plugin will monitor your blog and looks for any broken links and let you know if any broken links are found. [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker scans all your articles and their internal links to verify that none of them are broken. I haven’t kept this plugin continuously active, though did check my entire site after upgrading and changing many of my categories, and, happily, there were no broken links. [...]
[...] the Wordpress Broken Link Plug In, I found that along with the hundreds of links to my old web site I had over 160 broken links on my [...]
BLOATWARE ALERT… caused my blog to take FOREVER to load… probably because I have LOTS of content… but still! This is hardly “running invisibly in the background”!!!
@Bleh – Depends on your browser… I’ve had no problems with it
[...] Le nettoyage consiste à vérifier et corriger les liens morts. Pour cela, j’ai installé le plugin Broken link checker [...]
This is a great plugin! Except that it’s reporting links to nearly all Wikipedia pages as broken, while they not. Such as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%A5%9E%E3%81%AE%E9%9B%AB
Is there something funny about these Wikipedia pages? Or is it just that the Wikipedia web sites can’t be reached from my host?
@hillman – Wikipedia links work okay (i.e. not detected as “broken”) on my blogs, but some other users seem to have problems with them. Maybe it’s really a problem with your server, or maybe Wiki is blocking certain ranges of IP addresses.
@White Shadow – I see. Perhaps I’ll just discard those errors. Thanks for the reply!
Does Broken Link Checker keep a log of the checking result? Like, whether it reports the link as broken coz it gets a 404 or 503 when checking?
Also, one of the link in my blog is linking to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora’s_box
but BLC is reporting the link as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora
Does it stumble on single quote in the URL?
Xenu Link Sleuth produces some sort of error message on Wikipedia links (”forbidden”), I am guessing the same thing that stops XLS also blocks the BLC4WP.
@hillman – There is no log.
The plugin can probably get confused by links that contain a quote. I’ll need a more advanced link-finding regexp to solve that, but it’s doable.
The official regex for URIs is
^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?Confused yet?
Nah, it makes perfect sense
Actually I need a regexp for HTML links. I think I’ll need to update the existing one to use a backreference to ensure it only accepts matching types of quotes for the opening and closing quote of the href parameter (I think that sentence got a bit tangled).
Anyway, I’m putting that off, because currently I have a more pressing issue – finding out how somebody managed to hack this site today. I’ve got it back working, but now I need to read the logs and whatnot…
[...] ) 15-Auto Social Poster 16-Broken Link Checker 17-Global Translator [...]
[...] plugin Broken Link Checker habe ich erst kürzlich eingebaut. es läuft im hintergrund und scannt alte postings nach [...]
OK, more on my broken link checker stopping in the queue. It appears to get hung up when checking a link to http://www.phl.org/ . The site never loads up, the curl call never seems to actually time out as it should, and so the AJAX call comes back with a 504 (Gateway Timeout) error. When I manually removed this link from the blc_linkdata table, it went happily on checking the rest of the queue.
@Michael Hampton – Hmm, I guess I’ll have to think of something to detect cases like that.
Well, curl should be timing out, but it isn’t. Looks like the CURLOPT_TIMEOUT isn’t being honored. I don’t know if that’s a bug in curl or in PHP, but it’s certainly a bug.
Anyway, I worked around it by just having the link checker pull links from the work queue randomly, i.e.:
/* check the queue and process any links unchecked */$sql="SELECT * FROM $linkdata_name WHERE ".
" ((last_check<'$check_treshold') OR ".
" (broken=1 AND check_count<5 AND last_check<'$recheck_treshold')) ".
" ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 100";
Now it’s at least checking most of them.
@Michael Hampton – I seem to recall that “ORDER BY RAND()” is considered a bad thing performance-wise.
Sure, it’s a performance problem if you’re randomizing a few million records. Randomizing 100 is trivial.
P.S. Please fix your comment form. I’m going nuts having to re-type my information in all over again every time.
@Michael Hampton – I’ll use a different workaround. The new version should be up soon.
I think one of my antispam plugins is causing the comment problem. I’ll investigate, but it might take a while.
really works thanks
Hello, nice to meet you, Janis.
This is nice plugin.
I fixed a lot of broken links on my blog.
But, first time, I got a error below at “Status : ” area on admin page:
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class wpdb in /var/www/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 53
So, I remove the line
require_once(”../../../wp-includes/wp-db.php”);
from wsblc_ajax.php , thinking it was negative solution.
Today, I found an article, “Tackle Plugin Compatibility Issues While Using Popular Libraries” : http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/08/27/tackle-plugin-compatibility-issues-while-using-popular-libraries/
Yes, That might be the answer!!
I changed like below :
/*
The AJAX-y part of the link checker.
*/
require_once(”../../../wp-config.php”);
if(!class_exists(’wpdb’)) {
require_once(”../../../wp-includes/wp-db.php”);
}
…
I GOT IT!!!
It potentially has same problem in require_once(”../../../wp-config.php”), maybe.
I wish my work will help you, thank you.
@Dai – While I haven’t encountered this problem before your suggested modification certainly can’t hurt. I’ll add it to the plugin
However, I think using “isset($wpdb)” instead of “class_exists(’wpdb’)” will be a better choice because the comments in wp-db.php indicate that it is possible to replace this class by something else by setting the global variable $wpdb.
Including wp-config.php should be okay, that just loads the WordPress core.
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Thank you for update.
> using “isset($wpdb)” instead of “class_exists(’wpdb’)” will be a better choice
I guess you’re right, actually, it works fine.
‘wp-db.php’ is not one of the “Popular Libraries” like PclZip, but a part of
WordPress system.
The article is may not suitable for this situation.
Anyway, the problem has gone.
I won’t have to edit when this plugin updated.
If you need, I’ll try to find out which plugin cause the conflict I wrote.
@Dai – Nah, it’s fine, though feel free to investigate if that helps your peace of mind.
This is a great plugin – found loads of dead links on one of my blogs. But on another, I can’t get it to run.
Both blogs are 2.6.1, and both are hosted on the same server, so I think there must be some interference with another plugin, one that I’m not using with the first, successful installation. Specifically, what happens is that it doesn’t run automatically, and when I click ‘re-check all pages’ in an attempt to trigger it, I get my ‘no results of a search’ page, suggesting other links, up for a few seconds. Then the default Broken Link Checker start page comes up again. Very odd!
I’ve tried deactivating all the obvious plugins – do you have any suggestions?
@Lucy – Hmm, here are some ideas :
* When you click the “re-check all” button note the URL of the “search page” (before it redirects). That might give some clues.
* Check your .htaccess. Maybe there are some security-related rules that are blocking parts of the plugin.
* Try disabling/enabling any cache-related plugins. My intuition tells me those could have something to do with it (somehow).
* Check file permissions/file owner of broken-link-checker.php and wsblc_ajax.php (especially the second one). The “right” permissions depend on your server configuration, but in general these files should both have the same permissions as the .php files of other, working WP plugins on your server.
Hi man.
I just tested a hack:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/190128?replies=4#post-840910
And I have this problems, can you kindly search the wp-config file in a relative way?:
Warning: require_once(../../../wp-config.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/wordpress/plugins/broken-link-checker/wsblc_ajax.php on line 5
Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘../../../wp-config.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/share/pear:/usr/share/php’) in /home/wordpress/plugins/broken-link-checker/wsblc_ajax.php on line 5
@Nokao – I see why the plugin wouldn’t work in that configuration, but I’m not quite sure what you mean by “in a relative way”. It’s already using a relative path to include wp-config.php, do you mean I should use an absolute path, or what?
Hi White Shadow (and compliments for your storms pictures, we have the same photographic taste for natural strength).
I said “relative” because someway, your plugin recognizes that he is in a “symbolic link jailed folder”.
The point is that it’s the only plugin that it’s not working and I think that it’s not the only that uses the wp-config someway.
I’m not a WordPress hacker, so maybe you can look how do plugins like nextgen gallery look into the wp-config file…
I also have another question I posted months ago:
to remove the check of links that have different protocols from http, like for example skype://
Your plugin hates my msn and skype “addme” buttons
Thanks again for your work!
@Nokao – It doesn’t “recognize” it, it just tries to include the file as if the plugin was in the usual location, and, obviously, fails. I don’t think there’s anything I can do to the plugin to fix this except overhauling the entire AJAX part of it and getting rid of wsblc_ajax.php altogether. That would take a lot of time & work, so it probably won’t happen in the foreseeable future.
For the time being, you should just edit the plugin and replace “../../../wp-config.php” with a full path to the wp-config.php file. Hopefully I’ll be able to remove this need for hacks in the next version – but, as I said, it probably won’t be soon.
Ah, and thanks for the compliments
@White Shadow –
Ok… I’ll surrender to the fact that I can’t use your plugin in that server
(i’ll continue to use that for my personal blog)
Infact, I can’t change the ../../../ folder with something, because, you know, I did that “hack” to have the SAME plugins folder with more than 25 wordpress websites.
So I can’t know wich website is calling the function, and I can’t address a wp-config.php in an absolute way.
I really hope that your plugin is the only that have that problem… I’m curious about that.
Actually, all seems to be working fine.
@Nokao – Oops, I forgot about that. You’re right, my suggestion wouldn’t work.
Other plugins work because either they don’t use AJAX at all or use it in a different way (possible, but as I mentioned it would take a while to convert this plugin to use the other method).
@White Shadow –
Uh
Even nextgen-gallery have SOME problems, in the admin menu’, the link is wrong and it’s a mix of server path and symlink.
I don’t understand honestly why this is happening… and why you need to look for wp-config.php
@Nokao – Do you really want to know all the details?…
Okay, for my plugin it’s like that : the link checks run in the background using AJAX in the admin menu. This is necessary because I can’t expect every user to set up a cronjob for the broken link script.
In WordPress plugins an AJAX-y component can be built in several ways. This plugin uses a different PHP file for the AJAX tasks. The file, wsblc_ajax.php, needs to be able to access the WordPress database to be able to read posts and check links in them, etc. That’s why it needs to load the WP core engine and blog configuration. This is done by including wp-config.php. Also, the plugin needs to load the database layer, so it includes wpdb.php.
That’s it
That seems to happen on CGI and FastCGI installations of PHP, which is the vast majority. Apparently the symlink is getting dereferenced when the file is loaded. So the script has no idea where it was called from, but instead sees where it actually is on the filesystem. Therefore it can’t figure out where anything else is because it isn’t in the directory tree you expected. My test Apache/mod_php install doesn’t seem to have this problem, though my FastCGI install does. As far as I know there’s no good way to “fix” this.
@Michael Hampton –
Maybe we can try with an hard-link ?
Can you contact me in private so we don’t go off-topic here on White Shadow’s website?
info at
nokao dot
com
If someone reads my previous questions about having a multi-blog engine installed to have only one WP and of course only one plugins/themes folder… and wants to know if there is a solution…
Yes, there is, and it’s called:
http://striderweb.com/nerdaphernalia/features/virtual-multiblog/
I’m astonished… now I have more than 20 WP websites with a single WP installation, no more multi-update-caring and balls-breaking.
Bye
Thanks a lot for the great add-on, should save me having to use a manual solution.
I just installed the plug in and works really great but since then the wp admin becomes really slow, do you know or anybody knows or have the same issue?
thx!
@Dan – Some users have had similar issues, but the only thing I can suggest is trying a different browser. I think the problem is site/browser specific.
I think the broken link checker hmight have a problem with del.icio.us (wonder if their nofollow is part of it?) BLC is showing false positives for just about ALL my del.icio.us tag links. For about a month earlier this year I was doing a LOT of bookmarking on delicious and was having del.icio.us do a daily post to my blog since the bookmarks were of mostly useful, relevant content – in a nutshell, I have LOT of del.icio.us bookmark links on my site and BLC is showing 3000+ bad links I have nary the time to go thru by hand so I ‘d be tickled pink if there arose a automagical remedy to this problem. – thx
@R. Richard Hobbs – Del.icio.us links seem to work fine on my test blog, so I’m guessing the problem is site-specific. I can only suggest you add del.icio.us and delicious.com to the exclusion list in Settings -> Link Checker.
>>> I can only suggest you add del.icio.us and delicious.com to the exclusion list in Settings -> Link Checker.
<<< thanks for that – I really only turned BLC back on yesterday after I had deactivated a while back. I have been keeping it updated but I hadnt really noticed that feature – thx again
Feature request: make links to check open in new tab or window
Feature request: make your comment form remember me
thx
@R. Richard Hobbs – Could you clarify what you mean by “links to check”?
As for the comment form, I’m aware of the problem – it’s caused by the same plugin that handles comment paging. I’ve let the author know about this bug, but it’s not fixed yet. And I think disabling the plugin would be a bad idea – for example, this page would take forever to load with >250 comments on one page.
>>> Could you clarify what you mean by “links to check”?
<<< after the BLC has done its work you are presented with a list of bad links it has found (it’s”edit” link is next to each of these) I’ll call this the “work page”… Normally I will confirm for myself they are bad if just click on each link you are moved off the work page and have to go back after following the link unless it is opened in a new tab or window. Its a relatively small chore but little things matter if there are a lot of links to check. Automatically opening the link in a new tab (or giving users the option on the config page would please me immensely.
Another suggestion might be to be able to select all the text automatically (like the “embed” box on Youtube) in the edit form window. There appear to be lots of free javascripts that do this. Admittedly I havent gotten in there and tried it so I cant say exactly how easy or hard it might be to implement this, but for me it would be a helpful feature.
Thanks again for your hard work and kind ear.
@R. Richard Hobbs – Ah, I usually just middle-click those links which opens the link in a background tab in Opera. Anyway, I’ll make them open in a new window by default (the window/tab distinction is browser-specific, can’t control it from JS AFAIK).
I’ll see what I can do about auto-selecting the text.
We’ve been able to fix many bad links in the resources lists on our site. But there are four links that it keeps marking as bad links that are really good links. Why are these URLs being marked as bad? (I tried putting them in normally but your comment form thinks it is spam so I’ll try the following to see if that gets accepted.)
www dot accessible dot ie
www dot accessible dot ie/?p=50
www dot natural-access dot com
www dot eschoolnews dot com
Thanks.
@SleeplessinDC – Those links work fine in my tests. Anyway, the next version of the plugin will have more detailed reporting which should help you figure out why the links get marked as broken.
[...] of link checkers on the internet, but for all you WordPress-ers, there’s an easier way – the broken link checker plugin. I recently installed and ran it on one of the sites I look after, and it came up with a list of [...]
Hi there,
I thought I’d give BLC a try in WP 2.6(.1). No (PHP/WP) errors but it marks perfectly fine links as ‘broken’ while they’re obviously not! At first I thought it only did that with ’shorthand’ links like domain dot com instead of www dot domain dot com but it has now also marked other ‘good’ links as ‘broken’…
This somewhat negates the use of BLC…
However: Great plugin and I’m looking forward to seeing any issues resolved or more documentation on ‘why BLC marks those links as broken’ becomes available.
Thanx!!!
@CID – If you have the latest version (0.4.8) you should be able to get some clues as to why those links were marked as broken by clicking the new “Details” button(s) in Manage -> Broken Links. However, meaningful info will only be available about “broken” links that were checked with this newer version.
Hey WhiteShadow,
Thanks for your quick response!
Yes, I do have version 0.4.8 and it lists ‘details’. However, every link detail (except the URL’s and time ofcourse) reads:
——————————————————————————
Last checked : 2008-09-09 12:06:09
Final URL : http://www.cid-iv.com
HTTP code : 0
Log :
=== First try : No response. ===
Trying a second time with different settings…
=== Second try : No response. ===
Link is broken.
——————————————————————————
The sites load fine but BLC keeps getting ‘no response’…
@CID – It’s probably timing out. The timeout is hardcoded to be about 30 seconds (when using CURL). Maybe I should add an option to configure it…
Yes, well, that would, in any case, be a welcome addition. Always nice to be able to set the threshold for this kind of functionality. But I don’t think that that’s the case here because the site (mentioned in the example) loads in under 2 seconds… (Checked with Fasterfox.)
@CID – Maybe the site has some kind of security software in place to prevent suspicious bots from accessing it. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Ok, yes, that would cause such behaviour, I will check!
But how about the internal links it marks as ‘broken’?
And to me it seams that it has problems handling shorthand URL’s. Or can’t that be the case?
@CID – “shorthand” URLs shouldn’t be a problem if the URL is otherwise valid and working. In particular, external links should always include the protocol part (usually http://).
Are the local links using relative URLs? The plugin should handle it, but the algorithm is not perfect.
~ bug ~
When I activate the plug-in my website bleeds through the admin. So I can actually see my website below with some themes the admin, and integrated with the admin in other themes.
~ end bug ~
has this been fixed yet?
When I search for “broken link checker” in the wordpress plugins search I do not see your plugin any more. What happened?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=broken+link+checker
@Bart Gibby – The WordPress.org plugin search is notoriously bad. The plugin page is still up.
As for the “bug”, check that wsblc_ajax.php is present in the plugin’s folder (i.e. in wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/) and that it doesn’t have any weird permissions set. Actually, just see if you can access yourblog.com/wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/wsblc_ajax.php. You might have a .htaccess rule or some security module blocking it. Or possibly your “wp-content” folder isn’t where the plugin expects it to be.
Broken Link Checker is not compatible with Ozh Better Feed
@cartmanffc – Okay, thanks for the info.
If i’am klick on ‘unlink’ in the list of Broken Links, The complete text of the Artikel is deleted!
I’am working with the newest Version of WordPress 2.6.2!
@Stefan – Err, sorry? That has never happened in my tests :/ If you have backups (hopefully you do) could you mail me the post (including HTML etc, not just the text) that got deleted? My email is whiteshadow (et) w-shadow (dott) com
I would run some tests with that posts and try to find the cause of the problem.
Love the plugin — it works so much better than any other link checker I’ve tried! Sadly, I had to turn it off after upgrading WP because of server load problems (I’ll keep an eye out for updates that address this issue!).
@alice – Thanks
I haven’t been able to pinpoint the source of the performance issues yet as only certain people/blogs seem to have them. The plugin has always been running well on my sites.
White Shadow,
I’ve been thinking about the server load problem and how only a few people seem to have run into the issue. In trying to come up with reasons I might have had the problem where others didn’t, I came up with two possibilities:
1) my blog goes back to July, 2004, so there are a lot of entries with an abundance of links, which could have kept the link checker pretty busy; and
2) and this one is probably the more important one: I tend to just leave my dashboard open in a browser tab all the time. Since your plugin is designed to work certain intervals whenever the dashboard is open, that means that I’m letting it work around the clock. Maybe there needs to be a setting to slow down the link checker if the dashboard is left open for long periods of time?
Anyway, maybe this info might be of some use to you.
Have a great weekend,
Alice
@alice – So is the slowdown you experience really occuring on the server, or just in the browser? If you try to access the site from a different computer when you have the dashboard open on another, does it still load more slowly than usual on the other computer? That would help narrow down the range of possibilities.
I don’t know if this would help, but here’s an idea – go to the plugin’s settings and increase the “Check every post” value to ~160 hours. Also increase “work session length” to 60-120 seconds. It might reduce the load, or it could make it worse, or do nothing, but it would be an interesting data point.
what difference of this and google webmaster tools ?!
thanks for share this plugin.
@mobile software – Google Webmaster Tools lets you know about internal broken links, for example, when a link somewhere leads to a missing post on the your site.
The plugin, on the other hand, shows broken links from your posts to any site, either your own or external. For example, if your blog is blog.com and you link to example.com/article.html in a post, and that page (article.html) goes missing one day, the plugin will tell you that the link to example.com/article.html is “broken”.
[...] می توانید از این افزونه برای رفع مشکلتان استفاده کنید. Broken Link Checker: وجود لینک های خراب در یک وبلاگ، در رتبه بندی و ایندکس [...]
Hi,
Thanks for the plugin – very neatly done. I modified your source so that it includes a javascript mechanism to resort the broken links by post date (or by the original last check date). I’ve tested in firefox so far – going on to test in IE. Haven’t tested under heavy load yet (massive number of broken links).
Wanted to know if you were interested in the modified source for inclusion back to the trunk when I’m done?
~Aron Beal
@Aron Beal – Sure, sounds like a useful feature. You can post a link here or email it to me at whiteshadow@[this domain] when it’s done.
On my dashboard I get a notification of a lot of broken links but when I check them there’s actually none. This started to happen when I deleted a page where all those links (of images) belonged.
@Nelson – This might be caused by a database bug in an older version. Click “Re-check All” on the link checker settings page to reset the plugin’s tables. It will probably take a while to recheck everyghting, but it should fix the problem.
@White Shadow – That’s odd. I believe I had already done that before. Anyway, I’m glad it really did the fix this time. Thanks!
[...] if you’ve been blogging more than a year, here’s a plugin you might find helpful: broken link checker. Whenever you’re logged into the WordPress Admin area, this handy plugin will spider all the [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker: I love this plugin! It is new to me, but one of my favorites already! Too often links go bad, this plugin checks your complete site and lets you know if there are any links that don’t work anymore. Here is what they wrote about it: [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker – This plugin will monitor your blog and looks for any broken links and let you know if any broken links are found. [...]
After installing broken link checker, it seems that only account authors with a status of “admin” can access the link checker. Is there a way to let other user status’ to access the link checker as well?
@Drew McManus – It is done. Editors (in particular, users with the “edit_others_posts” capability) can now access the page as well. The update should show up in 24 hours.
@White Shadow – Wow, that was fast, many thanks!
I find that this plugin often displays broken links for images in post and links to photos in my NextGen gallery. Testing the links shows that they are not broken. When I tell the plugin the recheck for broken links it then comes up with none. A little strange…..
@AJ – Probably just temporary glitches with the links, that does happen once in a while. There isn’t anything substantial I can do about it.
This is an excellent plugin, I’ve included it in my must-have maintenance Wordpress plugins list at:
http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/how-to-set-up-a-blog/must-have-wordpress-blog-maintenance-plugins/
Thank you for the wonderful plugin!
I tried it out for a few days and it was working well (and even helped me find a couple of links that had recently changed. However, it is now reporting a status of “Error: You can’t do that. Access denied.” while logged in as an Administrator. Any suggestions?
@Lance – That’s strange. I recently updated the plugin and changed what capabilities are needed to see/edit broken links : now it’s “edit_others_posts”. Administrators should have this capability by default and I haven’t encountered any problems with my two blogs (WP 2.6.3 and 2.7-almost-beta).
Are you using the latest version of WP? Also, can you still access the Manage -> Broken Links page?
I am running the latest plugin version, am using WP 2.6.3 and can access Manage -> Broken Links. It did stop working a couple of days ago, perhaps this is when I upgraded the plugin. I will email you with a few more details. Thank you!
You were right; after logging out and back in, everything is now working. Thank you so much for your assistance!
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress – As your blog gets more and more posts, it can be difficult to go back and look for what has broken with time. This plugin will check images and links and notify you via the dashboard when it locates something. [...]
هذه هي بلدي وليس من المستغرب بعد ذلك ، ولكن بفضل..
I have been using your broken link checker plugin on a few WP sites and it seems to be randomly putting a strikethrough line through some of my affiliate links. At least that is what the developer of the paid for link cloaker says. So I’m going to leave your plugin active until the next time an affiliate link gets the strikethrough and then I will deactivate it to confirm if it is in fact the culprit. Has anyone else had this same problem?
[...] para determinadas palavras-chave. Se por ventura utiliza Wordpress, procure instalar o plugin Broken Link Checker, que faz uma análise completa ao seu blog, detectando imediatamente links que não consegue seguir [...]
@Steve – Yes, the plugin will show a “strikethrough” line on links it considers broken. You can turn off this feature by going to Settings -> Link Checker and unchecking the “Apply class=”broken_link” to broken links” box.
Great plugin!
Congratulation an thaks from Brazil!
@White Shadow –
Okay great! That is good to know and thanks for taking the time to reply!
Hi,
Been using your plugin for a little while now and have found it very handy (especially when I moved my blog about six months ago).
I have a question:
I would like to display the number of broken links on a stats page I have put together and basically want to show my readers the number of broken links on my blog.
Any ideas?
R
@Robert@PNG – Hmm, it can be done, but probably not easily. There isn’t any built-in API useful for this purpose.
In a nutshell, you can get the number of broken links by running this MySQL query : “SELECT count(*) FROM [linkdata_name] WHERE broken=1″, where “[linkdata_name]” is the name of the plugin’s link metadata table (usually it is “wp_blc_linkdata”).
I don’t know if this helps any
That did the trick mate!
Thanks,
R
@AJ –
I’m having the same problem. I have WordPress 2.6
So you have Wp plugin too!!!
Man you’re so great
Thnx for this useful plugin ..
regards
[...] Broken Link Checker – Der Broken Link Checker Überprüft automatisch auf tote Links und zeigt diese ggf. im Dashboard an. [...]
[...] Check for broken links Search engines and your blog readers do not like broken links so use the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin to check for broken [...]
[...] Broker Link Checker überprüft alle Links in den Beiträgen ob diese noch vorhanden sind oder nicht und markiert oder deaktiviert diese dann auf Wunsch automatisch. [...]
G’day from Australia
Have you been getting any problems with this plugin on GoDaddy Hosting? I have a couple of blogs (2.65 and 2.7) and they are both failing on GoDaddy.
My other blogs on other hosting servers are fine.
Any ideas.
Dave
@David from the Jewelry Appraisal Center – What kind of problem are you having exactly?
@White Shadow – G’day again and many thanks for your swift reply.
When I first installed it there was a FATAL ERROR – probably due to activating 2 plugins at the same time. Once I did them one at a time it seemed to just hang but eventually (after kicking me out of the Admin area and asking me to download the edit file?) I managed to get back in.
Everything was extremely slow – but with some patience (I went for coffee) found it was simply checking all my posts and links. There were 79 broken links – Wow and I thought I had everything under control
Now all is well and so I put it down to PHP4 on GoDaddy PLUS two plugins clashing.
Many thanks anyway – great plugin.
Dave.
@Dave at the Jewelry Appraisal Center – Hmm, yes, it can slow down the site for some users, but I haven’t been able to figure out why. Glad to hear it’s working now.
[...] Broken Link Checker – Este plugin faz-me lembrar a minha avó: podia estar um calor do caraças, mas quando eu saía de casa dizia-me sempre para levar uma camisola porque «pode fazer frio». O Broken Link Checker examina todos os links existentes nos teus posts e informa-te quais os que se encontram inválidos, incluindo alguns que estão a funcionar bem. Tens a opção de editar a morada e corrigi-la sem necessidade de abrir o post, de «esquecer» o assunto quando refere como inválido um link válido (mas depois o falso alarme regressa) ou simplesmente remover o link. É uma ferramenta interessante se fores um tipo picuinhas como eu, mas de vez em quando exagera e é preciso muita paciência. [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress | W-Shadow.com (tags: tools wordpress web plugin plugins php 404 brokenlink) [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker - Checking broken links can be a tedious chore and this plugin makes this task simple by checking [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker ; Another must have for siteowners everywhere. This plugin basically goes through EVERY single link there is on your site and checks to see if it’s broken. If it is, it gives you a handy dandy table to where you can select to whether you would like to unlink it or even discard it, all without having to actually edit the page. A lifesaver! [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker – A handy little tool which regularly checks all of the links on your blog and warns you of any broken ones. Includes a handy interface to change or unlink broken links without editing the full post or page. It does struggle with some redirected links but that’s not really the fault of the plugin. [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress – As your blog gets more and more posts, it can be difficult to go back and look for what has broken with time. This plugin will check images and links and notify you via the dashboard when it locates something. [...]
Is the plugin compatible with wordpress 2.7 ?
Thank you for your great work.
I haven’t done any in-depth testing, but it appears to be working okay on my two WP 2.7 sites. I think it should be fine.
i have just downloaded it mate.. hope it works well for my website… thanks a lot for sharing..
http://www.edtechguide.com
[...] Broken Link Checker (Dowload Broken Link Checker) [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker (Dowload Broken Link Checker) [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker für WordPress wird einfach im Backend aufgerufen und überprüft dann die gesamte Website. Im [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are [...]
Hellon
like coment#302 I have this error on admin panel:
“Error: You can’t do that. Access denied.”
Hmm, try to log out and log in again. If that doesn’t help, try resetting your account’s role to “Administrator”.
[...] Broken Link Checker for Wordpress – this handy little tool can automatically check your entire wordpress blog for broken links and will alert them too you. You can also apply CSS to the broken link. [...]
Hey, nice plugin.
For some reason, whenever I update the options (pressing the button), I am redirected to my login page, and cannot proceed from there. Entering the password does not help.
If nobody else experienced it, it is probably a collision between your plugin and some other plugin i have – maybe MiniMeta widget, which incorporates some wordpress redirect function.
Anyways, thought Id let you know.
Indeed, it’s probably some kind of plugin conflict. As far as I know, nobody has reported anything similar yet.
There is a conflict with Broken Link Checker and a $97.00 paid-for plugin called ‘MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate WP Plugin.’ MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate is a plugin that cloaks affiliate links. Anyway, what happens is that Broken Link Checker will randomly put a strikethrough line through a couple of my affiliate links. I say “random” because I haven’t figured out any pattern as to why it will do that to one affiliate link and not other affiliate links. Your plugin is a good one but unfortuneately had to deactivate it because of that problem. I have no interest with the company that makes this plugin but you can see more about it here: http://www.mbpninjaaffiliate.com/ It would be nice to know if you plan on fixing your plugin so I can start using it again.
Thanks
Steve
I don’t have any immediate idea about how to fix the conflict itself, but you can remove the strikethrough by unchecking “Apply class=’broken_link’ to broken links” in the plugin’s settings (Setting -> Link Checker).
Also, you might be able to stop the link checker from checking cloaked links by experimenting wih the exclusion list on the same page. Find a piece of text that appears in all cloaked links and add it to the list. Though I’m not entirely sure if that would work because I haven’t used the Ninja Affiliate plugin.
[...] and Widgets used: Add Meta Tags Akismet Better Blogroll BlogCatalog Link Broken Link Checker Dashboard Widget Manager Different Posts Per Page dTabs Excerpt Editor Hello Dolly My Category [...]
[...] and the following invaluable plugins: askimet, podpress, all in one seo pack, google sitemaps, broken link checker, contact form II, wp database backup, get recent comments…we love open source code! (and [...]
[...] Broken Links: te comprueba uno por uno todas las entradas de tu blog wordpress y comprueba si los enlaces siguen siendo válidos. Nada más instalarse lo comprueba y luego se le puede programar para que vuelva a comprobarlo cada cierto tiempo. Lo hemos puestos cada 72 horas, aunque igual es muy pronto… sólo deciros que nada más instalarlo ya ha encontrado 155 enlaces que fallan. [...]
[...] Links kommen hier im Blog in Zukunft nicht mehr vor, dank des Broken-Link Plugins von White Shadow. Es scannt bequem im Hintergrund alle vorhandenen Links in allen Posts und listet [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress – As your blog gets more and more posts, it can be difficult to go back and look for what has broken with time. This plugin will check images and links and notify you via the dashboard when it locates something. [...]
Hello!
I observed strange behavior with wordpress 2.7:
when I post youtube video, link checker reports them as dead. It’s not a problem – I can discard them, but… they are back sooner or later.
any update?
Is there anything interesting in the “Details” of the reported links? Maybe YouTube have started using some spambot protection that interferes with the plugin.
I have a couple of links showing as broken due to the way in which they are formed. Is it possible to add an options for exceptions whereby the user lists “links” which they don’t want checked so as to avoid those links appearing as broken links?
@ Gary O : Err, there’s already the “Exclusion list” for that. See Settings -> Link Checker
DOH!!!!
That’ll teach me to look more carefully before making a comment!
I’m so embarrassed.
I am using it, but since I activated WP-SuperCache it throws an Internal Server Error (every second). It looks like the settings for this plugin (.htaccess changed) are interferring the work of your plugin. Could this be and how could I solve this?
Cheers
Sebari