Broken 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 implementing some of them. Enjoy 
What’s New
Making broken links look different
There’s now an option to add a “broken_link” CSS class to known broken links. In the default configuration this will simply add a strike-through effect to the links. If you know CSS, you can define your own style in the Options -> Link Checker tab, or in your stylesheet. The style is only applied when a post is displayed, so your posts won’t actually be modified.
Exclusion list
Links that contain (in the URL) any of the excluded words won’t be checked. You can also add domain names or complete URLs to the list. Note that this doesn’t affect links that already show up as broken. If you want to permanently hide some of those, update the exclusion list accordingly and “discard” the broken links.
Remove broken links without editing the post
The list of broken links (Manage -> Broken links) now has a new button for each link - “Unlink”. It will remove all instances of the broken link from the post, but will leave the link text intact. So “a link” would turn into “a link”. This doesn’t work for missing images though.
Get the Update
Download : broken-link-checker.zip (~9Kb).
Or, if you have WP 2.3.x, use my Single Click Plugin Updater to upgrade the link checker plugin 
August 4th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
@JC - Your idea was added to a very long list of suggested features. That is all.
August 4th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
You know what would be great to add on to this would be to list the 301 redirects, and an ability to mass update them by any certain domain which changes their URL format. This would identify in most cases expired domains which become link farms and return as a 301, but certainly not something you want to still link to.
May 25th, 2008 at 1:47 am
thank good plugin broken link checker
April 13th, 2008 at 12:13 am
ahh, well it appears it has worked
April 13th, 2008 at 12:06 am
You know, when you hit the “Delete” link, it just sends a request to the server - it’s not deleted instantly. So if you click it a lot of times and navigate away from the page some links might not get deleted
April 12th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
correction the dashboard does show the 517 broken links message but eitherway minor bug
April 12th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
i only saw one problem, after deleting the 517 broken links when i goto the mange broken links it still lists 517 not really an issue the dashboard doesnt show that number either in case you were wondering
April 12th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
thank you very very much works like a charm
April 12th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
New version is up!
April 12th, 2008 at 12:04 am
awesome thank you
April 11th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Well, I did some tests and it seems it may work in WP 2.5, too… I’ll get back to it tomorrow
April 11th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
ahh, im using wp 2.5 now ;(
April 11th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Hmm….
If it was easy - maybe. However, I just looked at the code and it seems that it would be pretty hard to add a “Delete Post” button that works both in WP 2.3 and WP 2.5 (due to the significant interface changes in WordPress 2.5).
If you’re okay with it working only in WP 2.3 then I can add it.
April 11th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
ok could i perhaps be able to convince you to create a version with it for me and perhaps anyone else who wants it
April 11th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Not extremely hard, but it would be useless to most people, and only take up screen space.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
would it be hard to place a delete post link in a colum on the broken links manager ? beside each post so i can click delete?
April 11th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Hmm, that’s not going to happen. Your situation is probably very rare if you need to delete a post just because a link becomes invalid.
April 11th, 2008 at 3:48 am
i would like to the ability to delete the post from the broken llnks page as well as a mass delete option by checking boxes of posts that are broken.
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Yes, it only checks links in posts and pages, but no the blogroll. Ah well, I’ve added your idea to the ever-growing wishlist
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
A fab, much-needed plugin! I’m just dusting off my unloved blog and upgrading it to WP 2.5, so discovering new (to me) plugins like yours is a joy. Of course, one finds a fair number of broken links after leaving a site fallow for a while, too. Am I mistaken, or does your plugin not check the Links (née Blogroll) links? ‘Cos that would be handy it would.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Not enough information
March 26th, 2008 at 4:25 am
Doesnt work for me didnt detect a broken link that i posted on purpouse.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
That’s because your server has safe mode enabled. You can make the message go away by changing this line in wsblc_ajax.php :
to this :
(Note the @ symbol.)
Personally I think turning off safe_mode is a better solution, but that’s probably not an option for most shared hosting accounts (I assume your website is on shared hosting).
March 7th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
I’m seeing the following message at my dashboard:
March 5th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
I’ve just uploaded a new version that will (hopefully) fix the “Unlink” button.
March 4th, 2008 at 12:05 am
The “Unlink” button is supposed to work, but there’s obviously no warranties with free tools like this one
Anyway, I’ll look into it.
As for the session length - the link checking is done in fixed-duration sessions. This has several reasons - for example, many hosting providers limit the maximal script execution time, so you can’t just check all links in one go. Another reason is that if the checker “hangs” for some reason, the checking process will be restarted when the current “session” ends.
Many servers limit the max. execution time to 30 seconds, so the default session duration is 27 seconds.
As for how long it “should” be, there’s no single answer. Long sessions are slightly more efficient if your webhost can handle them (if it can’t long sessions will just waste time without getting much work done). Short sessions (less than 20 seconds) can lead to working links being reported as broken because they time out too soon. Use what works for you
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I am using this plugin on a huge site.
started to click on “unlink” as soon as i ran it, and the ajax deleted the post from the list, but the total count stayed the same, and when i refreshed the page they were all back.
was thinking the cue had to be 100% finished before you could “unlink”
2 days later im @ 3000(mostly media file links from pre 1999) broken links and the cue is done ( can you please describ the “session time” setting a lil more in dept. i toggled between 27 and 270.)
tryed to “unlink” again and same thing.
if i manually edit the post them the count goes down.
is the unlink feature still underconstruction or something. this pluggin will same a huge amount of time if the unlink function works.
what would be cool also if the unlink totally deleted the link and name.
/s
February 25th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Broken Link Checker-problem
The code that shows up (see above) is displayed in IE 7 (fully updated), Firefox 2 (latest stable version) and Opera 9.26 (latest stable version).
It is displayed on the Options–>Link Checker page as well as in the Dashboard.
It is displayed in three different themes, incl. the standard WP 2.3.3 (Danish) theme.
I cannot find any errors in the MySQL-database.
Is there anything in the code that may require an English WP 2.3.3?
February 25th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Add them to the exclusion list and don’t worry about it? Eh, I don’t know
February 25th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I changed the timeouts to 25 and 35 respectively. It has taken care of all the wrong broken links except for the two that always showed up, one of which being the one I mentioned earlier.
I may try changing the timeouts again, but am not sure that will help. Do you have any other ideas?