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Validate External Links: Difference between revisions
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While MediaWiki makes it easy to find bad links to pages on our own wiki, marking them in red and providing tools like [[Special:Wantedpages|Wantedpages]], there is no automatic check of external links. MediaWiki compiles external links into a table, but it does not ping the URLs to see if they give any response. The most you are allowed to do is [[Special:LinkSearch|search]] through the links table, and even that isn't implemented well. Over the years, many links on our wiki have gone dead as the Web has changed and various file hosts have gone out of business. | While MediaWiki makes it easy to find bad links to pages on our own wiki, marking them in red and providing tools like [[Special:Wantedpages|Wantedpages]], there is no automatic check of external links. MediaWiki compiles external links into a table, but it does not ping the URLs to see if they give any response. The most you are allowed to do is [[Special:LinkSearch|search]] through the links table, and even that isn't implemented well. Over the years, many links on our wiki have gone dead as the Web has changed and various file hosts have gone out of business. | ||
So here's how ValExtLinks helps with this: | So here's how ValExtLinks helps with this: at 6:20am and 2:20pm (GMT) each day, a script written by [[User:Admin|Alloc]] dumps the wiki's external links table to [http://wiki.oni2.net/w/extlinks.csv this location]. Val, which runs on Iritscen's computer at 3:00pm (GMT) each day, then walks through the table and looks for URLs that return problematic codes such as 404. It also detects other lesser problems with links. Val then makes suggestions for fixing these links. | ||
==How to fix bad links== | ==How to fix bad links== | ||