Useful by annoyingly inaccurate.

  • timmitra

    (@timmitra)


    4 months, 3 weeks ago

    I’ve been using this plugin on 3 of my main sites for several years. It reports too many false positives when it encounters a crawler violation when checking the URLs. I have NEVER been able to connect to the Cloud version either by manual or automatic connection. I can login to “The Hub” but can’t connect from The Hub or connect from the plugin on my sites.

    It is useful at finding broken links, but lately 90% of the reported links are not broken. The remote websites report “Forbidden” which is NOT broken. They just don’t like the method this crawler is using.

    • This topic was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by timmitra.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support Nithin – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudevsupport11)

    4 months, 3 weeks ago

    Hi @timmitra,

    Sorry to hear about the issues noticed.

    I have NEVER been able to connect to the Cloud version either by manual or automatic connection. I can login to “The Hub” but can’t connect from The Hub or connect from the plugin on my sites.

    Could you let us know the exact issue you encountered when trying to connect? Did you receive any error messages?

    It is useful at finding broken links, but lately 90% of the reported links are not broken. The remote websites report “Forbidden” which is NOT broken. They just don’t like the method this crawler is using.

    This can occur for several reasons; however, it primarily happens when such sites’ firewalls block requests during the plugin’s crawl, and the error indicates that the page cannot be accessed due to that. Our team is always working to reduce such 403 false positives.

    It appears there isn’t a support topic you have raised with us regarding the issues noticed. Possible to open a new thread by following up with the above queries so that we can assist you further?

    URL to open a new support thread:
    https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/broken-link-checker/#new-topic-0

    In the support thread, please provide additional details about the links that were having issues, and include more information by clicking the “details” link. This would be helpful.

    Thanks for your feedback, looking forward to get this sorted via the support thread.

    Regards,

    Nithin

    Manu

    (@manuxx34)

    2 weeks, 1 day ago

    The thing is, you guys shouldn’t mark 403 Forbidden URLs as broken links because they are not actually broken, they are just forbidden.

    This happens a lot with .gov websites and official sources, and it’s incredibly annoying because even if you dismiss them, they still keep showing up as broken links.

    Plugin Support Nebu John – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudevsupport14)

    1 week, 6 days ago

    Hi @manuxx34,

    You are technically right, a 403 URL is not exactly a broken link. But from a user experience perspective, it can feel like a broken link. The user expects to see content, but it is likely to be blocked for them due to the firewall and feels broken. It can impact SEO performance as well. Hence, the Broken Link Checker is reporting the URL as broken.

    However, I understand what you mentioned, and I have brought this to the notice of the development team.

    Best Regards,
    Nebu John

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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