Saturday 23 January 2016

What happened to 'recheck bad links' in Integrity / Scrutiny?

Lots of people have missed this feature. 

Unfortunately it was always problematic. Besides bugs and problems with the actual implementation there were some more logical problems too. One example is if a user has 'fixed' an outdated link by removing it from the page. Scrutiny would simply re-test the url it has and continue to report it as a bad link. The fix for this is convoluted. Given that the user may have altered anything on the site since the scan, it's slightly flawed in principle to simply re-check urls that Scrutiny is holding.

There's often a more specific reason for wanting the feature rather than a broad-brush 'recheck all bad links'. For example, the server may have given a few 50x's at a particular point and the user just wants to re-check those. Or the user has fixed a specific link, or links on a specific page.

After working with a user on this, we found a solution that answered the above requirements, while being more sensible in principle. 

From Scrutiny 6.2.1 (and soon in Integrity 6 too) the Links views (by link, by page and by status) allow multiple selection. Context menus then give access to 'Mark as fixed' and 'Re-check selected'.
It is possible to select all urls, or all bad ones. All urls on a particular page or all urls with a specific status. It is still possible to re-check a link which may no longer exist on a page, but if the user selects the url and chooses the re-check option then it's illogical but it's a deliberate action on his part.

6.2.1 is currently in beta, the link below will download it and will give 30 days use.

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