Hi there,
My forum's been going for 12 years. I would like a way to find all the dead links that may be lurking in old posts? Does anyone know an SMF-compatible way to do this?
The worst ones are where people have linked to an image that no longer exists, but there's links to websites that have disappeared too.
Thanks,
-Rob
I don't believe there is any good, automated way to do this.
My search through the mods didn't yield anything useful either.
Lots of 3rd party tools do that:
https://www.deadlinkchecker.com
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk
https://ahrefs.com/broken-link-checker
Most free versions only check the first few thousand URLs they find then ask you to pay. Good for smaller sites.
Google Search Console supposedly has this, but I can't find it... I preferred the old version - Google Webmaster Tools - it was right there under Diagnostics...
Probably would have to build a tool to scan each message post using the database then find links/linked images and check first if the host still exists then second if the file exists.
Xenu Link Sleuth
Free
I have used it to crawl many thousands of pages. You can set the crawl rate.
What are you going to do with the broken links? Try to find the updated url? Delete them?