mahara-contributors team mailing list archive

[Robert Lyon <robertl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From what I can tell about the moodle tool_crawler plugin it goes and
finds broken links and then alerts the admin/course admin about them.

Am I right in thinking the content it checks is generated by
admins/course admins?

If so this is different to how Mahara works where the content is student
generated.

Having a robot crawl the site to find links would also be difficult in
Mahara as a robot even with site admin rights would still not be able to
'see' everything, eg a site admin not in a group would not be able to
access the group pages.

It might be easier to have a plugin that reads directly from db all the
external links (I'm assuming that broken internal links are safe) and
ignore ones that we can trust within a whitelist, eg links to
google.com, facebook.com, youtube.com etc

Also as students may stop maintaining their account we will need to work
out what to do with potentially unsafe broken links. Who will fix them
up? if they are not fixed up after a certain time do we just not display
them or delete them?

Things to ponder

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1724950

Title:
  Broken link checker

Status in Mahara:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Implement a broken link checker to prevent people going to web sites
  that may be up for grabs and thus exposing them to phishing, serving
  malware, impersonation.

  Thanks to Vineet Kumar for reporting this.

  I think it concerns primarily links in the editor (TinyMCE and plain
  text) as well as any field where you can enter a URL. External media
  should be fairly safe as domains need to be whitelisted in the
  "Allowed iframes". So having a check for them rather than when a block
  is on a page might suffice.

  Before implementing a solution, the following should be discussed:
  - What do current link checkers offer?
  - Unlink automatically or require admin intervention? If admin intervention, will there be a weekly / daily email?
  - If admin intervention, most links will be in user created content though to which admin doesn't have direct access.
  - Should links be crossed out and unlinked automatically? That would also resolve the issue with posting direct links rather than linking text.

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