Broken / orphaned links report

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

 

  Idea will be open for vote Wed. October 7, 2015 - Wed. January 6, 2015  Learn more about voting...

 

With our growing development and dependence on Canvas we are increasingly having an issue with broken or orphaned pages / files in our courses.

 

This is happening more as course are copied from one semester or academic year to another and material in the form of pages or files are updated, removed from files store in the course etc.

 

I would therefore like to have some form of report interface that would allow Teachers on a course to find broken links, orphaned files etc

 

 

  Comments from Instructure

 

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2015-12-19)

12 Comments
Chris_Hofer
Community Coach
Community Coach

Hi  @r_v_jones ​...

In searching the Canvas Community, I found a few links you might be interested in:

Course Analysis Tool

Automatic Broken Link Checker?

Hope this helps!

jordan
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Chris has provided some great suggestions here  @r_v_jones ​ Your feature idea will go up for voting tomorrow, Oct. 7th. Hopefully the solutions that Chris has provided will be sufficient as your idea goes through the idea development process.

r_v_jones
Community Contributor

Thanks Deactivated user​and  @Chris_Hofer I've had a look at these.

The idea is something that internal to Canvas that Teching staff could run, similar to Chromes Check my links or dreamweavers link checker.

Will see how many votes it gets, thanks again

Rob

biray
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

This idea is now open for voting.

r_v_jones
Community Contributor

Thanks  @biray ​

RobDitto
Community Champion

I love this idea of an information source focused on finding broken links to "orphaned" files. Here's an idea currently open for voting which focuses on locating information about linked files:

Jeff_F
Community Champion

On a related note, here I share a few tools we have found useful when testing external links:

To minimize the impact of broken links we've been contemplating use of simple HTML redirect files that point to a URL in a content repository.  Then if a link goes bad all we need to do is update the single link in the repository and then it is repaired everywhere in an instant.  The initial setup is daunting but once in place it would be a powerful asset.  ROI is debatable however.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team
  This idea has been developed and is On Canvas Beta How do I access the Canvas beta environment?

For more information, please read through the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2015-11-30)

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team
  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2015-12-12)

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

ROI.png

Thank you to  @r_v_jones  for submitting this idea, as well as,  @Chris_Hofer ,  @RobDitto , and  @Jeff_F  for your contributions. Your investment in this idea helped refine a feature which is now part of the Canvas! Smiley Happy