Link Validator & YouTube

[ablankenbaker2]

Our team is verifying links in a large number of Canvas master sections, and as I have been running the link validator I am finding the same issue in various courses: courses that had a handful of "false positives" previously are now showing 20-40+ broken links or issues. In a vast majority of these circumstances the links are embedded YouTube videos or external links to YouTube. Has there been an update recently to the link validator that may have caused its "alerts" to be different? I have not been able to find anything about the link validator in the Release notes that would suggest this significant of a change.

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hello there,  @ablankenbaker2 ...

That's quite interesting!  I, too, have not seen anything in the Release Notes or the Deploy Notes related to the link validator.  Have you reported this issue to the Canvas Help Desk staff?  If not, I would recommend that you do this...so that they can get a ticket logged and have their engineers investigate if anything needs to be fixed on their end.  You can submit a ticket by following the information in this Guide: How do I get help with Canvas as an instructor?.  Please report back once you have a conversation with them to let us know what they tell you...thanks!

[rmurchshafer]

I'll just add that it also could have been a change implemented by YouTube.  I don't know exactly how the Link Validator works, but it's certainly possible that valid urls could return as invalid if the service linked to doesn't provide the type of response that the Canvas link validator is expecting.  I'm not trying to blame it on YouTube; just saying it could be them too.  As Chris mentioned creating a ticket is the best route to have Canvas support start looking into the issue.  

Rick

[clputnam]

We also have an instructor that has reported this problem. On Oct 9th, she ran the link validator and came up with 300+ errors, mostly YouTube videos.

I did some testing and found that all of the videos that failed were YouTube videos that she added by copying the video's URL and pasting it into a page in Canvas. When YouTube videos were added by using the embed code from YouTube or the YouTube button in the RCE, they didn't fail. Since I didn't find any mention of this problem in the Canvas forums and no mention of an update to the Link Validator in the Release Notes, I told her that maybe it was a change on YouTube's end that caused the problem.

The curious thing we then realized is that it is an intermittent problem. She re-ran the validator on 11/3 and received only 60 errors, but the ran it again on 11/5 and again received 300+ errors.

[icostiner]

Thank you for this post! We're experiencing this as well. We'll log this with Canvas support.
-Imanuela

[clputnam]

I put in a ticket with Canvas and received this response:  We have an open engineering ticket for this behavior,  I am going to add you to this ticket. You will receive updates to this open engineering ticket when the information becomes available. 

So if you're also experiencing this and want to be kept updated, put in a ticket with Canvas.  I'll try to come back and post when I receive notice, but I'll probably forget.

[caroline_foley]

Thanks for posting about this,  @clputnam ! I've been looking for an answer to this and added myself to engineering ticket thanks to you!