Broken links to Guides

[lori_griffin]

Canvas team, any chance you could put the guides back to their old URLs? By changing the URL you have broken several links in every course in our entire system. 😫

P.S. Your site footer links are broken, too.

Thanks,

Lori

_____

Update: Canvas is aware of the issue and has it listed on their status page. (thank you @James and @mtutin for that update!)
I'll mark this as solved as soon as the issue is fixed.

[amcallister]

Hello Instructure Folks,

When is this expected to be resolved? 

Andrew.

[pblackman1]

Quickly please?  We are in the middle of training.  Thanks!

[scatterjames]

Yes, all archive links are now broken.

[James]

Canvas is aware of the issue and has it listed on their status page.

Investigating - We have found that some redirects from community.canvaslms.com are still not working. If you are using a bookmark in your browser to access the Community you may see a page error. However, you can still navigate and search the site. We are investigating the issue and working to resolve it as quickly as possible.
Aug 7, 08:34 MDT

[mtutin]

So I actually chatted with Canvas support about this earlier today and I was told they are working on redirecting the old links to the new ones and do not yet have an ETA on when they will be fixed. However, I was given a new link to the guides: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Guides/ct-p/guides

I hope this helps! I was also confused when I saw that today.

[scottdennis · Accepted solution]

Hi Lori,

Thank you for coming and providing this feedback.  Based on all the comments and kudos from fellow community members they found it helpful as well.

Yesterday during the community platform migration, we ran into a few unforeseen hurdles.  One of those was that not all community content and links were redirected to their corresponding migrated content items or locations in the new platform.  As of a short while ago we now believe that all official and user created content redirects are working.  Sometimes in the old community guide articles would be redirected to other articles and then archived.  Bookmarks to those older, archived and redirected guide articles may still not be working.  We are working to address that.  In the meantime if a user arrives at a 'Page not found' message in the new community when following an old saved link, they can usually find the topic they are looking for by searching and coming to the new version of that content.

If you have questions about this or anything else related to the migration, please let us know.

[pblackman1]

Hi.  Thanks.

The issue with the Growing with Canvas course having broken links (and they still seem to be) is not easily solved by having users search the guides for similar content.  Many of our faculty users are not that experienced (hence, the training!)  Since this course is a key element to introducing Canvas to new users, I'm hoping for a better fix.  Any thoughts?

-Pat

[lori_griffin]

Hi @scottdennis ,

Thank you for the reply. The link that we use most often, and that is still broken, is this one: https://community.canvaslms.com/community/answers/guides/

which of course pointed to the top level guide page (now located here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas/ct-p/canvas). I believe this is also the default link at the top of the Help menu ("Little lost? Try here first! Search the Canvas Guides"). 

Would it be possible to request that one link to be redirected? It's a big one. 

If you're open to requests, it would be nice to also have the top level Instructor Guide, Student Guide, and Video Guide links redirected as well.

By the way, your "Support" and "Guides" links in the footer of all canvaslms.com pages are broken too (they're pointing to the old location). 

Thanks again for your reply! Hopefully you can get the links - at least the biggies - redirected soon! 🙂 

Lori

[lori_griffin]

@scottdennis Confirmed redirects were working for us Saturday morning. Thank you! 

Have a great week,

Lori

[scottdennis]

Yeah!  Glad to hear, it Lori.  Thanks for letting us know.

Victory!

[judy_harmon]

We are still showing broken links to Canvas Guides.  We use them extensively in our Start Here module that is used consistently across the college because we had understood it was best to direct faculty directly to the Guides knowing that's where the greatest and latest updates would be housed.  We also teach them to use the Link Validator before each semester and yes, it has found all the broken links in the Start Here module template.  It will mean having to faculty change each link individually in every course?  Please advise another fix - thank you.

[A_K_Dekker]

Hi @scottdennis ,

it seems that all the download links to files in the community are also broken, see the last replies on the following topics for examples: Getting-Started-with-Canvas-in-10-Steps-Students & Getting-Started-with-Canvas-in-10-Steps-Faculty & Canvas-Assignment-for-Zoom-Attendance

[scottdennis]

Hello,

Thank you for letting us know about the issue with the attached files not being accessible on migrated documents.  The attached files should remained accessible.  We have reached out to the migration engineering team for follow up.

[maga]

The links to the sections of the Instructor's Guide are still not working, e.g. hxxps://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10460#jive_content_id_Quizzes, hxxps://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10460#jive_content_id_Files or hxxps://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10460#jive_content_id_Pages - will they ever work again or do we need to change them all? We've used them extensively in our training materials ☹️

[scottdennis]

Hi Maga,

The engineers are continuing to work on linking within documents.  Linking to sections may be fixed by I cannot guarantee that at this time.  Also, workload permitting I would recommend eventually updating all redirects to direct links for long term stability.

Thank you.

[kirsten_ryall]

Thanks for the updates on this. We are still finding loads of broken links. Is the suggestion that institutions update all the re-direct links themselves? If so, golly gosh, that is going to be a massive job. At the moment I have a ticket open with Canvas Support and every time I find a broken link, I am letting them know about it? Is that the recommended course of action to get this sorted in the short term? I understand that a user should be able to search the community for updated pages/links, but that assumes that the user knows what they are looking for. I recently sent out a status update to our institution about some of the major features we working on, and that communication had links to quite a few feature user groups. Some of those links are no longer working, and I have not been able to locate the corrected one. This is a problem, given that I was pretty comfortable with searching the community for answers....until now. 

[scottdennis]

Hi Kirsten,

Thankfully overall the reports of broken links are starting to slow.  We have one another batch of about 700 going in tomorrow and we'll continue to process them as we find out about them.  We're working on a better way to track new reports against batches that have already gone in.  The goal is to redirect every direct link to a document that functioned in the old platform.  We're working on how best to handle links to anchors within documents and attached files that didn't all migrate correctly as well.

[James]

@maga,

I spent several hours last night downloading a list of all of the links from the guides in the old community and a list of all of the links from the new community. As part of that, I spent a bunch of time looking at the HTML on each page.

The new community has much cleaner HTML. Jive had a tag for everything. The jive_content_id_Pages URL fragment that you mention is very specific to Jive and will likely not be implemented here, it wouldn't make sense for Khoros to have a bunch of Jive tags floating around.

But the picture was even bleaker for linking to things. Each of those sections in the new guides is marked up with a section header. That's good semantic use of HTML. However, there are no identifying attributes on the on the section. It looks like this:

<section>
  <h4>Pages</h4>
  <ul>...</ul>
</section>

What would need to happen for scrolling to a specific section to work would be to put an id=pages attribute on the h4 element. Just calling it pages could be problematic in some cases as I found that Khoros uses some very simple words for IDs: example, the breadcrumb is id=list. Canvas would need to make sure that their IDs were unique enough to not cause problems as IDs must be unique per the HTML specification. Perhaps id=toc_pages or id=section_pages would be a good name. But it probably won't be jive_content_id_Pages.

Chrome 81+ supports "Scroll to Text Fragment", which allow you to use #:~:text=Pages and it will find "pages" on the page and scroll to it. It's not case sensitive, so it finds pages as well as Pages. Trying that here will take to "How do I organize my ePortfolio pages as an instructor?" because that's the first occurrence of "pages" on the page. It also highlights "pages" in yellow. Browser support is extremely limited. Chromium based browsers like Chrome and the last two versions of Edge support it. Of the major browsers, it leaves out Firefox and Safari completely. About 66% of browsers have support for it.

In order for you to be able to link to a section, two things need to happen.

1. The headings need to have IDs on them.
2. There would need to be a mapping between the old query fragments and the new ids.

I see a lot of people asking about a table of contents. The first item would have to happen before a table of contents could be created.

[scottdennis]

Hey James,

When you refer to a table of contents do you mean a table of contents for a document at the beginning of that document that links to anchors within it or do you mean a table of contents documents with links to multiple separate documents?

[James]

@scottdennis 

People have been asking for the table of contents at the top of the page that had links to the same page. That is, a list of the section titles at the top with links to the sections beneath it.

[scottdennis]

Thanks @James,

That is something we're hearing about quite a bit and are working on restoring.

[scottdennis]

Hi @James 

Do the links we have back in now help you?

[maga]

Yes, THANK you so much 😀

I'm currently in the process of updating our resources!

Thanks again,

Maga

[scottdennis]

Yeah!!  😊

[maga]

Hi James

All I want is just anchors/IDs in section headings so that I can link to the whole section on Assignments for instance, and not to specific pages inside this section. Sorry if I didn't make it clear. Obviously it would be wonderful if the old links to sections were redirected but I'm happy to update them all once there are anchors. Also, I think a TOC of sections at the beginning of the Guide was very useful - now you need to scroll and scroll (or search)... I really hope it will be added at some point 🙏

M

[James]

@maga,

That is what I was explaining how to do. In order for you to link to an entire section, the h4 headings need ids on them. Until those are added, there's no real work-around for the linking to the sections.

[maga]

Many links we've been using are still broken... Also, the "old" Instructor Guide had a TOC (hxxps://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10460) while the new one doesn't - it was very useful! It made it easier to find what you were looking for and made it possible to link to the whole section, e.g. "Quizzes", instead of linking to a specific page... Please bring it back?