BPLinkBot

BPLinkBot

BPLinkBot is an automated program (bot) that checks outbound web links from Beachapedia to other sites. Comments and questions about the bot and its operations should be directed to Chris Wilson, BPLinkBot's creator.

Misc. Info

From the latest test run of BPLinkBot:

• There are 721 article pages on Beachapedia (including redirects, but not including Talk:, Help:, User:, and User talk: pages)
• There are 2551 unique external URLs linked from Beachapedia
  • Many of the URLs are linked from multiple pages
• If a human could check four links per minute, it would take over 10 and a half hours of clicking to check all the links on the site. At a rate of only one link per minute, it would take more than an entire work week (43 hours) to check the links.
• BPLinkBot completed its first run in about 2.5 hours, averaging 17 links checked per minute, or a link every 3.5 seconds.

Operation

BPLinkBot runs a search for links through the MediaWiki API, compiling the results into a database of links and the pages that contain them. Each link is checked only once to avoid creating a heavy load on other organizations' servers. If a link is found to be bad, the page(s) on which that link is found will be added to the HasBadLinks category. A note will be placed on the Discussion page(s) for the article(s), listing which links on the page produced errors.

Known Bugs in V 1.0 (01/07/2011)

• Does not ignore mailto: links - fixed in version 1.1--Gwsuperfan 21:00, 7 January 2011 (PST)
• Needs to preface "Found Bad Link" message with a newline character - fixed in V. 1.1--Gwsuperfan 22:01, 7 January 2011 (PST)

Known Bugs in V 1.1 (01/08/2011)

None so far- requests for features/changes being accepted.

Run Schedule

I was thinking someplace between every two weeks and once a month. If BPLinkBot should be run more often, or have special runs scheduled (like if there are major changes/additions to Beachapedia), it shouldn't be a problem to do so.

Source Code

The source code for the current version of BPLinkBot is at the source code subpage