Request to transfer ownership of Broken Link Checker

I support this, if a plugin is no longer maintained, the best thing to do would be to transfer it to someone willing to spend time maintaining and supporting it.

This plugin is a real time-saver and I would hate if it suddenly stopped working.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by Stian Lund.

Thank you @pathduck !

I have put together all the patches around on Github I could find via the network analysis, including PHP7 fixes and transaction fixes. Mainly @achmafooma posted these, I have emailed him as well to see what he would like to do.
Please take a look at the issues I wrote up which illustrates good ideas that can be applied to this plugin:
https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/issues

Repo URL:
https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker
The Head of the patched Broken Link Checker github repo can be downloaded here if you want to try it:
https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/archive/master.zip

Note this repo URL is subject to change – if i have to fork it i will change the URL. I already have a “cool name” in mind.

Hi @hongpong – I was responding to your email probably at the same time you were writing this latest comment, so my response should be in your inbox.

I was considering starting my own renamed version (or trying to get ownership of the original). I got my GitHub fork going to integrate others’ contributions and make one fix of my own, and I’m using that forked version on my own sites, but that was as far as I’d gotten with it. Too much other stuff going on ;-).

It sounds like you are motivated to get this going, and you have a great issues list started. I think that’s great, and I’m happy to contribute to your efforts however I can.

This is a good effort. I’m not sure Vladimir Prelovac (https://profiles.www.ads-software.com/freediver) has notifications turned on for himself concerning this support forum.

I emailed him on Feb. 15 but didn’t hear back from him.

I got his email address from his website (https://prelovac.com/vladimir/), which has an email link. I’d put the address, but I don’t want him spammed (especially not from here).

If he doesn’t reply, isn’t there some mechanism to take over an abandoned plugin? I’ve never looked but have seen plugins at least forked without any indication of formal authorization, etc. I’m sure you looked at his code concerning that, as you’ve already added “Add GPL license” to your Issues list.

Thanks so much for including me in the loop.

Hi guys, nice to see this talk over here.

There are many ways to adopt a plugin, but mostly all of them depends on the plugin author, but thanks to GPL you can, as you already did, fork the plugin and upload a new one.

If you already tried to contact the author directly, and ask him to give you commit permissions in the plugin repo with no success, you have other chances. Try to contact the plugin team through the Community Slack. They can give you commit access, but they might request certain things like a new version of the plugin, and so on.

This is an incredible plugin, and I’m pretty sure that you will improve it!

Cheers.

Hey Dan,

You may already know but just in case, Vladimir is the founder of ManageWP.com might be worth contacting them to see if there’s a way to get a message to him.

Cheers
Pete

Thank you so much for updating this. It’s a great plugin that saves all of us so much time with thousands of posts.

Having someone take care of this great plugin would be wonderful!

So, https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/archive/master.zip has been running on one of my sites for a couple of days now and hasn’t quit finding broken links, etc.

The original version would run but would simply stop after finding just a few broken links even though I had it throttled way, way down.

I didn’t change the settings/options, so it’s still just as throttled.

BTW, the site is hosted on a DreamHost VPS and running PHP 7.2.11.

I’m going to let it finish checking every link before I try putting it through its paces.

Very encouraging!

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by TomUsher.

@tomusher, that’s exactly the problem that prompted me to start my fork, and fixing it was pretty much the only thing I had done before @hongpong jumped in to really get this moving. I’m also running my sites on a DreamHost VPS.

It was getting itself stuck in an endless loop when a link was checked with CURL and timing out (vs. throwing a 404 or a redirect). Even when it is throttled, every time it fires back up it starts with the same link since it was never recorded as a timeout and then got itself back in the loop again.

Glad to hear the updated version fixed this for you too!

FYI – https://developer.www.ads-software.com/plugins/wordpress-org/take-over-an-existing-plugin/

We actually do document this stuff for ya ??

Hi all,

I did hear back from ManageWP reasonably quickly, and they recognize the situation and are deciding what to do about it. I’m alright with waiting a bit to see what they say next. They might jump back in, but have not decided yet, as I understand it. @ipstenu if I don’t hear anything from them for another week to ten days, I will proceed on that documented process and submit a patched plugin for the process; thank you for checking in!

@tomusher thrilled to hear the jobs are running correctly for you.

I would think that these commits by JanneAalto improve working thru the transactions:
https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/commit/ce9d09dbd300c314b03809f79a81c425f4ac999b
https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/commit/c71c62ed2f4a4e8d96bb08d6c2a3e81068f1711f
also probably @achmafooma fixing the infinite loopback issue with CURL
https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/commit/fb117066dbd04bf3ff78f4179a4a604aad85ca6d
https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/commit/069c4326f48e3c73e5cdeadc01f384a150e85026

I think all of these have improved stability a lot.

Hello everyone.
This plugin is too good for it to actually disappear.
Currently I use it on WordPress 4.9.9 with PHP 7.2 and it works normally.
Do you think that if I switch to version 5.1 of WordPress it may not work anymore?

It still works fine with 5.1. If you have Amazon affiliate links, it will keep showing them as forbidden ones no matter how many times you click to ignore.

Otherwise, it works fine.

Thanks @gooma2 I have filed your issue here:
https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/issues/27

@rominet You are welcome to try the patched plugin version here and see if it improves stability. It seems the pattern is not that the main plugin is totally broken but it is more likely to suffer timeouts and ‘get stuck’ . the alternative community version, currently:

https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/archive/master.zip

Hi, I am also interested to see this great plugin updated ??

Well done.