Cannot edit or fix found links locally

Hi @ravanh,

Sorry to know that you are experiencing an issue.

I attempted to replicate this issue using various links on my end but was unsuccessful. Could you please share some of the broken links where you noticed this issue, so we can try to replicate it on our end?

Additionally, could you confirm if Cloudflare Zero Trust is enabled for this website?

To rule out any potential conflicts with other plugins or themes, could you also perform a complete conflict test?

I hope the following article comes in handy: https://wpmudev.com/docs/getting-started/getting-support/#conflict-test

If the issue is noticed on your live website, please perform the test on a staging website without disturbing the live traffic.

We look forward to hearing back from you and help you resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Kind Regards,
Nebu John

Hi Nebu, thanks for following up ??

I’ve checked for conflicts beforehand using the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin.

There is no such thing as Cloudflare Zero Trust on this website but we do have the Jetpack WAF in standalone mode, so I deactivated the auto_prepend_file while testing.

I activated Troubleshooting mode, then re-activated only Broken Link Checker and verified the affected broken link list again. The same error occurs.

This should rule out any conflicts with theme or other plugins, as far as I can tell…

To investigate further, I needed to find out which link was causing this. This was hard because the error itself prevents the Source column table to show more information and the WP internal search, searching for the link URL did not reveal any results. By a direct MySQL query, I did finally find the URL in the Footer wp_template_part post type…

I should maybe note: the site uses the default Twenty Twenty-Four theme with modified template parts.

Hi @ravanh,

I hope you are doing well today!

Thanks for the update. Please install and switch to one of the not modified WordPress default themes such as Twenty Twenty Three or others then try again.

If the issue is the same then I suggest performing plugin conflict test in standard way without using Health & Troubleshooting plugin as it might not always give the correct results.

Please make sure you have recent backups and perform this operation on your dev/staging site if possible.

To learn more about a conflict test, please see this guide below:
https://wpmudev.com/docs/getting-started/getting-support/#conflict-test

Check out this handy flowchart of the troubleshooting process detailed above.
https://wpmudev.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Support-Process-Support-Process.gif

Please let us know the results.

Kind regards,
Zafer

Resetting the Footer wp_template_part to the theme default did indeed fix the issue. Have you tested a broken link in a block theme template like footer? Apparently, a broken link there can cause the above error…

Hello @ravanh

Glad to know that you were able to narrow down the issue and resetting to the theme default did fix the issue for you.

We test the plugin to the best extent possible, I also see that there are no previous reports of the issue. I have reported it to the plugin developers as a bug since I was able to replicate it on my lab site with a Fresh WP install and the issue appeared by just adding a custom link on the footer template.

Although at the moment I will not be able to share an exact ETA as to when it will be fixed, subscribing to our roadmap https://wpmudev.com/roadmap/ is a good way to be posted about the upcoming versions once they’re released. It is going to be described in changelog found on https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/broken-link-checker/#developers

Since the bug was acknowledged, reported and tasked to be fixed, I am marking this as resolved, but feel free to let us know if you have any additional questions.

Kind Regards,
Saurabh