Good, but Pro doesn’t detect “401 Gone” errors

I’m a very happy user of TA Pro, with a single exception.

The 404 Checker feature, which is in theory extremely useful if you have hundreds of affiliate links to products in fast-changing industries (as I do), literally only detects 404 Not Found errors for target URLs.

The problem with this is that there are several valid HTTP codes that might be used when attempting to reach a URL which is no longer valid. One in particular is the 401 Gone error, which many retailers use to keep pages for discontinued products online. It’s a valid use case for this error code. Unfortunately TA does not detect or report such URLs, instead reporting them as valid. This means I still have to manually run every target URL through an external link checker on a regular basis, which is enormously inefficient when this paid plugin could achieve it automatically with a few lines of code.

I’ve made several feature requests to TA’s developer over the last year and been told it’ll be ‘considered for future releases’, which I interpret to mean it’s too much work. Considering that payment is partly meant to help fund plugin improvements, I thought a 4-star public review might jog things along.

As previously mentioned, all other aspects of the current version of TA Pro are indispensible to me as a blogger managing an extensive affiliate linking operation.