Request to transfer ownership of Broken Link Checker

@hongpong Please add me to the beta tester list when you get ownership of the plugin and continue the work. If you want, I also have some feature suggestions but will hold off on those until you get to the next phase.

Good luck and thank you picking this one up. Cheers.

Thank you so much @hongpong for taking this up. I had that same issue with it getting stuck. Installed your 1.11.7 version and I’m back in business.

I hope that your changes will get rolled into the “official” version or you can take it over. You’re doing some great work on it. Just want to express my deepest appreciation for your efforts.

I support this. I would like to see this plugin updated.

@hongpong

Thanks for what you’ve done so far! Your forked version is running normally. Of course, as you know, the original could have used a number of improvements.

Will you tell us your longer-term intentions if you do either takeover the current plugin or continue on with your fork?

Specifically, I’d like to know whether you’d be going strictly the donations route or creating features that would be off for those who don’t pay.

I encourage the donations route. If donations prove insufficient, then a “Pro” version could be your plan B.

I think WP plugin developers should become more interactive concerning donation requests. A developer could say that such-and-such feature would take me x hours, and I’d like to get $x per hour to bring it about. There simply are people who cannot afford a dime who shouldn’t be left behind by the WP opensource community.

I’m not rich, but this plugin has lots of installs. If enough admins or site owners would donate even a small amount, it could be really great for the developer(s).

Also, if this WordPress repository system would allow it, it would be nice to have a tab separate from the “Support” tab just for “Feature Requests/Improvements” or the like.

Hi @tomusher, thank you for the positive feedback!

Re longer term intentions: I am not interested in creating a subscription “pro” version. It is not really my style and I don’t have the latitude to cover the kind of support level people might expect. I am interested in, for example, if this plugin could help purge the Interwebs of those horrible AMP URLS and Facebook ?fbclid query strings (replacing them both with good canonical links) https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/issues/7

I would think that donations are reasonable (if you have advice about which donation gateways are best for wordpress plugins I would like to know! can email [email protected] since that is a bit offtopic ) and I agree this is a big enough plugin that it ought to be able to get at least a bit of donations coming in for a reasonably scaled effort.

I am also a big supporter of free software and would like a friendly community around this plugin that can really make it hum. I would also like to make it connect with all things related to indieweb.org which has a lot to do with cleanly published URLs and the health of the overall internet. (there are some indieweb wordpress plugins, maybe they can leverage this one and vice versa)

Generally I would intend to manage feature requests and improvements via Github here : https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/issues and there is already an enhancement label going on several issues there. (A first pull request came in and was rolled last week there, we are off to the races). I also agree that some kind of fundraising system that could crowdfund new features would be a nice add on that could push this plugin even farther.

Re short term intentions, I spent the last few days rebuilding & reinstalling my local system to provide a better dev environment. Next I will take a shot at adding a few phpunit tests (this will also be posted on github and work with Travis CI I hope) then I will submit that to the WordPress plugins group and see if they find it acceptable for taking over managing this plugin.

Per what @ver3 mentions, I wonder if a mechanism for beta testers would be simply alternatively tagged releases on github (like 1.11.8beta3) or if there would need to be an email listserv.

Thank you all for the support on this!

@hongpong ,

Hi,

I see you’re addressing support issues in this forum. Some of the things you are tackling or have at least noted are things I have been saving on my list for when the dust settles as to whether you’ll be taking over this plugin or continuing with your fork.

Anyway, you may not have the original plugin installed and, therefore, might not have been made aware that it was just updated:

Changelog:

1.11.7

Fixed a PHP 7.2 compatibility issue

1.11.6

Fixed link check not saving

I think you’re doing a solid job being informative. WordPress should take that into consideration when deciding anything on their end.

Oh, and the Changelog only goes to 1.11.7 while the latest version is actually 1.11.8.

This might be helpful to see what’s changed: https://plugins.trac.www.ads-software.com/changeset?old_path=%2Fbroken-link-checker&old=2054130&new_path=%2Fbroken-link-checker&new=2054130&sfp_email=&sfph_mail=

Thank you @hongpong for raising this issue, and thank you all for making both code and feedback contributions.

My team and I had taken over the plugin years ago, as a way to contribute to the community. There were never plans to monetize the plugin, which in hindsight is one of the reasons we haven’t been that actively maintaining it lately.

Luckily, both the ManageWP project and the team have grown, which allows us to divert more time into community contributions. This is why we decided:

• Broken Link Checker plugin will remain under our care, with our commitment to keep it up to date.
• You will be keep being able to contribute via GitHub. We will work on properly attributing your commits.
• Broken Link Checker will remain free, forever. There will be no need for donations.

In the coming weeks we will update all the accompanying info like the missing changelog item that @tomusher mentioned, so please bear with us.

Looking forward to BLC’s future!

Nemanja & ManageWP team

@kouteki Thank you for replying here and confirming your continued motivation in maintaining this very useful plugin.

The role of maintainer also means the responsibility of monitoring and responding to requests on the Support forum. Something which has not been happening for a very long time here. I hope this changes and that users with issues no longer need to be posting into an empty void.

Agreed. But it also goes back to the true meaning of community.

The expectation from users should not be that the author is hanging around to solve all their issues, but to in fact come together and help each other. It is a big problem that existed in WordPress community forever, and will not go away. And luckily, there have been multiple occasions where BLC users helped each other out.

So if we can build on that, it would be very beneficial for everyone involved.

Cheers,
Nemanja

@kouteki ,

I think all of this in a very positive development.

Let me say that on the main page for this plugin here on the WP repository and under “Contributors & Developers,” it currently lists only ManageWP. I feel that Dan ( @hongpong ) and perhaps @achmafooma (if he has or is going to contribute to this plugin) should also be listed.

Now I have a minor technical question I believe is rightly included here even though this support ticket has been marked as resolved.

For those of us who installed https://github.com/HongPong/broken-link-checker/archive/master.zip, if we update to Version 1.11.8 as updated by ManageWP, will we run into any database table content losses? I’m concerned about losing what’s been indicated as “false positives,” Dismissed, and any of the “link-checker-settings,” especially the “Exclusion list.”

What if anything will I need to back up in one form or another and manually add back in?

Thanks!

Thank you @hongpong and @kouteki for making this possible!

Also happy again to have purchased that MainWP LifeTime account. This inspires trust. Cheers to you all!

@tomusher good question. I would defer that question to @hongpong since it’s his fork, but at a glance there should not be any DB loss if @hongpong fork is using the exact same DB structure.

I recommend backing up and testing it, just in case.

On the contributions, I agree that contributors should be listed. We temporarily cleaned up the list to avoid any confusion about the ownership. We will rely on GitHub to put together the final list.

@kouteki

Hi Nemanja,

@hongpong hasn’t chimed in here, so here’s what I did in case others can benefit.

1. backed up Dan’s forked version in case he takes it down

I didn’t check whether it’s still available.

2. disabled (but did not delete via WordPress) Dan’s version

3. deleted Dan’s version on the HTTP server via FTP

In case others are wondering why I took that approach: I was concerned that the plugin or WordPress might delete the database tables without saying so. I didn’t want to have to restore the database backup.

4. installed your latest version and enabled it.

Everything was as it was under Dan’s version.

Thanks,

Tom Usher