xF2 Add-on Link Checker for XenForo 2.x by AddonsLab 3.5.6

Add-On Information

The add-on gives full control over the links you have in all your posts, allowing you to search for them quickly, check their status, modify them one by one or at once. Support for other content types (resources, profile posts, third-party blog or article add-ons etc.) will be released as separate paid plug-ins. Please check-out the related add-ons section for more information.

The supported BB Code tags are URL, MEDIA and IMG. Supported media types are YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo. Other media types can be supported if requested.

The product comes with the following main features and pages:

1. A new section in Admin Panel, under Tools section, allowing you control the product.
2. Rebuild page to find all links posted on your board currently. A separate rebuild task can be run to check the status of the links.
3. Manage Links page lists all links found so far. It has a quick search and filter controls allowing you to quickly find links by URL.
4. Each link can be edited individually. Edit page gives full information about last status check, allows to force-update the status by checking it one more time, to set the URL and text of the link or to delete it. It also has a link to the content where the URL was used so you can check the post quickly if needed.
5. Deletion of links allows setting a placeholder message that will replace the link. It can be left empty for the simple removal of the link.
6. Advanced batch update tool allows you to change an unlimited number of URLs at once. Caution: use the tool with care as it modifies the database content, and any submitted changes will not be reversible.
7. Batch update page allows to quickly find any link by its status code, the content of the URL or its text, URL domain etc. Replacement options are to replace the URL/text entirely, or to do partial replacement only replacing the parts defined in your search criteria. The tag can also be deleted or the content having the tag in it (post, thread) can be deleted entirely.
8. Regular expressions are supported in both search and replace mode. Subpatterns of matched searched criteria can be used as variables in the replacement.
9. Live preview of all changes, which will be saved to the database.
10. Ability to process only sevaral of tags using the checkboxes in the preview.
11. A link can be shown under each post allowing to force-update the status of all links found in the post. Controllable by a new usergroup permission.
12. Moderation queue support. Invalid links are added to the queue where forum moderators can see the links detected in their forums and modify/delete them. Their actions are logged in Moderator Log. The permission should be enabled on per-usergroup basis.
13. Alert users about their link not being valid. The permission should be set on per-usergroup basis. The alert is automatically removed if the URL is validated later.
14. Links in the posts can have a "valid" or an "invalid" icon next to the link based on their status. The usergroups allowed to see the icons are controlled via XenForo Usergroup Permissions page.
15. The "valid" icon can be hidden for all usergroups at once if you prefer not to have it but to show broken links only.
16. Special support for "429 Too Many Requests" URLs. If a server blocks the requests because they are too often, the validation is scheduled and run with some delay.
17. Batch Update and Dead Link Check can run both in the browser and as a cron job in background. In that case, admins can see the status of the background tasks on that pages.

Here is a video demonstrating the Batch Update tool in Admin Panel (made on XenForo 1.x version but the interface is identical on XenForo 2.x)
We are getting reports from our customers, that several URLs are actually alive but the product does not recognize it and gives an error when trying to save the URL in Admin Panel.
It is important to realize, that checking a URL automatically is not the same as visiting the URL in your browsers. There are many techniques available, that can make a page to work when visiting by the browser, or when Google indexes the site, but block any other bots, including our bot that checks the status of URL.
Feel free to contact us whenever you get any URL that doesn't work for you in our add-on but works via browser, but so far in all cases, we had this resulted from the site/IP being blocked by another site or automated requests being blocked altogether. Please consider adding the URL/Domain to the exclusion list in these cases.

Disclaimer: Please make sure to backup your database before using the tool. It is processing the real content of the database and any changes committed are impossible to revert.

Planned Features

1. Front-end management of broken links by users who posted them.