Short description

It would be very helpful for the project wikis in our company to have some kind of broken link management feature in MoinMoin, which reports broken links to missing pages and files on network servers. This feature request concentrates on the problems which can occur in company environments, where not everything can be stored inside the wiki but also on the Web and on project network drives.

Broken links?

Broken links are links which don't work anymore. If you click them, you'll come to an empty page. You always get broken links if the target of the link has moved for any of this reasons:

Broken links are annoying and can create a big mess in your wiki. So you should take care about them from time to time and fix them with the help of your wiki system. That's what this feature request is about.

There exist four different kinds of links which could be broken. These links are links to...

BLM - how we abbreviate "broken link management" from now on - should be able to do this tasks for you ...

Environment

The picture above shows a "real life" environment for a company wiki.

accessrights.adraw

Wiki server

Normally the wiki server runs on a dedicated machine. The wiki server runs the wiki framework and has it's own storage where pages and some attachments are located. The pages contain links to every kind of information. Not only to other pages but also to attachments, internet sources and to the projects network drive.

Don't assume that every information should be stored in your wiki. There are other projects which have only weak connections to your project, but maybe you also want to link to them. If the other projects data is stored on a network drive, you have to offer a link to that on your page. The wiki server must not have a direct connection neither to the internet nor to network drives. It only serves the clients - the users - with the wiki pages, which on their own contain links.

With this information we can say about the wiki servers ability to check for broken links on it's own, that ...

... the wiki server can always detect and fix broken links to:

... the wiki server can't always detect and fix broken links to:

cause we can't ensure that the wiki server always has a connection to the internet or a connection or the access rights to all network drives.

User

Users work with the information provided by the wiki server. Users should normally have access rights not only to certain wiki pages but also to the information which is linked from there.

In company environments users normally are working on computers which are separated from the computer, the wiki server runs on.

Users log in into the wiki server through a web browser and can only see pages and follow links to where they have the proper access rights for. They also only can access files on the network drive, if they have the proper access rights. The access rights normally are managed by login information on their computers.

With this information we can say about the users ability to check for broken links on their own, that ...

... the users with the proper access rights can always detect and fix broken links to:

... the web browser the users are working with has also access to information, the wiki page provides links to.

So why not to use the user's environment somehow for broken link management?

Workflow(s)

When should BLM be done?

Thus BLM can take quite a time to process every link on every page you have access to in the wiki, it's no task which should be done in intervals of minutes. Maybe it's better to do it once a day. Maybe started automatically by some kind of CRON job software.

Who is allowed to perform BLM?

Thus a successfully performed broken link management requires that users have full access to all information which should be checked, only users which have ...

should perform BLM. This could be some kind of wiki maintainer team or at least the project leader / project admin.

A user which want's to perform BLM must have read access to all pages and all link destinations where the links go to. If the user won't have access, then wrong broken links could be reported.

Semi automatic method:

Discussion

Some advice:


CategoryFeatureRequest