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Broken Links

Guiding principles

  • Veterans should not encounter broken links.
  • With hundreds of editors, broken links are inevitable.

Strategies to Prevent Broken Links

There are 3 concurrent strategies to prevent broken links.

  1. CMS Pre-save Validation
    • There are several checks performed on links as they are saved that are either cleaned up automatically, or prevent saving the revision.
  2. CMS Post-save Warning: Node Link Report
  3. Front End Link Checking

CMS Post-save Warning

The Node Link Report module tests all links from a page rendered to the anonymous user. It looks for broken links, links to pages that are unpublished and links that may have accessibility issues.

Drawbacks:

  • Cached, so it only updates on node save or 24hr, whichever comes first.
  • Some external domains are blocked by the VA network, so there are links that get falsely reported as broken. They can be exempted in /admin/config/content/node_link_report once they have been confirmed to be legitimate.
  • Some external sites block the useragent that we use to check the link, which results in a falsely reported broken link. These can also be exempted.

Front End Link Checking

The link checking on the front end happens during the content-build in Content-Build repo.

Only internal links are checked. If more than a certain number of broken links are found, the content release is considered a failure and does not occur.

CMS team is to respond and remedy if this happens.

The broken links are reported to both the #vfs-platform-builds and #content-broken-links channels in Slack.

CMS Team support triages reported broken links following a defined process.

Notes:

  • Only schemeless links (lacking https://) are considered internal.

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