Call for a Volunteer!

[newey]

. . .so, everyone take two steps backwards and we'll see who remains out in front.

It has been several years since our links page was last updated and many of the links are no longer operable. It seems that the half-life of online guitar parts retailers is about 3 years.

We need someone who has a bit of free time on their hands, to go through and update links that have moved, delete ones that have disappeared for good, and add those that have joined the fray more lately.

You get nothing in return, except perhaps a warm fuzzy feeling, knowing that you may have helped another guitarist somewhere across this vast globe . . .

If you wish to help, rather than attempt to correct what is there already, I suggest a wholly new thread, transferring the items which are still good and proceeding from there. This avoids the need to edit prior posts, something only admins can do. Plus, we'll have a fresh, discreet list, and my older list will just remain for historical purposes. I'll update, of course, simply to redirect users to the new thread.

All links should be embedded using BBC coding. I can walk any rookies through this process if need be.

If you aren't aware, the existing "Links" page is a subforum within the "Reference Articles" board.

[Deleted]

If i had free time (and i might in 1 month from now) i could write a program which just reads all content from the said page : guitarnuts2.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=links&action=display&thread=4290 parses just the links, and then tries to fetch every each of the links. If the result is anything else than status code 200 (the http OK) then it should print the problematic link. So, do we have any young programmers here who would like to take the task in the mean time? It should not be more than an evening of coding/testing.

btw there are loads of open source/free/public domain tools for such tasks, one that i tried already is :
validator.w3.org/checklink?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fguitarnuts2.proboards.com%2Findex.cgi%3Fboard%3Dlinks%26action%3Ddisplay%26thread%3D4290&hide_type=all&depth=&check=Check

[newey]

Good idea, GD-

The ability to do this sort of thing is beyond my meager computer skills, however. But if the code can be written, sumgai and I can then implement it.

sg, this sounds like a job we would need to test out in the Industrial Guitarnutz Research Kitchen . . .

[sumgai]

It's been done to death. This is one of the programming exercises for beginning PHP and/or Perl programmers. Javascript writers (aka "scriptkiddies") rarely get into this kind of thing, but it's easy enough to translate, should one wish.

However, the limitations espoused by greekdude (return of 200 only) means that any redirects won't be caught, and believe me, there are plenty of them. In fact, the web would just about be dead in the water, if it weren't for updates via redirects. But this is also easily overcome, the only "intermediate" level of difficulty would be to capture those new addresses, and stash them into a file.

Worse, what happens when a now-dead link isn't dead - it takes you to a fake search engine? (Like, one showing an image of the perennial Gateway-girl, in her college guise....) Those will come back as 200 and not as redirects, because they've been officially changed in the master Name Servers. Bad berries, that.

And finally, there are always new links to be added, from many threads around the 'House. Collecting them, testing them, and then officially adding them to the list is, in truth, beyond the bounds of most programmers. (But I didn't say that it is impossible, only that it's almighty difficult. )

Much as we hate to say it, we need a person with time on their hands, who can cull the cruft and share the riches. ;D

HTH





sumgai

[Deleted]

SG,
redirects could be followed, (the link i posted above does that), and definitely permanent redirects should be updated. Now about the supposedly valid (200) resources which simply now contain irrelevant content, some kind of smart parsing could be done to search for tags like guitar, bass, music. Surely the work has got to include some manual human labor in the end, but it would be nice if the large bulk of the job is done programmatically or at least aided by a program. At least in my box, an old-ish FreeBSD machine, i can count at least 8 web/link checkers in the ports collection. So, I think it is pretty likely that the requirements we now face could be very well been faced by other ppl. I will check some of them and get back.

[Deleted]

Here is the link docs.google.com/file/d/0B-nuZtE4Cy0Jcl9qa1hxam5aNHc/edit?usp=sharing to the output of linkcheck 1.41 against "http://guitarnuts2.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=links&action=display&thread=4290".

[Deleted]

sos, proboards.com blocked both my NAT ip, and my proxy IP (both at work). Pls unblock them.

The reason most probably must be the scripts i run against the said thread, to find dead links, moved pages, etc...

Anyway, i managed to create this report, it is in HTML, download it and view it with your browser, it should be an assistance to those attempting to clean up the site :

docs.google.com/file/d/0B-nuZtE4Cy0JS2w0TDN4NGFZWnM/edit?usp=sharing

Unfortunately the proboards.com attack-flood detection defense mechanism kicked in and you can see that in the last lines of the output of the script. The program used this time is LinkChecker 6.6 (better than linkcheck IMO).

[newey]

Pls unblock them.

That's ProBoards, not us. We have no control over that.

[sumgai]

May 29, 2013 5:13:37 GMT -5 newey said:

Pls unblock them.

That's ProBoards, not us. We have no control over that.

I'm not so sure it's ProBoards, either. I "spider" this Forum about 3 times a year (less often when my Ginko Biloba runs out!), and they haven't ever blocked me.

Not to mention, blocking a NAT would be a tad difficult, seeing as how it's behind your company's firewall in the first place. But blocking your company's IP in total, that's easy. The only question now is, who's doing that? I suppose it could be PB, but based on my activites over the last 6 years (as the Admin), I have my doubts.

As to blocking a proxy, that's easy for any server. There are several lists of proxies that are constantly updated in real-time, so Hosting outfits like ProBoards would have no troubles blocking one or more of them, if they should choose to do so. Not sure why they would....

As it turns out, PB hosts many political discussion Forums (read that as: complaints about the current state of government, in one form or another). Blocking proxies would remove a great majority of participants who wish/need to remain anonymous, which would run counter to PB's stated intent of having the most open discussion platform on the entire Web.

Again, not saying that it can't be PB, but I do favor the idea of first looking elsewhere for the blockage. In fact, now that I think on it a bit more.... your own company's outgoing server(s), could be doing that blocking, including your intended proxy target. Just sayin', ya know.

But let's get back to basics....

gd, I have to thank you for your efforts so far. But speaking of blocking.... Wouldn't you know it, but I've got Google Docs blocked, for all the obvious reasons (well, obvious to those who value their privacy....). Would it be possible for you to load that results file to another hosting server? Please?

Thanks. ;D





sumgai

[Deleted]

SG, thanx man,

The guys from my company's IT admin group dont know a thing, also i am part of it, and have access almost anywhere, so i am not the type of guy to have such problems

Now, if you could please see here : support.proboards.com/thread/465076/proboards-blocked-address-valuable-member , other admins have similar issues with their users. If you follow this thread, the case is similar as mine :

IT stuff Admins says:

I looked it up and can confirm that your IP address has been blocked automatically by our systems due to suspicious activity. Can you recall any particular action that you were doing shortly before you noticed you were no longer able to load the forum anymore? Actions such as constantly refreshing a page, or making multiple posts in a very short period of time?

SG, i will give you the two blocked IPs via PM.

I also opened up a thread here : support.proboards.com/thread/465932/proboards-com-blocked-ips

Please drop a line or two, to see if we can resolve this. Currently i logged in from some exotic proxy, dont know if it will be still available after some hours.

About the google hosting issue, pls recommend a good hosting service, its a PITA having to download a freaking HTML page locally to view it such an anachronism.

Problem is, we moved out from our house due to major restoration work, and have no access to the net.

[sumgai]

'dude,

I've been schooled.   Since I last "backed up" this site, a little over 7 months ago, ProBoards has tightened up their rules/policies about such things as what you did, and I used to do.

newey and I are on it, and with you over there in the Support mud-pit. Let's hope for the best.




sumgai

[Deleted]

Good morning!
its all sorted out. Ricky from proboards.com and Newey helped resolve this.

Now, SG do you have in mind any nice free hosting service that could host files? (in order to potentially use it for future needs)

[sumgai]

gd,

For the very near future, I've allowed all Nutz to attach a file to their postings. We normally have this "feature" disabled for all the obvious security reasons. But in this case, and only until I see your attachment, I'll open the gate so that you can post that file directly here on PB's own servers.

Afterwards, I'll close the gate, returning the feature to "not available", but don't worry - your posting and its attachment will remain visible to all. And newey can also enable/disable this, so he may beat me to it.


Thanks. ;D





sumgai

[Deleted]

Here is the first one (text) from linkcheck.

Attachments:

[Deleted]

And here is the output (html) from linkchecker:
as you can see (from the formatting), this one did not end up gracefully.

Attachments: