The Goal: No Broken Links |
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Given the very nature of the internet, the "No Broken Links" goal is a formidable task. But we try our
hardest to eliminate broken links, because your time is valuable.
As you may know, we currently have thousands of links on the Perl Archive. Each and every link is checked on a
daily basis to ensure its existence. Currently, no other CGI directory can boast this attentiveness.
We unleash "The Hunter" every day between 12:30am and 3:00am. The Hunter is a perl program that has been
engineered to check the existence of links in our archive. The results of this broken link hunt is sent
to our administrator by email.
Between 6 to 10 hours later, our administrator manually
checks for the existence or non-existence of the links and one of the following situations occur:
If the link leads to a "We've Moved" page, the
administrator updates the link database to reflect the
new location.
If the administrator receives a "File Not Found" page, an attempt is made to locate the program's
new location. If unsuccessful, the link is removed from the link database.
If the administrator receives a "Server Not Found" page on a site with its own domain name, we
check InterNIC's database
to see if the domain registration has lapsed. If so, all links to that domain are removed.
If not, the domain is flagged and checked again in another 6 to 10 hours. This is to allow time
to correct server outages, in case the domain's server is experiencing problems.
If after that 6 to 10 hour period, if the server still cannot be found, all links to the domain
are removed from the database.
The thought process here is, Hunter didn't find the server 6 to 10 hours ago, and the
administrator received the error after checking 2 more times within a span of 20 hours. It's
gone. No annoying our visitors.
We know we could probably check links once a week. Maybe even once a month. But we want you to come
back... to know that there is one CGI/PERL resource that you could go to and not be frustrated with broken
links.
We want to become, and remain, your one directory source for cgi/perl programs.
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