Dead Links

[Minimal-C]

Hi, I noticed some dead links in some of the build instruction pages. So I did some digging and compiled a list of all dead links using this https://github.com/tcort/markdown-link-check tool.

Full disclosure: I work for Andor Technology but am contributing this issue on my own time.

I have attached the output for running this tool on this repository for *.md files:
output.txt

The output contains mostly false positives for intra-document links but as far as I can see most of the external http failures are valid, so that's what I would draw most focus to.
A general estimate would be that ~966 http/https links are dead.

I understand that there are alot of pages specific to manufacturer websites and user pages so it might be difficult to cleanup all the links.

[marktsuchida]

Thanks for this. I also generated a list when we switched to the GitHub Pages-based site, and if I remember correctly I eliminated all broken internal links. (At the time I used a different tool that scans the generated HTML rather than the Markdown, but I had to disable checks for external links for it to finish within a reasonable time.)

The false-positive internal links probably result from the fact that we generate redirect pages based on the page header entires; a tool scanning the Markdown will not notice this.

As for the external links, I get 448 after filtering and uniquing.
cat output.txt |grep -o '^ \[✖\] http[^ ]* ' |sort -u |less

I don't think it's going to be easy to act on these other than by manually reviewing each, except for the one or two cases where there are a large number of similar links -- but it was useful to confirm this.

Categories that may be actionable:

• some of the http URLs might work if changed to https (and others should be updated to https even if they work with http)
• links to micro-manager.org, valelab.ucsf.edu, and valelab4.ucsf.edu (although some are obsolete and/or lost)