286383 - Bookmark sanitizing assistant

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Arnaud Legout]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223 Firefox/1.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223 Firefox/1.0.1

One of the main problem with bookmarks is to maintain them up-to-date.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8648 proposes an interactive way to
update bookmarks when accessing a page.

A sanitize console that tests all your bookmarks to see:
(1)if the site has moved
(2)if the site is no more available
would be a nice feature. 

I see the following funtionality.
In the bookmark manager you have a button called sanitize (this terminology is
probably not the best one). When you press the button, all your bookmarks are
tested.
A progress dialog show you the amount of bookmarks tested.
Parallel testing startegy is required to avoid the effect of the timeout on a
site not found event.
When the test is over, bookmarks with state (1) and (2) are displayed in a pane,
sorted state (1) before and state (2) after. 
For all the bookmarks in state (1) you have a counter associated that shows the
number of successive tries that failed to access the site. You also have a day
counter that shows the number of days elapsed since the first failed try among
the last successive failed try chunk.

For all the bookmarks in state (2) you have the old and the new URLs displayed.
Probably, displaying the old and new site title would be a good idea too.
Indeed, when your site moves, it is likely that the title will remain the same.
But, when you are redirected to a generic provider web page (that gets back a
domain name) the title will change.

Then you can individually update the bookmarks, by right clicking on them, our
you can define preferences to perform an automatic sanitize. Preferences can be:
-Automatically update bookmarks in state (1):
  *always
  *with more that n failed try
  *that failed for more than n days
-Automatically update bookmarks in state (2) 
  *always
  *when the site title remained the same
  *when the domain of the site did not changed

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Arnaud Legout]

Also to add to the sanitize console (and related to bug
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261744)

All duplicate bookmarks (based on the URL) are displayed.
An alternate color scheme should allow to easily see clusters
of bookmarks that point to the same URL.
Each bookmark is displayed with its bookmark folder path. A check box enable to
keep (checked) or delete (uncheck) the bookmarks. By default only one bookmark 
per cluster (i.e. bookmarks with the same URL) is checked.

The option of a radio button per cluster is not satifactory as we can imagine
scenarios where we want duplicate bookmarks. 

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 3

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

assume you have 1000+ bookmarks and a few links don't work...
You can have dinner and check in later for it to crawl through.

assume a server or part of the net is down when you do this, you'll loose loads
of valid bookmarks because of this.

this will only add UI which Joe User will never look at

->WONT

wait till 2.0 and make an extension for it

Comment 4

[Arnaud Legout]

There are several ways to prevent such problems:
-provide to the end user the list of failed URLs and let him validate the removal. 
-make a ping to the server and mark in the report whether the server answered or not

Also, it is clear the with 1000 URLs the process will be long. But, it is even longer to search something in bookmarks that are not uptodate. It is possible to do it in backgroud. You don't have to load the whole page to test it. 
I reopen it in case there is interest in implementing such a feature for 2.0 as the main focus of this release is on bookmarks and history improvements.

Comment 5

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change

Comment 6

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

This is best left for an extension, but I don't really see the point, since with domain parking, you're likely to just get a lot of false positives to sift through.