458018 - Need an automatic 404 broken link reporter broken link that reports to the web page creator when external link breaks / becomes unavailable.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[glenn n. davis]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008091620 Firefox/3.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008091620 Firefox/3.0.2

When i visit a website i frequently encounter  404 errors and often cannot find a way to notify the creator of the web page that the web page no longer is working.  It occurs that this task could be automated by the browser generating a message to the creator including the web link and updating the count number of people who could not get thru.  It could also be done at the same time as the attempt so as not to report when the users web connection is shut off.  This would have the tendency of cleaning up the whole internet a little bit.

Of course it should be optional to the user to turn this feature on/off  so that privacy issues are avoided.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Go to any web page.
2.click on a kink that doesnt work.
3.result 404 error.
4attempt to contact web master of site.
Actual Results:  
lots of effort is wasted informing web master whose info is burried on page, ... ... or not!!! 

Expected Results:  
broken link trigers reprorter program that informs web master of broken links location in page and url. and adds to a counter. and reports to mt that the link has been reported.  404- error.

This feature does not exist in MS products to the best of my knowelege.  and would show the superority of mozilla firefox!!!

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I don't think we should implement this in Firefox.

There is already a link checker addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/532

but it doesn't report it because that information is useless if the site isn't maintained by the author of that page. Reporting would mean that someone must create a central server and this creates a privacy problem (source and 404 URL must be reported to the server) and the author must use Firefox with this feature enabled.
You can not "report" such a 404 to the [e-mail] because this is in most cases unwanted, generates spam mails and if you want to get it fixed you should write a mail yourself to the webmaster.

I'm going ahead and mark this wontfix because reporting to a central server is a privacy problem, someone must create such a server and in most cases such a site isn't maintained from the author.

Comment 2

[Luke]

Unfortunately Firefox doesn't even log 404's correctly. See Bug 956992.

If/when Firefox correctly logs 404s, there isn't a standard way of notifying the administrators that I know of.