Moodle plugins directory: Link crawler robot

thanks Allison,

I've logged that new feature idea here:

https://github.com/central-queensland-uni/moodle-tool_crawler/issues/23

Does anyone have any privacy/security
issues using this?

hi Mary-Anne,

There should be no privacy issues, as the crawler results are only visible to admin and course managers by default. Also what the robot can see is completely configurable via moodle's capabilities so if anything sensitive is being scraped you can turn it off. Also the robot is only interested in links, it ignores all other content. So the only real privacy issue could be visibility of an external link, but either way all content that is scraped is visible to normal course admins / students anyway.

The main security issue is making sure the robots credentials aren't leaked as then someone could gain access to whatever the robot can see. But this is exactly the same as managing credentials for any other user. The robot user should not have any write permissions to anything at all. If you need to roll the password for the robot this is trivial.

If you, or anyone, identify any privacy or security issues I've missed please ensure they are logged here: https://github.com/central-queensland-uni/moodle-tool_crawler/issues

thanks!

Hi Brendan,

great idea and something I assume many people were waitiing for. Thanks for providing the plugin!

Your solution technically seems to work from the comments here, but I think at least for some it answers the wrong (business) question. In our university, responsibility for maintaining course content such as external links does not lie with the (poor) administrator or cron job running the plugin, but with the trainer of the respective course.

For full business utility, the plugin should sort the dead links by trainer and course and send an email to every trainer with his or her broken links, ordered by course and - if possible - givie the title in the course along with the link target.

I assume that due to the limited capabilities of individual Moodle plugins the email functionality would require an additional plugin. Anyway, the individual email per trainer solves any data privacy issues that might arise from sending the full report to all trainers - even in the very critical Germany.

Please let me know what you think of this idea.

Thank you very much, best regads,

Gero

hi Gero,

This plugin currently provides reports at both the site level and also add filtered reports at the course level so that each course coordinator can see just what affects their courses. See Course > Course administration > Reports > Link crawler robot > (4 new reports).

If they find issues they can fix it on the spot, and then from those course level reports flag a url for recrawling and these get a higher priority than the background en-masse crawling. We could very easily add an email report within this plugin if we wanted to - but for the client that sponsored this plugin that was actually undesirable. Broadly I would like to evolve this plugin to have a similar set of features and reports to the Google webmaster tool aka Search console.

I'd happy to implement some sort of email based reporting, as long as it was opt in and was configurable at the site level. If you want to sponsor this new feature please contact us:

https://www.catalyst-au.net/contact-us

Brendan

will the latest version of this plugin work with moodle 3.3.2?

This plugin requires the basic auth plugin which in turn needs to updated to support the new auth settings api. This isn't much work if you wanted to sponsor it. I have another client interested in this so support should be added in a couple months if you are happy to wait.

Hi,

Any update to Moodle 3.4?

Ricardo

Or 3.5?

Should this be working in 3.3 or 3.4 now? I see you were doing some work on the basic auth so wanted to check in.

Couple of other questions;
1. Is a valid cert required? Your curl command fails due to self-signed cert on my dev machine. can override with -k
2. We are running OKTA/SAML as the default login, again your curl test command returns the OKTA login rather than going to the page. The user is set for basic auth but our default is SAML.

thanks

Hi,

Any updates to M3.6?

Ricardo

It would be great to see if this could be updated for 3.6! I can see that the BB community is advocated to get this added to their plugin set as well: https://community.blackboard.com/thread/7082-broken-link-checker-plugin-please - Ben, BlueSky Online School, MN

Hi,
Any one help me about why Progress ETA is more than 5 year from crawl start date in robot status tab.

Progress 1.53% ETA in Monday, 21 April 2025, 4:55 AM | Reset Progress

Hello,

I've installed the plugin to my Moodle 3.4.5 environment that is using a SQL Server database and i'm getting errors from the plugin. When looking into the code, I found that there is SQL specific to MySQL and is not supported by SQL Server. Also I found that the table mdl_tool_crawler_url has a field called "external" which is a keyword in SQL Server.

Has anyone got this plugin to work with a SQL Server DB? Did you run into the same issues I have?

~Adam

Hello Friends,

Any update to Moodle latest version, please?

Sajjad Hussain