Hi there. This page http://www.dropzone.com/safety/Gear_and_Equipment/index.shtml has an article titled "do skydivers care about safety?" by Bill Booth. The link is broken, it shouldn't contain the question mark, it leads to http://www.dropzone.com/safety/Gear_and_Equipment/Do_skydivers_care_about_safety?_19.html However, the correct link is http://www.dropzone.com/safety/Gear_and_Equipment/Do_skydivers_care_about_safety_19.html
Also weird is that however link is broken, the site doesn't report an error but just sends to the list of articles again, which is definitely a bug.
Concealing errors is a great evil in software engineering, you have to indicate that the link is dead, afterwards you can redirect wherever you want, but the user won't helplessly try to find the information he came for on a page that seems legit. It is already an error when a wrong link is followed, but the site simply fools the user into believing that everything is ok.
(This post was edited by unkulunkulu on Nov 21, 2012, 8:49 AM)
Ok, actually this website is very interesting :D For example, this link leads to the correct page with the article http://www.dropzone.com/safety/Gear_and_Equipment/Do_skydivers_care_about_safetyaoeuaoeaoeuoe_19.html
And it actually shows errors for some other kinds of broken links, so it tries something clever at least :D
Meso
Administrator
Nov 21, 2012, 10:17 PM
Post #5 of 10
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Re: [unkulunkulu] A broken link report
[In reply to]
Thanks for the heads up, the reason behind the error is that we recently changed our URL structures and with the change, it ended up causing 'special characters' to break the link if they were included in the article title, we went through a process of removing the special characters from the titles, but we evidently missed one. I've gone ahead and changed it, so that the link should now be correct.
