Discussion Forum

tsamant

Member

From: Chicago

Registered: May 14, 2015

Posts: 52

Cleaning up bigtree_404s

Our bigtree_404s table is getting quite bulky. I am seeing entries in there that don't immediately make sense, and am thinking of cleaning them up. Questions:

1. Does an absolute URL as broken_url have any effect at all? There's a lot of them in there, somehow. Not sure how they got in.

2. Does an external link in redirect_url serve any purpose? Does bigtree redirect to external sites?

3. If redirect_url is empty, would deleting that row break any functionality? (Assuming we are not interested in the number of requests to the broken URL.)

Thanks,
Tushar

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 978

Re: Cleaning up bigtree_404s

If you're seeing absolute URLs in the broken_url column it's likely due to people putting in likes like http://www.whatever.dom/http:/another.url -- they should be stored as just whatever comes after your www_root.

External links in redirect_url are valid -- e.g. redirecting a broken link to an S3 uploaded PDF is a common use case.

You can definitely wipe out anything that doesn't have a redirect_url if you don't care about the statistics of knowing what 404s have been hit the most. Newer versions of BigTree actually have a button to do that clearing for you -- not sure which version that was introduced in!

tsamant

Member

From: Chicago

Registered: May 14, 2015

Posts: 52

Re: Cleaning up bigtree_404s

Thanks! For now, an ad hoc query to blow away empty redirect_urls will do for us. Absolute broken_urls as well.