Yes, it lists all URLs it checks and then the ones that failed. There are configuration options for the timeout on checks and the number of retries to attempt. There is also an exclusion list of links not to check. I had to tweak those some when I first set it up. Its not perfect -- I occasionally have experiences like you had. DOI links in particular like to fail, even though they are in fact good and because they're DOIs, there is a commitment behind them that they not disappear. My guess is that may have to do with the redirects (from doi.org to the actual provider). Occasionally other things fail the test too.

My strategy for bssw-tutorial is to check the links that fail and if they work when I check, I just let it go. If I see something failing several times in a row, I'll consider adding it to the exclusion list. This works fine for the tutorial.

For something on a larger scale, like bssw.io, I can imagine that this might be more of a problem. There are other URL-checker actions out there. I'm using one by Vanessa Sochat which was simple to adopt in part because she provided several good examples. I don't recall anything that described saving a list of failing URLs and comparing from run to run. But that doesn't mean such a thing doesn't exist -- or we could write one, of course.

I will note that in the tutorial, and in general, there are two different use cases:

Checking new/changed files to ensure that links in new content are valid
Periodic checks of the whole site to identify linkrot

They don't necessarily have to use the same tools. It would be nice if they could share a common exclusion list (if necessary).

Uh oh!

Periodic CI to find links that have gone bad #1431

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