Nonexistent pages

[NickCH-K]

I've been working through and fixing all the broken links. There are, unsurprisingly, a bunch of links to pages that don't exist yet. This makes it annoying to fix the broken links, since you have to remember what pages exist, and also is probably annoying for anyone who clicks on them. What would be the best way to make these links "work?"

Having them go to a page that says 'this page doesn't exist yet' seems ideal. I assume it wouldn't quite work to do that automatically, Wikipedia-style, right? If not I can set something up manually.

[khwilson]

You can do that but probably not out of the box. :-)

You'd need to setup a custom 404.html plus a little custom javascript that looked at the value of the address bar and then ask if you want to create the page.

As for differentiating between broken links and "to be created" links, you could write a script that checked the "Desired Nonexistent Page" and just filtered for those. That's probably a little harder because you'd need to do some weird parse magic, but not undoable....

[aeturrell]

I'm definitely no expert here, but this seems like something that could be done automatically using github actions.

As a possible template, see this example (first response).

I guess we would use desired non-existent (DNE) pages as the reference against which other broken links are compared. If the broken link isn't DNE, either it's truly broken or it should be added to the DNE list.

Not sure how easy passing the broken links on automatically would be, but if that part can be solved then I guess actions and some scripting could do the rest.