Audit of Links on the Exploit Interactive Web Site

In a new regular feature, we provide an audit of links on the Exploit Interactive web site.

The Need For Auditing

Web sites deteriorate in quality. The most visible manifestation is normally a 404 error message, indicating a broken link. However a variety of other errors make occur during the life of a web site. In order to ensure that web sites continue to provide a effective service there is a need for systematic auditing, followed by fixing of errors.

Audit of Exploit Interactive

On 22 December 1999 a report of the Exploit Interactive web site was carried out. Microsoft's SiteServer Analyzer package was used. A summary of the findings is given in Table 1.

Note: The number of links excludes links contained in the report of the web site.

A complete report is available [1].

The most pleasing statistic is the complete lack of broken links. Although the Exploit Interactive editors are responsible for ensuring that there are no broken links internally, it is not easy for a web magazine to formulate policies for the maintenance of links to external resources. One could argue that an article should not be altered once it has been published. An alternative argument is that readers would expect links to be updated, as long as an indication is given of changes. This is an area we will address in more depth in a future issue.

References

1. Site Summary Report for www.exploit-lib.org,
   <URL:http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue4/exploit-audit/report/exploit-lib_summary.html> (Hyperlink no longer available)