[Course Settings] Allowlist for Link Validator Tool

[sheads]

We use some publicly or institutionally visible Canvas courses to host content so that it can be easily linked and available in our Syllabi and course resources pages.  Unfortunately, links within a course that direct to other Canvas courses (even ones that are institutionally or publicly visible), show up as "Links to other courses in this resource may not be accessible by the students in this course" in the Course Link Validator scan results.

Rather than train our faculty to ignore the errors that we expect them to see in every course (6 total because of our use of blueprints), would it be possible to have an allowlist for the Link Validator tool that would prevent an error from appearing for certain specific links in the allowlist?

[sheads]

Alternatively, having the link validator tool check for whether the links are in publicly or institutionally visible courses would work, and then not passing errors for links that direct to courses that have a wider level of visibility?

Or displaying whitelisted URLs that appear upon scan in an additional area (marked "whitelisted URLs" of the Course Link Validator scan results, that includes the original error/warning message that would have appeared)?

[Stef_retired]

@sheads 

Thanks for sharing this idea. We've moved it forward for broader discussion after editing the terminology for consistency: Canvas uses the terms "allowed" and "allowlist."

You might be interested in adding your comments and ratings to these ideas also associated with the link validator:

Option to skip deleted content in Link Validator

Link Validation

[Eily]

I agree that training faculty to ignore link validator results is not ideal, and I wish there were better solutions.

I posted this comment on another thread, but will do so here as well:

"It is also cumbersome for instructors to have to sift through the HTML editor to find and remove "ghost links" where a link is included in the HTML code but is no longer linked to any visible text. It would be great to be able to remove these automatically from the link validator area, or to have an option to skip them so that instructors can focus on checking links that are actually visible to students."

[mbrandon1]

Glad to see this already on the idealist!  Was thinking of something similar to prevent the LV tool from throwing flags for our student resource course. This would be great so our instructors could also see the confetti feature for when the courses actually come back with no broken links 🙂 

Let's keep the wheels of progress moving, this community is full of wonderful ideas!