Filter Settings in "Equalify + UIC Utilities"

[sfrozman]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
On our College's largest website, we are encountering so many identified blockers that it is hard to identify which to address. I noticed that there are quite a few items which are links to other websites.

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like to see a couple of checkboxes such as "ignore all external links" or "ignore links for other sites with matching top level domain" i.e. it.las.uic.edu site could ignore any *.uic.edu external links.

How does this feature satisfy Equalify project goals?
Having the option to ignore these will help site editors will reduce the number of blockers identified and let them focus on things they can fix themselves.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Manipulating the exported CSV before uploading to Equalify could be an option, but might be more difficult to implement and would not help all users.

Additional context
Any matching *.uic.edu external links should be worked on by the people managing those websites. Yet, once the site's own content is in good shape, the ability to still check content you are linking to could be helpful.
Perhaps the default setting would be to ignore any *.uic.edu links on other sites.

[azdak]

Hey @sfrozman, thanks for the feedback and feature request!

I would like to see a couple of checkboxes such as "ignore all external links" or "ignore links for other sites with matching top level domain" i.e. it.las.uic.edu site could ignore any *.uic.edu external links.

I think the difficulty here is that by design, in Equalify audits are simply collections of URLs to scan for errors, so an individual audit has no set "base" URL/domain- it's expected use for an audit to have, say, with 50 URLs from domain1.com and 50 URLs from domain2.com- so I think that would make a simple checkbox to exclude "external" URLs problematic.

That said, I definitely think I could see a clear use case for the ability to optionally exclude blockers from the table by domain/URL - ie an additional "Exclude by URL" filter field, which the user could set to, say, "*.domain2.com" to remove those from the view. Would this solve this issue for you?

In the meantime, I think our suggestion for handling this situation at the moment would be just to set up separate audits per domain, with only the relevant URLs included in each.

[sfrozman]

I was thinking more of changing the content of the CSV exported from the WordPress dashboard. The WordPress site itself would have the context of the site's domain because the code running to create the export would be running on that domain.
However, something else related that I also thought of was if Equalify was compatible with and XML sitemap, a site audit could automatically learn about new content or ignore URLs which no longer exist without the need for a human to export a CSV from one environment and then import it into Equalify. I think it may come from a WordPress plugin, but our RED sites already have the ability for a sitemap being generated and this is also an industry standard. https://www.sitemaps.org/ is about the standard. Here is a link to our IT website and I think it does pages by default and then our custom post types need to be added which I had done for news, event and profile post types. https://it.las.uic.edu/sitemap.xml

[azdak]

Ah I see! We actually have an entirely new WP plugin that works very similar to how you're describing:
https://github.com/EqualifyEverything/equalify-wp-integration

With the new plugin:

• Published posts, pages, and custom post types are all tracked, and the list of URLs Equalify scans is updated from the WP site when the scan is executed- which means added/removed posts/pages/etc are automatically detected
• Optionally, any PDFs in the media library are also tracked
• Each detected URL can be manually enabled or disabled for use in Equalify within the WP plugin
• Setup is one-time for each audit, just copy/pasting a special feed URL from the plugin into Equalify, in the Build Audit step (under the "Remote CSV" option, altho that language is likely to change a little this week)

This plugin is fully functional and can be used now, we're just waiting on the RED team to deploy it.

[sfrozman]

That's good to hear.... sounds like that covers the second half of my comment above. If your team are the ones who put together that plugin, then I still think it could be useful to have an option to do something with external links... ignore them... identify them, so you can disable or something.