URL Status Checker crashes website, host blocks IP

[Dave5E29]

I used a script called Gryperlink to add URLs to all our product SKUs in our catalog. The script finds the SKUs, appends the SKU to the end of a uniformed URL to generate the product's specific URL.

We have very big catalogs with 1500-2500 products in each. The script took a while when testing on 100 products, so I set to run on a catalog overnight. Came back the next morning, and the catalog looked great, but no one inside the building could access our website. Our host blocked our IP because of the many requests InDesign was making to the website. I turned off the "Automatically Update URL status" and that seemed to prevent the issue. This leaves me with some questions:

Has anyone else experienced this with a catalog with lots of links?

How does InDesign check the status of the link? Does it actually load the page, ping it, or just crawl the page like a search engine indexer? I'm guessing it does this from the host computer, and not from a Adobe server?

And finally, a product suggestion: This feature should be turned off by default. It slows down InDesign and on large documents with lots of links can create a DoS attack on the site.

[Eugene Tyson]

You're using an add-on to do something InDesign doesn't usually do. 

For many the hyperlink checking on by default is preferred.

You could ask Gryperlink to add a function that disables this.

Usually you can make it default in InDesign by changing it without any documents open.

But that won't affect any documents created previously.

I'm not sure I can be of further help. 

I don't know how it tests the URL.

[Laubender]

Hi Dave,

if you are using the desktop version of InDesign the function "Auto Update URL Status" can be turned off with ExtendScript scripting that menu item. First you need to make the Hyperlinks panel visible, then you disable the menu action if it is checked:

app.panels.itemByName("$ID/Hyperlinks").visible = true;
var autoUpdateURLStatus = app.menuActions.itemByName("$ID/AutoUpdateURLStatus");
if(autoUpdateURLStatus.checked)
autoUpdateURLStatus.invoke();

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[Dave5E29]

Turning it off isn't the problem. As Eugene said, you can disable it on all documents by turning it off without having a document open. I just think it should be off by default if it has the potential to cause fo Denial of Service attack and get your IP blocked from your host. This seems like a major flaw in InDesign because I could technically use several copies of InDesign and one document to cause a DDoS attack.

It's hard to believe Adobe would design their software this way, which is why I'm looking for more information on how this URL Status Checker actually works. Does it just ping the URL? Does it load it? How much data is transferred when it does this? Has anyone else with a large catalog experienced this issue when checking their links?


I'm trying to pin down it this an Adobe problem, or a problem with our host. I would like to use the feature, actually, to check the URLs, and I'd like to be able to go to our host and show them that this isn't a problem for other eCommerce sites.

[brianp311]

Now that I think about it, I was working on a catalog hyperlink project and I was getting "Permission Denied" errors on the website after running my own batch update to add a bunch of hyperlinks to the SKUs (using my own script, not Gryperlink). 

[Dave5E29]

Could you share that script? Gryperlink is great, but it has some issues with large documents.

[brianp311]

Sorry, cannot. It's for a client, and is fairly customized. 

[Test Screen Name]

You can't check the status of a link with a ping. The ping only checks that the named host answers to pings. You may find the server logs tell you what was being done. Likely to be more productive that looking for internal insight here. I wonder if you had an exponential failure because all links were checked after adding each one.