CheckPlaces Support

Progress hangs or freezes

When checking pages, if CheckPlaces appears to stop before finishing the check this is not a bug! It is quite normal, it is just slow web servers (possibly bad ones) just failing to respond. Just be patient or cancel the check.

Because CheckPlaces checks all your bookmarks in parallel, these 'hanging' ones will always be the last to finish even though they may have been the first checked. Just click the cancel button and it will list those cancelled bookmarks so you can try them manually. Setting a timeout may prevent it hanging for too long, and using 'Check using GET' may also help, although the check may run slower with these options. Also if the bookmarks really are okay then you can always excluded them from future checks.

Also it is worth noting that the timeout figure applies to every page checked so increasing the concurrency or turning concurrency off will prevent a few stuck pages holding up the rest of the pages. And because CheckPlaces tries with a HEAD before timing out and then with a GET before timing out it may take twice as long as the timeout is set to for each page.

Places database errors

If you see a popup message saying that the Places database may be damaged then check the Firefox console (see above) for more messages about what is wrong.

There are SQLite tools available that allow you to manually edit and possibly correct the database, but generally it is far easier to rebuild your database as follows:

NOTE: You will lose any tags, and keywords you have set up when you do this
If you are using any automated bookmark processing (e.g. Xmarks, SortPlaces or SyncPlaces) then disable these
In the Bookmarks Organizer export your bookmarks in HTML format
Close Firefox
In your profile folder move or rename the places.sqlite file (your Places database)
Move or delete all the files in your bookmarkbackups folder
Start Firefox
Check that you now just have the default bookmarks
In the Organizer import your HTML bookmarks again
Your Unsorted and Toolbar bookmarks will now appear under Bookmarks Menu, so move them back into their correct positions in the Organizer
Try CheckPlaces again
Finally re-enable anything you disabled earlier

Alerts

For most problems CheckPlaces will open an Alert window with an email link to send details of the problem to me for investigation.

If the message is 'PlacesUtils.history is undefined', and this appears each time you try CheckPlaces, then you may have a corrupted Places database. First create a new profile ('firefox -P' from the command line), install CheckPlaces and try again. If this works then you can rebuild your Places database in your original profile as described above.

Firefox console

Another place to look if you are having problems is the Firefox Error Console (this is in the Tools Menu).

To see all the messages that can appear in the console you may also have to change some Firefox settings first: Open a new tab with a URL of 'about:config'. Set the following three options to 'true': javascript.options.showInConsole, javascript.options.strict, and extensions.logging.enabled.

Clear the Console and try CheckPlaces again. If there are any CheckPlaces related error messages on the console then email them to me for investigation.