Hi Docs team,
I had a chat this morning with Brian Proffitt (cc'ed), community wizard and all-around great guy at Red Hat. One thing we discussed is the apparent lack of release notes beyond F26. I say "apparent" because I know they're produced, and I know how to find them, but if you just search "Fedora release notes", you end up in the old Publican-based site.
I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I'd like to bring it up again: how can we easily direct people from the old docs to the new?
I don't think we want to remove them, because it's good for historical reference to have them around, but it would be nice if we could easily put a banner or something across the top saying "these are historical, click here for the latest docs".
I know Publican generated the whole of the site, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to go shoehorn that in. Another approach would be to run all of the old content through pandoc and rebuild in the new system. That sounds terrible.
To a large degree, this is an SEO problem, not a docs problem, but "solving" it as a docs problem seems a lot easier. What do y'all think?
One thing I'm going to do is add a link to the top of the ChangeSet wiki pages post-release that links to the Release Notes.
On Mon, Mar 02, 2020 14:33:58 -0500, Ben Cotton wrote:
Hi Docs team,
I had a chat this morning with Brian Proffitt (cc'ed), community wizard and all-around great guy at Red Hat. One thing we discussed is the apparent lack of release notes beyond F26. I say "apparent" because I know they're produced, and I know how to find them, but if you just search "Fedora release notes", you end up in the old Publican-based site.
I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I'd like to bring it up again: how can we easily direct people from the old docs to the new?
I don't think we want to remove them, because it's good for historical reference to have them around, but it would be nice if we could easily put a banner or something across the top saying "these are historical, click here for the latest docs".
I know Publican generated the whole of the site, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to go shoehorn that in. Another approach would be to run all of the old content through pandoc and rebuild in the new system. That sounds terrible.
To a large degree, this is an SEO problem, not a docs problem, but "solving" it as a docs problem seems a lot easier. What do y'all think?
One thing I'm going to do is add a link to the top of the ChangeSet wiki pages post-release that links to the Release Notes.
Related ticket: https://pagure.io/fedora-docs/docs-fp-o/issue/118
We didn't quite find a simple way of doing this, but yes, it needs to be done.
Dropping them entirely was suggested, given that they're archived in the internet archive anyway.
On 3/2/20 3:37 PM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
On Mon, Mar 02, 2020 14:33:58 -0500, Ben Cotton wrote:
Hi Docs team,
I had a chat this morning with Brian Proffitt (cc'ed), community wizard and all-around great guy at Red Hat. One thing we discussed is the apparent lack of release notes beyond F26. I say "apparent" because I know they're produced, and I know how to find them, but if you just search "Fedora release notes", you end up in the old Publican-based site.
I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I'd like to bring it up again: how can we easily direct people from the old docs to the new?
I don't think we want to remove them, because it's good for historical reference to have them around, but it would be nice if we could easily put a banner or something across the top saying "these are historical, click here for the latest docs".
I know Publican generated the whole of the site, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to go shoehorn that in. Another approach would be to run all of the old content through pandoc and rebuild in the new system. That sounds terrible.
To a large degree, this is an SEO problem, not a docs problem, but "solving" it as a docs problem seems a lot easier. What do y'all think?
One thing I'm going to do is add a link to the top of the ChangeSet wiki pages post-release that links to the Release Notes.
Related ticket: https://pagure.io/fedora-docs/docs-fp-o/issue/118
We didn't quite find a simple way of doing this, but yes, it needs to be done.
Dropping them entirely was suggested, given that they're archived in the internet archive anyway.
I am in favor of taking old docs offline. It is an SEO problem.
As someone who shares this frustration and has seen this frustration shared by others in user communities on Telegram, Reddit, and downstream communities, I think they provide little practical value in 2020. Ankur brings up a good point that they are available in the Internet Archive.
One thing that would help preserve historical hyperlinks across the Web *and* boost SEO is to create redirect rules from old URLs to the new docs. Search engines pick this up and boost the newer docs up in search rankings faster than it would be just taking them offline.
Resurrecting this
On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 4:25 PM Justin W. Flory jflory7@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/2/20 3:37 PM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
On Mon, Mar 02, 2020 14:33:58 -0500, Ben Cotton wrote:
Hi Docs team,
I had a chat this morning with Brian Proffitt (cc'ed), community wizard and all-around great guy at Red Hat. One thing we discussed is the apparent lack of release notes beyond F26. I say "apparent" because I know they're produced, and I know how to find them, but if you just search "Fedora release notes", you end up in the old Publican-based site.
I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I'd like to bring it up again: how can we easily direct people from the old docs to the new?
I don't think we want to remove them, because it's good for historical reference to have them around, but it would be nice if we could easily put a banner or something across the top saying "these are historical, click here for the latest docs".
I know Publican generated the whole of the site, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to go shoehorn that in. Another approach would be to run all of the old content through pandoc and rebuild in the new system. That sounds terrible.
To a large degree, this is an SEO problem, not a docs problem, but "solving" it as a docs problem seems a lot easier. What do y'all think?
One thing I'm going to do is add a link to the top of the ChangeSet wiki pages post-release that links to the Release Notes.
Related ticket: https://pagure.io/fedora-docs/docs-fp-o/issue/118
We didn't quite find a simple way of doing this, but yes, it needs to be done.
Dropping them entirely was suggested, given that they're archived in the internet archive anyway.
I am in favor of taking old docs offline. It is an SEO problem.
+1
As someone who shares this frustration and has seen this frustration shared by others in user communities on Telegram, Reddit, and downstream communities, I think they provide little practical value in 2020. Ankur brings up a good point that they are available in the Internet Archive.
One thing that would help preserve historical hyperlinks across the Web *and* boost SEO is to create redirect rules from old URLs to the new docs. Search engines pick this up and boost the newer docs up in search rankings faster than it would be just taking them offline.
Redirects here have the same problem as adding a banner. The old docs site is raw html that we don't have the capacity to recreate from source. Therefore adding the banner turns into writing a script/manually editing every single page.
The redirects add a dimension of deciding if you want to try to redirect to a related successor doc or dump people back on the starting page.
regards,
bex
-- Cheers, Justin W. Flory (he/him) justinwflory.com TZ=America/New_York
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On 3/25/20 5:24 PM, Brian (bex) Exelbierd wrote:
The redirects add a dimension of deciding if you want to try to redirect to a related successor doc or dump people back on the starting page.
I wonder if redirecting to Rawhide docs makes sense, similar to how other projects have a "latest" version for the latest stable release.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/rawhide/
I'm not familiar with the relationship between old docs site content and differences between f29/f30/rawhide docs, but without a way to consistently point to the latest stable release of Fedora, Rawhide seems like the best we have as a "latest" docs.
Given each version of Fedora has a prime life of six months and a total life of a year, starting a habit of pointing anything at versioned docs creates this same problem for someone else in another ten years. :)
On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 10:32 PM Justin W. Flory jflory7@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/25/20 5:24 PM, Brian (bex) Exelbierd wrote:
The redirects add a dimension of deciding if you want to try to redirect to a related successor doc or dump people back on the starting page.
I wonder if redirecting to Rawhide docs makes sense, similar to how other projects have a "latest" version for the latest stable release.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/rawhide/I'm not familiar with the relationship between old docs site content and differences between f29/f30/rawhide docs, but without a way to consistently point to the latest stable release of Fedora, Rawhide seems like the best we have as a "latest" docs.
My recollection was that we had a redirect for latest in place ... I can't find it now though.
Adam?
regards,
bex
Given each version of Fedora has a prime life of six months and a total life of a year, starting a habit of pointing anything at versioned docs creates this same problem for someone else in another ten years. :)
-- Cheers, Justin W. Flory (he/him) justinwflory.com TZ=America/New_York
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