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Bug 350535

Summary:

Links to old forum posts are broken

Product:

Community

Reporter:

Rüdiger Herrmann <ruediger.herrmann>

Component:

Forums and Newsgroups

Assignee:

Forums and Newsgroups inbox <forums-inbox>

Status:

RESOLVED WONTFIX

QA Contact:

Severity:

normal

Priority:

CC:

ruediger.herrmann, stepper, webmaster

Version:

unspecified

Target Milestone:

---

Hardware:

All

OS:

All

Whiteboard:

Attachments:

Description	Flags
Screenshot	none

Description Rüdiger Herrmann

2011-06-28 05:32:41 EDT

It seems that links to older (i.e. two years and more) forum/newsgroup posts are broken.

For example:
Google for 'pshelf rap'. Position 4 to 6 lists links to newsgrpoup posts (titled 'Anyone Ported the Nebula-PShelf...'). However, following these links won't show the indicated content. Instead one is led to the forum page of RAP.
Googles cache shows the right content. The banner says that the snapshot was taken on 30 April 2011. Might this be related to bug 348449?

Comment 1 Denis Roy

2011-07-22 10:32:49 EDT

Created attachment 200194 [details]
Screenshot

The links that are broken are the old newsgroup archives.  Those HTML archives existed back in the days when we only had an nntp server.  Since the newsgroups are now equally accessible via the Forums, we've disabled the old HTML archives.

The reasons for doing this are numerous:
- users who hit the HTML archive have no easy way of 'responding' since it is a static page
- with over 650,000 articles, having search engines index everything twice (once in the Forum, and again in the HTML archive) is redundant and a waste of resources

Although users are redirected to a generic project Forum page, search engines are sent a 404 Not Found error for those links, which causes them to (eventually) be delisted.  With over half a million articles, this takes time.

As you can see in the attachment, most, if not all, the Forum content should be indexed, so the top results should be useful to the user.

Comment 2 Rüdiger Herrmann

2011-07-27 06:40:37 EDT

Thanks for explaining.

I find redirecting to a generic forum page irritating. The Google search result already shows parts of the page in its preview. If - as it is now - following the link leads to an entirely different page with no apparent explanation, users get the impresssion that the Forum is broken.

Would it make sense to put an explanation on generic forum page in that case?

Comment 3 Eric Rizzo

2012-01-10 10:57:52 EST

*** Bug 368255 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4 Denis Roy

2012-01-10 13:28:41 EST

I'll see if I can find a way of fixing this intelligently.

Comment 5 Denis Roy

2013-05-10 09:18:09 EDT

At this time, all our forum content is well indexed with Google and there shouldn't be any older stale archives left.