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Bug 350535 - Links to old forum posts are broken
Summary: Links to old forum posts are broken
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Community
Classification: Eclipse Foundation
Component: Forums and Newsgroups (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified   Edit
Hardware: All All
: P3 normal (vote)
Target Milestone: ---   Edit
Assignee: Forums and Newsgroups inbox CLA
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
: 368255 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-06-28 05:32 EDT by Rüdiger Herrmann CLA
Modified: 2013-05-10 09:18 EDT (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments
Screenshot (138.47 KB, image/jpeg)
2011-07-22 10:32 EDT, Denis Roy CLA 		no flags Details
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Description Rüdiger Herrmann CLA 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 CLA 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 CLA 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 CLA 2012-01-10 10:57:52 EST 
*** Bug 368255 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 4 Denis Roy CLA 2012-01-10 13:28:41 EST 
I'll see if I can find a way of fixing this intelligently.
Comment 5 Denis Roy CLA 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.