[issue35435] Discourage external links to old docs.

[Julien Palard]

Julien Palard  added the comment:

Let's not have duplicate issues, so I'm closing this in favor of 
https://github.com/python/python-docs-theme/issues/24.

Thanks Terry for noticing.

--
resolution:  -> duplicate
stage: needs patch -> resolved
status: open -> closed

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[issue35435] Discourage external links to old docs.

[Terry J. Reedy]

Terry J. Reedy  added the comment:

James Lu today posted to python-ideas
'Make Python 2.7’s online docs optionally redirect to  Python 3 online docs'

Andra Roberge: There exists browser extensions that do this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/py3direct/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/py3redirect/codfjigcljdnlklcaopdciclmmdandig?hl=en

Steven D'Aprano pointed to this issue and gave some 3 first and 2 first 
examples.  I discovered that the only first page 3.x link for me for
https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=python+docs+netrc
only points
to https://docs.python.org/3.1/library/netrc.html
with no clicky way to get to the current .../3/..., so we still need links 
added.

Julien, do we still need this issue open, or is this superceded by
https://github.com/python/python-docs-theme/issues/24 ?

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[issue35435] Discourage external links to old docs.

[Julien Palard]

Julien Palard  added the comment:

> Without spending too much time on it, it seems to me there are s number of 
> issues here:
> 1. What URL schemes do we have and want to continue to support?
> 2. What things do we want to show up in search engine results?
> 3. How do we make that happen?
> 4. How do we maintain this going forward?

1. unchanged from today is good: let's not break things.
2. agree too: just the most current 3.x maintenance release
3. By adding links from old releases to new releases, go new releases get 
weight (from a search engine point of view) and should rank better. Also by 
checking if the canonical header is configured properly on all releases.
4. I don't think hiding old pages from search engine is a good idea, it's lying 
to them. I'd prefer the way of linking from old to new, which is both user 
friendly (a) and search engine friendly (b).

a) A nice text like "This is the documentation of an unmaintained version of 
Python, [switch to the latest version]" will not only help people landing from 
this old page from a search engine but also from favorites, links from 
articles, ...
b) Search engine compute the "weight" of a page by adding weights of pages 
linking to it. Our old pages are linked from a lot of articles and various 
sources, they have a huge weight. Linking from those pages to our new pages 
will forward a part of this weight to our new pages, ranking them a bit better. 
Which is I think better than hiding the old pages from them and loosing the 
weight they accumulated (risk: get old blogs articles rank better than new 
official documentation).

About the canonical, I'm having an issue opened indirectly about it 
(https://github.com/python/docsbuild-scripts/issues/51), by rebuilding old 
releases we could upgrade their headers and properly set a canonical link, 
typically from /3.4/ to /3/, like we're currently having from /3.5/ to /3/.

I have an opened issue about handling the /release/ directory from 
docsbuild-scripts instead of it being a manual step in the release process 
(https://github.com/python/docsbuild-scripts/issues/48).

I opened an issue in python-docs-theme about displaying a message pointing from 
old releases to new releases 
https://github.com/python/python-docs-theme/issues/24 mainly not to forgot 
about it.

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[issue35435] Discourage external links to old docs.

[Terry J. Reedy]

Terry J. Reedy  added the comment:

I changed the title to better state the actual issue and goal of action.

The termination solution is rejected, but further revisions to docs and site 
need not be.  Adding the auto updated https://docs.python.org/3/ was a good 
move (and a reason to not casually go to a 4.0 release) but not the end of what 
we could do.

I agree with Ned that easier internal access, such as through 'other...', would 
be nice.

--
nosy: +terry.reedy
stage:  -> needs patch
title: Documentation of 3.3 is available -> Discourage external links to old 
docs.
type:  -> enhancement

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