On Feb 26, 2012, at 7:30 AM, Tim Bannister wrote: > On 26 Feb 2012, at 10:34, Graham Leggett wrote: > >> On 26 Feb 2012, at 9:35 AM, William A. Rowe Jr. wrote: >> >>> Ok folks, it's been a "few years"... over 10, in fact, that 1.3 has >>> been dead. >>> >>> Doesn't it seem overtime to take down 1.3 docs from the site, altogether? >> >> I find that from time to time, v1.3 documentation comes up in Google >> searches, which probably confuses users who don't know what they're looking >> at. > > There are ways to leave it there but persuade crawlers not to index it. Maybe > even serve it with 410 status and some JavaScript to point out that the page > is deprecated. > > I think the first one is worthwhile and the second one is not worth the extra > effort.
We're already using the <link rel="canonical" href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/"/> to tell Google not to index the pages, although that's not (yet) on all of the 1.3 doc pages - Unfortunately that's something of a manual process due to the fact that the 1.3 docs are in HTML, not generated, and that not every page in the 1.3 docs has an exact corollary in the /current/ docs. There's certainly more we can do to purge it from search engines without making it completely unavailable. I'm somewhat torn on whether we want it to go away entirely - I tend to think that what Nick suggests - removing it but making it available as a tarball - satisfies those folks who are still running 1.3 for some reason that they consider legitimate. So, +1 to removing the /docs/1.3/ directory, and also to tarring it up and making it downloadable from a errordocument that loads for /docs/1.3/ requests. A .htaccess file with the content negotiation stuff would also be a friendly thing to include in that, as Nick suggests. Prior to doing that, there are some changes that we need to make the pointers in them to the current docs actually go the right place. Some of the pages reference 2.2 as the current version, and also /current/ still points to 2.2. So, give us a moment to resolve those two issues … -- Rich Bowen rbo...@rcbowen.com :: @rbowen rbo...@apache.org
