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Re: Removing old news from webpages (was: Peter Miller memorial page)

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  Re: Removing old news from webpages (was: Peter Miller memorial page) Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> - 2025-01-03 23:30 +0100
    Re: Removing old news from webpages Mattia Rizzolo <mattia@debian.org> - 2025-07-14 21:10 +0200
      Re: Removing old news from webpages "Jonathan Dowland" <jmtd@debian.org> - 2025-07-17 10:30 +0200
      Re: Removing old news from webpages Martin <debacle@debian.org> - 2025-07-17 11:50 +0200
        Re: Removing old news from webpages Robbi Nespu <robbinespu@gmail.com> - 2025-07-18 00:30 +0200
      Re: Removing old news from webpages Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> - 2025-07-18 12:00 +0200
        Re: Removing old news from webpages "Jonathan Dowland" <jmtd@debian.org> - 2025-07-18 17:30 +0200
          Re: Removing old news from webpages Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> - 2025-07-19 13:30 +0200
            Re: Removing old news from webpages Daniel Lange <DLange@debian.org> - 2025-07-19 14:10 +0200
              Re: Removing old news from webpages Andreas Metzler <ametzler@bebt.de> - 2025-07-19 18:30 +0200
        Re: Removing old news from webpages "Jonathan Dowland" <jmtd@debian.org> - 2025-07-18 18:00 +0200
          Re: Removing old news from webpages "Jonathan Dowland" <jmtd@debian.org> - 2025-07-19 22:10 +0200
      Re: Removing old news from webpages "Jonathan Dowland" <jmtd@debian.org> - 2025-07-24 18:30 +0200

#13663 — Re: Removing old news from webpages (was: Peter Miller memorial page)

On Fri, Jan 03, 2025 at 03:30:57PM +0100, Florian Ernst wrote:
> For reference, the rationale given for the removal of the old news pages
> is stated in a comment to the corresponding commit, cf.
> <https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/-/commit/e92471ba4917f0ec62d22e04229928e5531698f4#note_556263>:
> | The old issues of DWN are still available in their original location on
> | the Debian mailing lists. www.debian.org/News contains two links to the
> | mailing list archive. But on the web page, we want to show only the
> | relevant news to our users, which are the recent ones from the last
> | years, but not the very old ones.
> 
> HTH,
> Flo - who also thinks that removing the old content is wrong but also
> thinks that it is up to debian-www to make a call on that, and who now
> just wanted to clarify the references from commit to thread and vice versa

In that case, it seems like a possible compromise might be to keep the
old files in place to avoid breaking links from elsewhere, but no longer
list them from the index?

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson@debian.org]

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#13872 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

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Hello,

I just discovered this happened, in particular these two commits
https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/-/commit/e92471ba4917f0ec62d22e04229928e5531698f4
https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/-/commit/be8c189a8accd9bd381148c1a1a815c937e9fe2b

That are removing 25ish years of news.

I don't understand why.
One comment from the author states that this to not present outdated
news to users, but I feel this is bu**t.  If that was the reason proper
UI and decent filters in the right place (UX) would be much better.
One example could be to add categories to everything (or just to those
things you'd like to hide, like the security updates that are clearly
filling up the list of news), and have a different index list them.  But
the URI of the original ones should stay there.

It's not good to delete them and keep them deleted for months while
working on the new system, so please revent the commits now and work on
that later.


A LOT of those news where are referred from newspapers, other website,
bloggers, pretty sure I saw something on wikipedia as well, and have
been used as bibliography for documents.

It's one of the few websites I know of that hasn't changed much of the
URL structure since inception, and PRETTY PLEASE that's a feature, don't
stop now.


News articles should stay there forever, please revert the whole change,
or at the very least please provide a good reason for it that to be.



ty,
-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
More about me:  https://mapreri.org                             : :'  :
Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri                  `. `'`
Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia  `-

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#13874 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

I agree completely. I didn't realise this happened at the time, but I 
think it's very bad to delete the history. (a small portion has been 
restored already by some others, but the majority has not). Reading 
things like [1] is heartbreaking.

Thomas has been doing great work to modernize the website and make it as 
useful as possible for people in the present day. I don't doubt his 
rationale for this action, as he states it: to improve the presentation 
of the website to people in the present day.

Deletion was not an end unto itself, but an action intended to solve 
that problem. However it has introduced another problem which, whilst 
obviously not of interest to Thomas, is clearly of great concern for 
others; yourself, me, and at least Joe Brockmeier (these days writing 
for LWN).

I want to stress I disagree with the *action* taken to solve the 
problem, and not the problem itself: reverting this deletion doesn't 
mean we don't support Thomas and others goals of improving the website. 
It just needs to be achieved another way.

I think a solution which preserved the URIs but didn't necessarily host 
the material in that VCS (or even on www.debian.org) would be 
acceptable: so long as hitting the old URI redirected to something which 
served the content. That maintains the property that "cool URIs don't 
change"[1].

Putting in place a solution like this will take time, in the meantime 
the files must be restored.


[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2025/01/msg00000.html
[2] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

-- 
Please do not CC me for listmail.

👱🏻	Jonathan Dowland
✎	 jmtd@debian.org
🔗	https://jmtd.net

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#13875 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

On 2025-07-17 11:23, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> From my understanding, URL structure is a bit less of an issue, search
> engines in particular are good at dealing with it. However, the SEO
> value that we get from that huge history and incoming links is
> extremely valuable and it's something that money can't buy. Also,
> historical data, even though not as often referenced, is extremely
> valuable and I absolutely agree that it should be preserved and that
> the web team reconsiders this!

IMHO, we should definetively maintain all the historical pages
"forever", and also preserve their original URLs. But it might be useful
to have a header on historical pages, like The Guardian has:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2006/oct/13/dumpfirefoxsw

"🕑 This article is more than *18 years old*"

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#13876 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

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It's good to see the project being maintained, but it's sad to hear that
news about Ian, the logo, and parts of Debian's background history were
removed.

Looking at the raw file, it appears to contain a lot of hardcoded elements.
I assume the removal might have been due to outdated styling that doesn't
align with modern design trends.

Fortunately, since it's versioned in Git, the changes can be reverted if
needed.

My vote is to preserve this news content permanently—or at least migrate it
to a new location. It should remain accessible in some form.

Regards,
Robbi Nespu

On Thu, 17 Jul 2025, 5:47 pm Martin, <debacle@debian.org> wrote:

> On 2025-07-17 11:23, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> > From my understanding, URL structure is a bit less of an issue, search
> > engines in particular are good at dealing with it. However, the SEO
> > value that we get from that huge history and incoming links is
> > extremely valuable and it's something that money can't buy. Also,
> > historical data, even though not as often referenced, is extremely
> > valuable and I absolutely agree that it should be preserved and that
> > the web team reconsiders this!
>
> IMHO, we should definetively maintain all the historical pages
> "forever", and also preserve their original URLs. But it might be useful
> to have a header on historical pages, like The Guardian has:
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2006/oct/13/dumpfirefoxsw
>
> "🕑 This article is more than *18 years old*"
>
>

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#13877 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

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Hello,

No-one has spoken up in favour of the decision to remove the old news.
Shall someone just revert the commit removing it?

-- 
Sean Whitton

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#13878 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

Thanks Laura for providing some rationale.

On Fri Jul 18, 2025 at 10:52 AM BST, Laura Arjona Reina wrote:
> The old (and new) news are sent by mail too, so they are available in 
> the mailing list archives.

The availability of the information is one thing, but keeping their 
canonical URIs functional is another. Both are important.

> * the website is too big, and building /News consumes energy and time. 
> In the last times it's better than before, but I support the goal to 
> have a small website that builds quicker and more energy efficient, 
> and also is smaller to be moved to a better engine (now wml+perl, very 
> old code that works well but it's not welcoming for newcomers).

I understand this. I think it's important to solve it, but not at the 
price of losing our historically established URIs. It may take a bit 
longer, but I think we can find better solution. I am prepared to join 
in to help.

> * it contaminates the search results

That depends surely on what people are searching for. It would be worth 
unpacking and classifying this. You might mean (and I don't want to 
speak for you) that people looking for recent news might turn up search 
results for older news. But what about people who might search for older 
news?

> One idea could be to just leave the static html files and don't allow 
> more translations/changes in those pages

I would not have a problem with that,

> but I think that would not help with obtaining better search results.

For Debian-www-internal search, how many ways can users access the 
search end-point? Perhaps the ones from the front page and other 
prominent, present-day-relevant pages should exclude older pages. An 
"advanced search" could let users specify what collections to search 
over.

Obviously fully specifying and implementing this would be work.

Looking at search.debian.org, it's a bit confusing as to what it's 
searching already ("Syntax Help" redirects to 
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMailingLists/SearchHowto but I wasn't 
searching mailing lists)

For external search, I can understand the concern of older news items 
drowning out newer ones, when the search is likely interested in newer 
stuff.

> * The historically relevant news (I know that "relevant" is a 
> subjective term) should maybe be integrated in debian-history packages 
> or linked from there to the corresponding mail in the archives.

Moving historic material to another place is fine, but the URIs need to 
redirect to the new permanent home.

> * we (web team) are a small team and until now most of your Debian web 
> time is devoted to maintenance. Leaving things as it were (revert the 
> commits) it seems it's the easier but it leaves us continue living 
> with our old monster. Making the website smaller will allow us to make 
> it smarter and better organized.

The old news has been deleted for 6 months now already and the longer it 
is inaccessible at the established URIs the worse the damage done. I 
understand that reverting it will -- in the short term -- be a backwards 
step on the goal towards making the website more maintainable, but it 
should be recognised as a temporary situation until the material can be 
moved. And hopefully others as well as myself will contribute time to 
resolve this quickly. I don't know if that's much consolation.

I doubt it's as simple as reverting the commits since there's been 6 
months of work since then. I'm going to start looking at that next.

> * Maybe we can find a good way to make everybody happy, moving the 
> static html files to some other place and setting redirects, but that 
> also needs time and effort and personally my focus these weeks is in 
> other parts of the website (I'll try to rethink the /international/ 
> folder, another monster...).

I'm happy to help on that. But the material must be restored in the 
meantime.

-- 

👱🏻	Jonathan Dowland
✎	 jmtd@debian.org
🔗	https://jmtd.net

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#13880 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

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Hello,

On Fri 18 Jul 2025 at 04:16pm +01, Jonathan Dowland wrote:

> Thanks Laura for providing some rationale.
>
> On Fri Jul 18, 2025 at 10:52 AM BST, Laura Arjona Reina wrote:
>> The old (and new) news are sent by mail too, so they are available in
>> the mailing list archives.
>
> The availability of the information is one thing, but keeping their
> canonical URIs functional is another. Both are important.
>
>> * the website is too big, and building /News consumes energy and time.
>> In the last times it's better than before, but I support the goal to
>> have a small website that builds quicker and more energy efficient,
>> and also is smaller to be moved to a better engine (now wml+perl, very
>> old code that works well but it's not welcoming for newcomers).
>
> I understand this. I think it's important to solve it, but not at the
> price of losing our historically established URIs. It may take a bit
> longer, but I think we can find better solution. I am prepared to join
> in to help.

Keeping the URIs does indeed seem like the most important thing.

If Jonathan is going to help, would the web team consider temporarily
rolling back the change while he comes up with a solution that satisfies
everyone?

-- 
Sean Whitton

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#13881 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

Hi Sean,

Am 19.07.25 um 13:13 schrieb Sean Whitton:
> If Jonathan is going to help, would the web team consider temporarily
> rolling back the change while he comes up with a solution that satisfies
> everyone?

Why not build a solution that the archivists want now and not roll back 
what the web team wants? The old news had been deleted for months and 
very few noticed at all. Now there seems to be some momentum by 
archivists to preserve what they consider history, so let them drive 
that energy towards a solution and not just complain and walk away again.

Kind regards,
Daniel

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#13882 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

On 2025-07-19 Daniel Lange <DLange@debian.org> wrote:
> Am 19.07.25 um 13:13 schrieb Sean Whitton:
> > If Jonathan is going to help, would the web team consider temporarily
> > rolling back the change while he comes up with a solution that satisfies
> > everyone?

> Why not build a solution that the archivists want now and not roll
> back what the web team wants? The old news had been deleted for months
> and very few noticed at all. Now there seems to be some momentum by
> archivists to preserve what they consider history, so let them drive
> that energy towards a solution and not just complain and walk away
> again.

Because it decreases the time of unavailability.

cu Andreas
-- 
`What a good friend you are to him, Dr. Maturin. His other friends are
so grateful to you.'
`I sew his ears on from time to time, sure'

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#13879 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

On Fri Jul 18, 2025 at 10:08 AM BST, Sean Whitton wrote:
> Shall someone just revert the commit removing it?

Here's an MR which reverts the two commits that Mattia identified.

I pledge to work on a solution to host this somewhere in a way that 
satisfies the concerns of the www team, and respectfully request they 
address our concerns by restoring the content in the interim.


-- 

👱🏻	Jonathan Dowland
✎	 jmtd@debian.org
🔗	https://jmtd.net

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#13883 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

On Fri Jul 18, 2025 at 4:49 PM BST, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> Here's an MR which reverts the two commits that Mattia identified.

I somehow forgot the URI:
https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/-/merge_requests/1044

-- 
Please do not CC me for listmail.

👱🏻	Jonathan Dowland
✎	 jmtd@debian.org
🔗	https://jmtd.net

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#13898 — Re: Removing old news from webpages

This conversation ended up sharded across several mailing lists. I'm 
posting updates solely to the following bug, to try and keep things in 
one place:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1109609

-- 
Please do not CC me for listmail.

👱🏻	Jonathan Dowland
✎	 jmtd@debian.org
🔗	https://jmtd.net

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