I know this has been discussed before, but those threads are closed and the results in google aren’t going away. It looks like its partially got some results from both, but old results on the main forum in google and missing results for threads that exist on the archive, I mean it’s been well over a month. I know this is Google’s problem, but maybe they can be nudged to fix it. I’ve seen google update the index for an online shopping website with over 300,000 products in under 15 minutes, many of the products having multiple images and multiple pages of product details text.
Is Google intentionally dragging their heels on re-indexing the archived Manjaro forum? Maybe it would speed up Google’s indexing if the archived forum were exported as an XML sitemap and manually forcefed into google webmaster tools? Maybe that’s already been done and Google is still dragging their feet?
I’m not sure what webserver is running underneath the forum, but if it is Apache, a one line RewriteRule in the new forum subdomain pointing to the relative link in the archived forum subdomain (before handing off to the the 404 page of the new forum) as a permanent 301 redirect and either a rewrite rule or a custom 404 page in the archived forum that sends all 404 traffic to the new forum would make everything automatic.
Considering it has been weeks and Google hasn’t updated their index of the Majaro forums, getting google to update their index seems like a lot more work than a couple redirect rules.
Honestly … I am not sure we want automatic redirects.
The old forum is archived … and the instance is separate.
What happens if there is a post on the new forum with the same thread title?
Would other users be able to access it properly without being redirected to the old (and locked) site?
(and all the other little bells and whistles that could suffer the same issue)
I think the dead links are worse user experience than getting 2 results one old and one new. If there are no redirects, Google is likely to just keep the giving people the broken links. If there are redirects (permanent 301 redirects) then google will change the index to the archive subdomain.
The face that the old forum is a separate instance is the reason it would work. It would be a pair of coordinated simple changes for it to make any sense. I’m not sure if setting the 404 page in the archived forum to point to the new forum’s 404 page would be needed, but it would be helpful to have a link to the new forum on the archived forum’s 404 page right under the “Ooops” message. With something like, “Hey, this is just a closed archive. Are you looking for the new forum?”
If you set the redirect up up as a multiple line rule with rewrite condition lines you can have the server check to see if the target is a valid file/directory and bail out of the redirect if it exists on the new forum; however, the simple approach only works if actual directories or files for threads/posts are generated by the forum software and not just dynamically generate everything from the database on the fly. I don’t know the codebase for Discourse (that’s the one right?) so I can’t guess how easy it would be to bake it into the url handling of it is strictly dynamic from the database.
This is a Discourse forum, right? I will could look through the documentation and (if needed the source on github) and see if I have any more helpful suggestion. But, the general logic I’d imagine is to only redirect to the archive if the result specific URL is not found in the new forum, so anything in the new forum would get priority if there is the same post in both.
Ideally, Google would just get it in gear and update the index, but like I said before, I think they are not getting around to it anytime soon.
That would be cool. I mean it wasn’t impossible for me to figure it out, but it wasn’t all that clear either. Notes on the 404 pages about the archived forum and new forum with links to each other might smooth over some confusion.
I think time will do its thing for google, and for the time being if you get a 404 error on a google link then do as many threads suggested (manually modifying the link, using the ‘one click’ solution for auto redirect, and so on…). Google is already indexing the new archived forum so maybe next month everything will be properly indexed.
Thx for this topic. I am new to Manjaro and I really try to find solutions to my requests and want to avoid making topics to each of them. But this is sooo dissapointing and I wish that I could find the topics by a search within the forum but that doesn´t work, too. Not the best time to dive into Manjaro somehow… -.-
Some of you may know that I am a total Linux noob here, switched just weeks ago but I must tell you honestly that these DEAD LINKS were a great negative factor when I was Googling around the Linux distros and searching for actual “fix commands” and solutions, WIKIs. All this told me that this is an abandoned or messy distro or so. I am not saying that the official and unofficial sources for Debian would be more attractive just by Googling around, because that is 90% obsolate, not working, not compatible or unprofessional (harmful) commands out there just because tens of thousands of people have put them up during decades.
So I would say have just one single source but that is valid and up to date (working on the latest stable on any day). I would remove the old stuff or update it or transfer it just to keep single source, valid and as credible as possible.
I dont think anyone is suggesting to keep multiple sources, multiple forums, or that the dead links should live on.
This forum has only been up for not quite 2 months after the old one crashed.
Not all information is ported yet, so in the meantime it makes sense to keep it accessible at the modified ‘archived.forum…’ domain (obviously this forum is using the normal domain).
As to ‘search’ … We cant control googles search index. Yell at them about it you like
But … I dont know why you are using that anyways … the forum itself has a nifty search in the top right.
And you can even go there straight from ddg, like so: https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=!manjf%20new%20forum
Yes, I have read about that unfortunate digital accident. Seeing this thread I just wanted to share my personal experience with the dead links. Now as I am “already within the Manjaro fan club” so not a total outsider as I was just 2 weeks ago now I can of course understand the happenings and reasons of the dead links but for a total outsider it was really a turn off. I was wondering why the answers are all private (as the dead links suggests) or why are they deleted, why do they hide the answers from us
Honestly, now I already prefer to start my searches here on the WIKI or Forum or on Arch WIKI, but we, Linux noobs in most cases cannot understand most of the “solutions”, or manuals/instruction pages or they seemingly dont work for us (no result in the terminal or errors or missing stuff etc) so we continue Googling… And we tend enter wrong commands one by one copying from sites. And than TIMESHIFT saves us every time
