Cool URIs don't change - what should we do when removing and renaming pages?

Hi,

With the removal of PHP 5 information from the manual (which I approve 
of, by the way) a lot of pages have been, or will soon be, either 
removed or renamed. Unfortunately, this leads to two problems:

* The URLs give a 404 page (and a really ugly 404 at that), even when 
there is a useful page we could direct readers to.
* User notes on the deleted pages are orphaned.

I noticed this because #2 in the list of "pages with the most notes" is 
currently this non-existent page: 
https://www.php.net/manual/en/soapclient.soapclient.php

Until a few months ago, that was the manual page for the SoapClient 
class's constructor, but since PHP 8.0 removed "PHP 4-style" 
constructors, it is now at 
https://www.php.net/manual/en/soapclient.construct.php (which was 
previously a "this is an alias for..." stub).


A simple solution is to have "soft redirects" similar to how aliases are 
documented - stub pages containing only a single language snippet, and 
possibly a "See also" section. I think we would need:

* "This function no longer exists in maintained versions of PHP."
* "This method no longer exists in maintained versions of PHP."
* "This function has been renamed to"
* "This method has been renamed to"
* "This page has been moved to"

This would hopefully be easy for translators to maintain, because they 
could just adjust the snippets centrally, and mark all the stubs as 
fully translated.

There's no way I can see to batch move notes, but maybe moving them one 
by one and deleting some as we go is the way to go there anyway.

What do you think?

Regards,

-- 
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]