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

On Sun, Apr 18, 2021 at 3:57 PM Rowan Tommins <[email protected]>
wrote:

> 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.
>

It looks like there is a batch move for notes, but it's restricted:
https://github.com/php/web-master/blob/2c51137441cf1c6d5ff6538b1d8e0c0eabf4227d/public/manage/user-notes.php#L895

Nikita