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
✎	 [email protected]
🔗	https://jmtd.net