Delete "General Information" page in FAQ, and improve "Found A Problem?" box

[email protected] ("Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]") Wed, 17 Sep 2025 21:37:01 +0100
Newsgroups php.doc
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi all,

While looking for sources for the history section of the PHP article in 
Wikipedia, I stumbled on this page: 
https://www.php.net/manual/en/faq.general.php

Although it has had a handful of cleanup edits, most of the content is 
out-dated, redundant, or both:

- "What is PHP?" - out of date copy from the Preface of the manual; the 
homepage has a slightly different version, as does the Introduction page

- "What does PHP stand for?" - this is also explained in both the 
Preface and the Introduction; the explanation of recursive acronyms and 
link to Wikipedia page are nice for the curious, maybe they could go in 
the Introduction (there's also a link to the homepage of FOLDOC, where 
there's a short definition of "recursive acronym" written two months 
before PHP 1.0 was released)

- What is the relation between the versions? - dates from when people 
needed to understand how PHP 3 differed from PHP/FI 2.0; there is an 
entire section of the manual about PHP's history, and pages about 
supported and unsupported versions

- Can I run several versions of PHP at the same time? - refers to an 
"INSTALL" file which no longer exists; there's an entire section of the 
manual about different ways to install it

- I think I found a bug! Who should I tell? - talks about the "PHP Bug 
Database", with the link going to the GitHub Issues page because it uses 
a shared entity &url.php.bugs;


I suggest deleting this entire page.


The bug reporting is the only thing I can't see covered better 
elsewhere. On the other hand, every page of the manual has a prominent 
"Report a Bug" link which is actually for reporting a *documentation* bug.

I suggest adding a second line to this section for problems with PHP itself:

Found A Problem?
With this manual: Learn How To Contribute • Submit a Pull Request • 
Report a Bug
With PHP itself: Learn How To Contribute • Submit a Pull Request • 
Report a Bug

The existing "Report a Bug" link also goes directly to the "blank issue" 
page, rather than the reporting templates - it should be e.g.

https://github.com/php/doc-en/issues/new/choose?affected-page=https:%2F%2Fphp.net%2Ffaq.general 


instead of

https://github.com/php/doc-en/issues/new?body=From%20manual%20page:%20https:%2F%2Fphp.net%2Ffaq.general%0A%0A---


Thoughts?

-- 
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]