Some Old v2 docs still on NUnit.org?

[SeanKilleen]

There appears to still exist a non-canonical NUnit V2 reference on the NUnit.org site:

https://nunit.org/nunitv2/

This also tends to have a lot of the top results for various NUnit searches.

Are these docs published along with this project? I can't seem to locate them in order to submit a PR.

[CharliePoole]

The NUnitV2 project was archived in 2015. I temporarily unarchived it to check it out and discovered that we placed a copy of the documentation in a gh-pages branch and published it. At the time, we didn't have the current nunit.org our site was on a host that I provided.

Back when we set up an organization site using GitHub Pages and Jekyll, that NUnitV2 site would have become visible at the nunitv2 subdirectory. That explains the mystery of why we started getting so many results for NUnitV2!

I tried to simply unpublish the site, but it won't let me do that so long as the branch exists. So we need to decide as a group how important this history is. I think it's important but it doesn't need to be easily accessible on the internet. It's fine if you can only see it through GitHub.

I propose to rename the branch to something like old-gh-pages and stop the publishing. I'll take it on so long as everyone agrees that's what should be done.

[SeanKilleen]

Ah-ha -- nice sleuthing, @CharliePoole!

Are you able to set the branch for github pages to None in the repo's settings?

Example below from docs:

I think the route you proposed makes sense as long as the option above isn't available.

[CharliePoole]

Yes, that's the standard way to unpublish. However, it won't work if there's an existing gh-pages branch... an error message appears with a link that takes you .... wait for it.... to the same thing you posted (which doesn't work). thank you github 😃

If it were urgent, I would have just done what I proposed, but since it has been a problem for a few years, let's see what others say about the solution, particularly the project leads.

[ChrisMaddock]

😂 This mission to preserve links just gets more and more complex, right?

I'd like for us to go down to a single version of the v2 docs - the ones now in the docs repo. Ideally I'd like for the links to the /nunitv2/ version to redirect to the new authoritative place as well, but I think we need to be realistic about how much time and effort we're prepared to put into this - I think this version might just need to come down.

[CharliePoole]

I'm not a big fan of the idea that every link has to be preserved, at least not in this case. The files were copied there in order to archive them, not to make them visible. Unless you knew the secret of https://nunit.github.io/nunitv2, you could only get to them through our links on the nunit.org documentation page.

Of course, when we moved nunit.org to GitHub as an organization-level site, https://nunit.org/nunitv2 began to work and was subsequently crawled by google. Is it really a problem for us to break those links though?

[jnm2]

If I remember right, sites that allow links to become broken can get demoted in Google's search results. It's been a while though so this might not be the case.

[SeanKilleen]

I have worked with Google Webmaster Tools before and am able to sort those sorts of things out.

If @rprouse was to grant me access at a domain level (so that I could add TXT records to verify ownership, etc.) I could use the GWT console to sort out the mess of docs and point to docs.nunit.org as canonical. That's entirely up to him though.

[CharliePoole]

This is another of those cases where an issue really represents two issues:

1. How to fix the links
2. What to do with the extra copy of legacy docs.

If it weren't the NUnitV2 project, I'd just create a new issue on the project itself for item 2.

However, the NUnitV2 project is archived and can't have issues. Even if it could, it doesn't have a project team or lead so there's nobody to act on any issue.

Since the old NUnitV2 project was supplanted by the current framework and engine/console projects, I'll take the action I proposed on item 2 when I've heard from both project leads. @ChrisMaddock already replied. @rprouse What do you think?

[CharliePoole]

@rprouse Ping!

I'm not sure (1) if my renaming proposal still makes sense or (2) if I still have access to carry it out, but either way this seems like a pretty stale issue!

[rprouse]

@CharliePoole I think renaming the branch is a good idea.

On a related note, should we be maintaining the v2 documents here, https://docs.nunit.org/?

The styling is all messed up and they look terrible.

[SeanKilleen]

@rprouse thank you for reminding me of this. We'd had this working for a bit but something went wrong along the way. The styles etc have indeed gotten messed up.

I'll prioritize figuring that out. I think it's a relative path issue but I'll confirm.