[maemo-community] How can we keep old links alive?

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi,

Dead links has become a fairly big problem. In spite of link schemes 
that include release version numbers, we've had a lot of old links now 
end up as 404s. Some examples:

Pages renamed, breaking old links: 
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3987

Old: 
http://maemo.org/maemo_training_material/maemo4.x/html/maemo_Technology_Overview/index/
New: 
http://maemo.org/maemo_training_material/maemo4.x/html/maemo_Technology_Overview_Chinook/
There are a few examples of this.

Old wiki links still referenced:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4586

In the wiki it was expediency that led us to point all the old wiki 
pages to the front page of the new wiki. The ideal would have been to 
put in place redirections to the pages in the new wiki that replaced them.

I'm not sure why the training material links changed.

What's the best way to put in redirects to make the old links work 
properly again? Henri, is this possible/easy in Midgard? Any chance you 
could give me a blow-by-blow on how to do it for 
http://maemo.org/maemo_training_material/maemo4.x/html/maemo_Technology_Overview/ 
for example?

In the future, we should be careful about allowing the web to keep its 
memory - people link to docs and pages in blog posts, forum threads, 
mailing lists that are archived... when the links end up as 404s or 
pointing somewhere else, the value of the site & web searches goes down.

Anyone have tips on how to maintain the site over time to reduce the 
risk that this problem gets worse?

Thanks for input!

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
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