Remove user profile history links to closed/moved/archived content

[jonoaldersonwp]

User profile pages, like ​https://profiles.wordpress.org/zebulan/, contain an 'Activity' feed. This contains links to posts/comments/replies on forum posts/threads.

When those forum posts/threads are deleted, moved or archived, those links now inadvertently point to a URL which returns a 404 error.

E.g., many links from the example profile above direct the user to ​https://wordpress.org/support/topic/i-can-see-the-big-picture-and-i-am-looking-forward-to-it/, which no longer exists (or is not publicly available).

This is a significant UX and a SEO problem.

To address this, when a forum post is made non-public, we should automatically un-link comment and topic links from Activity feeds when the respective post is made non-public. Alternatively, the Activity feed should check the status of the referenced post, and alter its behaviour accordingly.

I suggest transforming the <a> to an <s> (and removing the href attribute), though we may wish to decorate this with a tooltip/similar for accessibility purposes.

Two additional considerations:

• These links will need to be removed anywhere where this content is exposed; including in feeds. That might limit/affect the preferred solution.
• When posts/threads/pages are moved, rather than deleted/archived/etc, the link should be updated instead of removed.

[dd32]

To address this, when a forum post is made non-public, we should automatically un-link comment and topic links from Activity feeds when the respective post is made non-public.

As of 6 weeks ago, that now happens, but it's not retrospective due to the way Activity data is stored (It's a HTML chunk, not structured data). #2408

When posts/threads/pages are moved, rather than deleted/archived/etc, the link should be updated instead of removed.

Threads being moved between forums/etc don't change the permalink.

[jonoaldersonwp]

As of 6 weeks ago, that now happens.

That's awesome!

Is there anything we can do to batch update existing pages?
I can go through and identify them all individually, if that'd help.

[dd32]

As per https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2408#comment:4:

Removing existing archived topics/replies from the DB is not an easy task

Not "easy", but the script is running (and will be for a few days).

I'm going to close this as fixed for now, just noting that it'll probably take all week before it's finished.

[jonoaldersonwp]

Awesome! <3