Making WordPress.org

Opened 4 years ago

Closed 13 months ago

#5348 closed defect (bug) (fixed)

Redirect legacy mobile subdomain forums into new support forums

Reported by: jonoaldersonwp's profile jonoaldersonwp Owned by: dd32's profile dd32
Milestone: Priority: normal
Component: Support Forums Keywords:
Cc:

Description

The forums at Blacberry, Android, Nokia, iOS and Windows Phone subdomains are at best stale, at worst spam soup, and in either case harmful to our SEO, branding and UX.

I raised a suggestion to retire these last year and received no objections (see https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RQC4LY/p1556027757013800).

In an ideal world we'd attempt to migrate some of the useful content, but this requires more resource than we can reasonably throw at this.

The plan:

  • Create a 'Mobile' support forum, with 'levels'* for 'Android', 'iOS' and 'Other'.
  • Add a notice that the forums are going to close/move, and provide links to the new locations. Prevent the creation of new posts (but allow for responses).
  • After ~30 days, move to read-only in all scenarios, and update the notice to state that the forum is closed (and direct people to the new one)
  • After another ~30 days, redirect all requests to (any path on) the forums to their respective new support URL.
  • Archive/delete all content/filesystem cruft from the old sites.
  • Hand over moderation processes to existing support forum moderation workflows.

*"If this is what is the end result, I'm going to need a heads up, as it will require some code, we do not have support for leveled forums at this time on .org in our bbPress 2.x themes, but we can fix that if there's a need.
@clorith via Slack

Change History (9)

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #mobile by jonoaldersonwp. View the logs.


4 years ago

#2 @Clorith
4 years ago

Since these are A8c properties (all the apps are under them), and all support tools within the apps send users to WordPress.com, it was discussed a fair bit, and the final outcome as I recall was that we wouldn't migrate them within dotorg, if anything they'd be redirected off to .com instead.

#3 @jonoaldersonwp
4 years ago

That's equally fine; as long as they're not sat around polluting *.wordpress.org! :)

#4 follow-up: @maxme
4 years ago

@jonoaldersonwp I like your plan.

In an ideal world we'd attempt to migrate some of the useful content, but this requires more resource than we can reasonably throw at this.

The Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Phone apps are deprecated and abandoned, and the only interesting topics there are 5 years old (or more) and probably not relevant anymore. I think we don't need to migrate the content from these.

Create a 'Mobile' support forum, with 'levels'* for 'Android', 'iOS' and 'Other'.

Having a unique forum for the mobile apps (Android and iOS) is fine. Having (iOS/Android/Other) levels would be great, but we can start without them.

Since these are A8c properties (all the apps are under them), and all support tools within the apps send users to WordPress.com, it was discussed a fair bit, and the final outcome as I recall was that we wouldn't migrate them within dotorg, if anything they'd be redirected off to .com instead.

I think it should stay under wordpress.org, the apps are open source, we regularly post updates on https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/ and there are contributors not working at Automattic.

#5 in reply to: ↑ 4 @Clorith
4 years ago

Replying to maxme:

I think it should stay under wordpress.org, the apps are open source, we regularly post updates on https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/ and there are contributors not working at Automattic.

That's fine, you can still use the make site etc, but moving support away was an active decision made by the mobile team, having it fragmented as it is now doesn't benefit anyone, so moving it all over to WordPress.com makes sense in that regard.

#6 @dd32
4 years ago

  • Component changed from General to Support Forums

#7 @jonoaldersonwp
4 years ago

#4816 was marked as a duplicate.

#8 @dd32
3 years ago

  • Owner set to dd32
  • Status changed from new to accepted

#9 @jonoaldersonwp
13 months ago

  • Resolution set to fixed
  • Status changed from accepted to closed
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