Prevent broken /support/ links

[jonoaldersonwp]

Many Rosetta sites link to a local /support/ URL (typically in the footer, but also from arbitrary in-content locations), but this page frequently doesn't exist and returns a 404.

E.g., ​https://de-ch.wordpress.org/support/.

This is a pretty terrible user experience, and represents many thousands of broken links throughout the ecosystem.

I propose that the best way to fix this would be to:

• Evaluate whether the request to the page returns a valid response, and if not;
• Execute a 301 redirect to ​https://wordpress.org/support/

Whilst it's not ideal to run this kind of logic at this point in the cascade, it means that we can don't need to manage adding/removing redirects if individual locales create dedicated support pages.

[dd32]

Do you have any examples of where things link to non-existent /support/ pages? We output a lot of localised-links and I wanted to make sure the place you're seeing this link isn't generated automatically incorrectly.

Returning a redirect for 404'ing /support/ seems reasonable to me.

[jonoaldersonwp]

Sure!

Looks like all footers on plugin and theme pages (and /plugins/ and /themes/).

[dd32]

Replying to jonoaldersonwp:

Sure!

Looks like all footers on plugin and theme pages (and /plugins/ and /themes/).

Awesome, yup, that's a bug.
The footer on those pages should be the same as the homepage links.

The problem here is related to the wacky things we do to make the Themes/Plugins/Gutenberg WordPress.org subsites appear as a site in the Rosetta network too, as a result, the function responsible for finding out if de-ch.wordpress.org/support/ exists incorrectly checks for wordpress.org/support existing.

I'll get that fixed up so the links are correct, and get a redirect added anyway for ease of use.

[jonoaldersonwp]

Nice one! :)

[dd32]

Redirects in place:

curl -Is https://de-ch.wordpress.org/support/ | grep ^location
location: https://wordpress.org/support/

Forums redirects have a double redirect, but it's a convenience-only redirect anyway (It was already partially in place)

$ curl -ILs https://de-ch.wordpress.org/forums/ | grep ^location
location: https://de-ch.wordpress.org/support/
location: https://wordpress.org/support/

Footer links corrected:

$ curl -s https://de-ch.wordpress.org/plugins/hello-dolly/ https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/hello-dolly/ | grep -E '<li>.+?/support/'
<li><a href="//wordpress.org/support/" title="Forums, documentation, and other resources">Support</a></li>
<li><a href="//de.wordpress.org/support/" title="Foren, Dokumentationen und andere Ressourcen">Support</a></li>

(de has forum, de-ch does not)