Making WordPress.org

Opened 3 years ago

Closed 3 years ago

Last modified 3 years ago

#6029 closed enhancement (fixed)

Remove links to forum posts with host-name as tags

Reported by: clorith's profile Clorith Owned by: dd32's profile dd32
Milestone: Priority: normal
Component: General Keywords:
Cc:

Description

The hosting recommendations page currently attaches a link to forum topics with the hosts name as the tag, and was allegedly even used as a metric to judge them by in the past (going by public statements in various networks).

Over the past year and a half, tags on the forums have slowly been wittled away, and we discovered that some of the host posts had so few uses, they'd been cleaned up without anyone noticing.

Given that the creation of new tags on the forums have been limited for over a year now to only moderators, in an attempt to curate what we have and make them valuable again, this means no new hosts that we haven't heard of would be given this opportunity to "build" their name via tags, and existing hosts that had too few posts also ended up with empty lists as they could not be re-added by the average user.

That gives the background and limitations that are currently in place. With that in mind, and the fact that users do not make good choices when being free to create any tag they want, I'd like to propose we remove these links from the hosting page, and not look to posts such as these to evaluate hosts. This would allow us to safely continue cleaning up tags without fear of accidentally removing data used elsewhere on dotorg.

Change History (2)

#1 @dd32
3 years ago

  • Owner set to dd32
  • Resolution set to fixed
  • Status changed from new to closed

In 11660:

Main Theme: Hosting: Link to searches in the forums for hosting companies, not to the tags which were removed due to non-use.

Fixes #6029.

#2 @dd32
3 years ago

I took the direction of fixing these 404 links by linking to forum searches instead.

This isn't perfect, as mentions of a hosting company in threads isn't always about the host itself, but it's better than a "Sorry, can't find that!".

Removing these links entirely might also be an option that can be considered in the future, if the searches are found not to be relevant to the average user/clicker.

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