[RESOLVED] Please don’t break existing discuss.rust-lang.org URLs

[SimonSapin]

Continuing the discussion from The address of this site is now internals.rust-lang.org:

The address of this site is now internals.rust-lang.org

discuss.rust-lang.org is up now as well.

Lots of links out there point to this instance using the old discuss.rust-lang.org name. All of these are now broken. This is really bad.

@brson, I think we should try much harder than this to keep these links working. The two options are basically:

• If we really want discuss.rust-lang.org to be the name of the new forum, we need to set up HTTP 301 redirects to internals.rust-lang.org for the specific paths of all topics that exist so far. This is a large amount, and so it may not be practical.
• Or pick a new name for the new forum. All of http://discuss.rust-lang.org/* would be HTTP 301 redirects to http://internals.rust-lang.org/*, or the internal forum could move back to discuss.rust-lang.org. I think breaking so many links is worse than not having the ideal URL for the new forum.

[iopq]

Cool URIs don’t change (1998)

[phaylon]

I don’t know how the forums are installed, but might it be possible to simply intercept 404’s and 301 the user over to the new forum if the URL exists there?

[stebalien]

Then the URIs would break at some later point in time (when a post with the same ID is created)…

[gkoz]

If the ids there started from e.g. 1500 instead of 1, this should not be a problem.

[brson]

Does anybody want to suggest an alternate name for the new forum?

[brson]

Here are some from Niko

14:18 <@nmatsakis> talk.rust-lang.org 14:18 <@nmatsakis> discussion.rust-lang.org 14:18 <@nmatsakis> 14:18 <@nmatsakis> chat.rust-lang.org 14:18 <@nmatsakis> cafe.rust-lang.org

talk.rust-lang.org sounds ok to me.

[phaylon]

talk seems quite nice to me too. My first ideas would’ve been users.

[rkjnsn]

I like “users.rust-lang.org”.

[Toby_S]

Given the new talk forum, will this one be left as internals, or move back to discuss?

Personally I think internals is a much better name for the goals of this particular forum, whereas discuss is very general, so I think redirecting discuss to here is the best idea.

[brson]

@Toby_S we’ll keep the name internals. I agree it’s a better fit.

[lambda]

As I suggested on Reddit:

Wouldn’t it be possible to just pick another name for the user facing discussion, like “discussion”, “forum”, or “talk” (to throw out a few possible bikeshed colors) in order to leave the “discuss” redirect around and not lose a year or so worth of history?

So, I’m all in favor, and discussion.rust-lang.org, forum.rust-lang.org, and talk.rust-lang.org all sound reasonable. Seems like talk is turning out to be the most natural, that several people have suggested or agreed with.

And yeah, keep the name internals for this instance, just have a redirect in place so that the links don’t break.

[nhowell]

If discuss.rust-lang.org must be changed, then I’d very much prefer forum (or secondly discussion).

Another point is that forum is practically the de facto standard on the internet. Perhaps we shouldn’t get too clever with the naming.

I think the general discussion board would be an appropriate use of the generic forum name, while keeping the internals name as-is because of its special use case.

Lastly, I’m not a fan of users or talk.

[brson]

After polling various people for opinions I’ve asked to have ‘discuss.rust-lang.org’ moved to ‘users.rust-lang.org’. After that is done I will set up the redirect. Thank you all for your feedback.

[brson]

The discuss.rust-lang.org redirect is up.