Add a warning banner to old versions of the manual

[mikaelmoutakis]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

If I duck-duck-go or google "darktable manual", a top hit is the 2.4 version. This can confuse the unobservant user.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add a big, fat red banner warning people that the 2.4 manual is stale, and point them to the newer version. Python does that very nicely: https://docs.python.org/2/howto/argparse.html

Alternatives

Automatic redirection?

[rgo]

Personally, I'd prefer an automatic redirection.

Why? Because if google/duck duck go/bing/whatever sends you to an old manual, it could be that you don't realise about the info/warning banner that says it's an older version of the manual. Furthermore, it forces you to make another jump to the current manual.

In fact, I'd send a 301 redirect to inform the crawlers where is hosted the new documentation.

Darktable 3.0 can have a section linking old manuals, and them could be stored in a subdirectory of the current manual. But of all them hosted in the same place.

[mikaelmoutakis]

I don't have any strong opinions here. Either solution works. But there might be people using the old versions of Darktable.

[TurboGit]

Fact is that previous maintainer of the documentation has lost the password for the server where the doc is stored. So I have moved the documentation into a more open location (GitLab IO). At this stage there is nothing we can do for the old doc.

[darix]

you could use readthedocs which actually supports multiple application versions.

e.g. https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/

[4044ever]

Fact is that previous maintainer of the documentation has lost the password for the server where the doc is stored. .... At this stage there is nothing we can do for the old doc.

You can set a redirect in .htaccess for that particular URL/page. Or all of darktable.org can't be accessed? Gee, where are the hackers when you need?

[rgo]

I'd say that user manual version 3.x hosted in gitlab has it really hard to compete for the ranking in search engines against version 2.4 because it's hosted darktable.org :-/

@TurboGit Who is/was in charge of the server? Having information about it, we may probably exploit some vulnerability (asking and having permission of course!).