Outdated documentation should be invisible to Google

[agrimm]

When you search for 'ruby starts_with' (sans quotes) with Google, http://as.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/CoreExtensions/String/StartsEndsWith.html comes up as the tenth hit, and is the first hit providing documentation. The documentation in as.rubyonrails.org is horribly out of date - it was last updated in 2008.

as.rubyonrails.org should ideally be deleted with users encouraged to use api.rubyonrails.org , but failing that, the domain should be made invisible to Google, possibly via robots.txt, so that Rails newbies don't end up using outdated documentation.

[sarahhodne]

I only learned a few weeks ago that as, ar, etc. were out of date, so it should at least have some banner on top saying "this documentation is out of date, please use api.rubyonrails.org instead".

[carlosantoniodasilva]

I think these "out of date" docs should redirect to api.rubyonrails.org for now, so we would keep all links over the internet working, pointing to some real docs, and we could get rid of the "out of date" ones.

@fxn @vijaydev thoughts on that?

[fxn]

I don't mind about returning 404 for these documents... @vijaydev what do you think about not generating guides unless they are published?

[vijaydev]

@fxn not published meaning all WIP and stale guides? Sounds good not to generate the stale guides (though we don't have a way to segregate them currently), but I think WIP guides are useful if available.

[isaacsanders]

+1

[jeroeningen]

👍

[joanwolk]

WIP guides can be really helpful, even if they're not finished. I got a lot of help from one about mailers a while ago. I'd be in favor of giving them proper links, noting they're still in progress but allowing them some recognized status on the site.

[fxn]

This is in my TODO list, I'll modify the scripts in the docs sever not to generate WIP guides. WIP guides are in the repo only for the convenience of authors, their content cannot leak, and time has proven they do in web searches even if not linked in the table of contents.

[fxn]

I am closing this one since the old subdomains are down.