Re: Release note trimming: another modest proposal

On 2/5/19 12:17 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 2019-02-05 12:10:57 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
>>> On 2019-02-05 08:50:16 -0500, Jonathan S. Katz wrote:
>>>> The original thought process was to _not_ do that given the effort, but
>>>> if it's just for `/current/` it may not be so bad.
>>
>>> I think it definitely should also be on /devel/, that's what's out there
>>> on blog posts and such.  I am flummoxed that we're just giving up google
>>> juice by willy nilly returning 404 for stuff that's more widely linked
>>> than the average page. It's not like we are that good placed in searches
>>> (although that's primarily related to other things).
>>
>> I thought there was some concern that we were deoptimizing by having
>> multiple copies of substantially the same page.
> 
> I think that's an independent issue, given that the rest of the docs are
> largely duplicated between the versions too.

To chime in on this quickly, I remember researching the traffic to the
various release notes over a fairly large window -- other than when a
major release comes out, the traffic is so insignificant to all the
other release pages that dropping them down to 404s would barely register.

For minor releases, most people get the info from the news article (and
presumably email to -announce) by several orders of magnitude vs. the
release notes themselves.

The redirects would be a courtesy for our users rather than anything
affecting what's in search.

Jonathan