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The above comment is one of my most upvoted ever. It's annoying to have to click twice to get to the latest version. Maybe they make it too easy to get to old v

by ximeng 9y ago

The above comment is one of my most upvoted ever. It's annoying to have to click twice to get to the latest version. Maybe they make it too easy to get to old versions - I don't think I've ever seen a link to Wikipedia that points to an old version of a page. Not saying this is an easy problem to solve, and the documentation is mostly pretty great, but this definitely bugs me and apparently a bunch of other people too.

marcosdumay 9y ago
Old Wikipedia pages are just dated and not useful as a starting point. Documentation for old versions of Postgres are the most up to date page for anybody using that version. I am one of the people that gave you an upvote, but this is not a fair comparison at all.
- ximeng 9y ago
  Not aiming to be unfair to postgres - it's not an easy problem and the documentation is great, and it is different to Wikipedia where old content is generally objectively worse. I guess for postgres 80% of people would be happy with always landing on the current version, and making an extra click or adding a version to their search if they really need documentation for older versions. Maybe adding a brief version history at the bottom of documentation pages would reduce the need for old versions even further.
kingbirdy 9y ago
I think a solution might be to make links to the latest version redirect to a v/latest/ which redirects to the new latest version across upgrades. For each url v/1.2/docs if 1.2 is the new version, then it redirects to v/latest/docs and when copy-pasted to e.g. stack overflow, when someone comes along later when it's in version 1.5, it serves the v1.5 docs. So the latest Google crawl will see mostly v/latest/docs links, it will always serve those at the top of search results for docs, and then no matter what those search results at the latest version of docs.
- ximeng 9y ago
  This would help! There are no direct links between the urls below which both have the same content. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html You have to click to another page and back again to change to the "current" link if you're on the "10" link.

by ximeng 9y ago

marcosdumay 9y ago

Old Wikipedia pages are just dated and not useful as a starting point. Documentation for old versions of Postgres are the most up to date page for anybody using that version. I am one of the people that gave you an upvote, but this is not a fair comparison at all.

ximeng 9y ago
Not aiming to be unfair to postgres - it's not an easy problem and the documentation is great, and it is different to Wikipedia where old content is generally objectively worse. I guess for postgres 80% of people would be happy with always landing on the current version, and making an extra click or adding a version to their search if they really need documentation for older versions. Maybe adding a brief version history at the bottom of documentation pages would reduce the need for old versions even further.

kingbirdy 9y ago

I think a solution might be to make links to the latest version redirect to a v/latest/ which redirects to the new latest version across upgrades. For each url v/1.2/docs if 1.2 is the new version, then it redirects to v/latest/docs and when copy-pasted to e.g. stack overflow, when someone comes along later when it's in version 1.5, it serves the v1.5 docs. So the latest Google crawl will see mostly v/latest/docs links, it will always serve those at the top of search results for docs, and then no matter what those search results at the latest version of docs.

ximeng 9y ago
This would help! There are no direct links between the urls below which both have the same content. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html You have to click to another page and back again to change to the "current" link if you're on the "10" link.