I know I shouldn’t be bringing this up. We transitioned away from the old version of Etherpad to Etherpad Lite a long time ago. In the process, we broke a lot of URLs and created a huge mess too.
I recently happened to visit an old web / wiki page that had a few URLs in the old format. That gave me this idea :
Can we have a URL redirect set-up for the old team pads that were migrated to the new Etherpad Lite instance to the new format? Thankfully, the pads that were migrated had a naming convention that made it easier to find.
AFAIK, the older team URLs were sub-domains for etherpad.mozilla.org which were migrated to public.etherpad-mozilla.org. For example, yo.etherpad.mozilla.org/my-cool-pad was migrated to public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/yo-my-cool-pad.
I don’t think the old domain is being used anymore for anything. Why don’t we set up Permanent Redirects (HTTP 301) from the old URLs to the new ones?
It’s as easy as writing very simple redirect / rewrite rules for the web server. Since the naming convention is well defined, it should be pretty straight forward.
This would help a lot of broken URLs to be gracefully redirected to their migrated counterparts. I’m guessing a lot of links on Mozilla Wiki pages corresponding to meeting agendas are going to be saved by this move. And it doesn’t harm anyone in anyway either.
Another question I have is : Why did we move from using etherpad -dot- mozilla.org to etherpad -hyphen- mozilla.org? Was there a team called public on the old instance that was migrated? As far as I see, there is only one subdomain that is being used currently and that is public, so, as long as there was a team called public whose previous URL was public.etherpad.mozilla.org, there was no reason to change the URL from -dot- to -hyphen-. I’m curious to know the rationale behind this change.