[Biopython-dev] URLs pointing email archives not working

[Peter Cock]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 12:27 AM, Martin MOKREJŠ <mmokrejs at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> Peter Cock wrote:
>>
>> Hi again Martin, Markus,
>>
>> I've filed the broken mailing list archive links on biopython.org
>> as an issue on the new website repository:
>>
>> https://github.com/biopython/biopython.github.io/issues/49
>>
>> My earlier replies were from a phone and a little short. I meant
>> that http://lists.open-bio.org/ and http://mailman.open-bio.org/
>> were not very helpful, just a minimal index.html page.
>
>   I am sorry my email generated so much troubles to you.

Not at all, your email was useful in spotting this problem.

> Personally I would rather keep email archives at OBF server
> and not bother with their move to github.

Me too.

> But I know you are very skilled so not only you rewrote the
> cvs/git History but I am sure you will invent some kind of
> a new redirect inside github. ;-)

GitHub Pages and Jekyll are very limited in what they can do.

>   I think Google and other robots will learn the new URL if OBF webserver
> at http://mailman.open-bio.org/mailman/ returns a proper status code
> (like permanently moved?). Actually you can also inject new URL into
> robots.txt file I think right away. So all the migration work could be
> done on OBF server and robot will update themselves.

We could update robots.txt to exclude biopython.org/pipermail/
but I don't know if we can tell Google/Bing/etc that that whole
folder has "moved" to another domain.

>> I've just replaced the index.html with a simple redirect to e.g.
>> http://lists.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo
>
> You mean http://mailman.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo , right? ;-)

I did. I was meaning to ask our mailing list experts why the two
different domain names report different tables of mailing lists ;)

> Well, good luck and once again sorry for generating so much churn.
> I only realized Google pointing to a broken link.
> Martin

The Google webmaster tools also report a lot of Error 404 links
to these mailing list archives on biopython.org, so don't worry
about it. I'm glad you emailed me about this.

Thank you,

Peter