Bugzilla

There is a recent change to redirects (bug 1404669) that would explain this.

First, our CDN caches content for about 5 minutes, and varies on cookies. This means each logged in user gets their own version of a page, and all the anon users get the same page. You sometimes see this around edits; when you make a change, you get the old version of the page for a few minutes, while other people see the new version faster.

The bug for 1404669 was with how KumaScript renders pages with redirects. KumaScript requests the page source (`?raw`) and then returns the rendered page. For the last few years, `?raw` returned redirects, so when you asked to regenerate a page, KumaScript was following the redirect to the new page, and getting the target pages' content. So, when redirects appeared to take effect immediately, what was happening was the content from the target page was being duplicated on the redirected page. No one was paying too much attention to the URL, which had not switched to the target page. In some cases, this was exposing duplicate content to search engines, which is bad for SEO.

The change is to request pages with `?raw&redirect=no`, so that the page source is the desired page rather than the source of the redirect target. Now when you use CKEditor to add the ``REDIRECT` magic, you will see it when you are done with editing. However, other users will see the last revision of the page, until the CDN cache expires, when they will see the redirect to the new page. 

If the page is unpopular and uncached, you may be able to see the effect immediately by using private browsing mode or an alternate browser where you are not logged in.

There is a recent change to redirects (bug 1404669) that would explain this.

Our CDN caches content for about 5 minutes, and varies on cookies. This means each logged in user gets their own version of a page, and all the anon users get the same page. You sometimes see this around edits; when you make a change, you get the old version of the page for a few minutes, while other people see the new version faster.

The bug for 1404669 was with how KumaScript renders pages with redirects. KumaScript requests the page source (`?raw`) and then returns the rendered page. For the last few years, `?raw` returned redirects, so when you asked to regenerate a page, KumaScript was following the redirect to the new page, and getting the target page's content. When redirects appeared to take effect immediately, what was happening was the content from the target page was being duplicated on the redirected page. No one was paying too much attention to the URL, which had not switched to the target page. In some cases, this was exposing duplicate content to search engines, which is bad for SEO.

The change is to request pages with `?raw&redirect=no`, so that the page source is the desired page rather than the source of the redirect target. Now when you use CKEditor to add the ``REDIRECT` magic, you will see it when you are done with editing. However, other users will see the last revision of the page, until the CDN cache expires, when they will see the redirect to the new page. 

If the page is unpopular and uncached, you may be able to see the effect immediately by using private browsing mode or an alternate browser where you are not logged in.