365853 - "Category Empty" page looks out of place

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Public Pages, enhancement)

Description

[Stefan Breunig]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: 

If a category is empty, this should be shown like all other pages with menu and so on instead of a simple link that points to the main page.
The page shouldn't auto-navigate away as well since it's confusing when opening in a background tab and later switching to it.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

While I agree that the simple redirect is bad, I don't think it should show a fake, empty page.

Maybe the links to these categories shouldn't even be shown on the browse page when they don't contain anything useful (yet) anyway, so the user doesn't click on them just to find out there's nothing to be found.

Comment 2

[Stefan Breunig]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Maybe the links to these categories shouldn't even be shown on the browse page
> when they don't contain anything useful (yet) anyway, so the user doesn't click
> on them just to find out there's nothing to be found.
That is a different bug. Given someone links to category xyz that now is empty because an extension changed categories, this bug would still occur.
However, I agree that empty categories shouldn't be shown at all. Do you file I new bug or shall I?
xeen

Comment 3

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

I don't think not showing empty category links is a separate bug, I think it's the solution to this bug. If we don't link to empty categories, the problem presented in this bug will very, very rarely occur - and if it does, the problem is handled via redirection. It's not like the person will get ugly PHP error messages or a blank page.

In production AMO there most likely won't even be any empty categories, as we only create them when there is a need for them. Following a link to a category that used to have content but no longer does is an extreme edge case, and even that extreme edge case is handled sufficiently, in my opinion.

Comment 4

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

Not showing empty category links proved to be pretty painful, IIRC.  Users shouldn't be seeing this page on the production system, though, so I'm downgrading it further.

Comment 5

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

This page is not present anymore in current AMO (both because no categories are empty and because the ugly code is gone).