Closed Bug 607177 Opened 15 years ago Closed 15 years ago

website archive - Operation Firefox (operationfirefox.com)

Categories

(Websites :: website-archive.mozilla.org, defect)

Product:
Websites
Component:
website-archive.mozilla.org
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: clyon, Assigned: ryansnyder)

References

Details

(Whiteboard: [privacy] [infrasecq4])

This is for archiving the Operation Firefox (operationfirefox.com) website. Please make sure that identifiable information isn't part of the archival process.
Blocks: 607187
We haven't sorted out a process to follow when a site is suggested for archiving or deletion. There's a proposal at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce/Proposals/Abandoned_Sites#Processes After filing a bug, the next step would be attempting to find the site owner -- in this case it would be someone in Engagement. I can email the Engagement team to find out the current status. Could we also make this bug public so people who may know about this site's history have a chance to comment?
Assignee: ryan → nobody
Component: Webdev → website-archive.mozilla.org
Product: mozilla.org → Websites
QA Contact: webdev → website-archive-mozilla-org
Group: infra
I'm the owner of this site. Am more than happy for it to be gently and respectfully archived.
Whiteboard: [privacy] [infrasecq4]
The site contains historically relevant information about how the community has helped promote Firefox and is therefore worth archiving.
Hmm. This is a campaign that has been over for almost 3 years and we're archiving it for what appears to be subjective reasoning at the expense of multiple teams.
We're archiving it now because recent analysis of our web universe and our privacy obligations has indicated that we can't just leave abandoned sites up forever. Now that Ryan has set up the process for archiving a site, archiving an additional site is also not that much of an effort.
Cool! So we'll turn the site off and redirect the domain. What domain do you want operationfirefox.com to redirect to?
Perhaps my earlier comments weren't clear -- this site will be archived and the operationfirefox.com domain will redirect to http://website-archive.mozilla.org/operationfirefox.com/
Alright, I thought we were porting the actual PHP over... :O I'm glad we're not doing that with PHP from 2007 on a subdomain of one of our main TLDs then leaving it flapping in the wind. I was mostly concerned about that. I'd still feel better if there wasn't any JS and we just did screenshots. Since all of the site code is in SVN, even the act of HTML-ifying this stuff is redundant and SVN fulfills the goal behind archiving. That's what it does -- it has every revision going back to the start of the project including all the original assets and the db structure without personal information. The visual look and feel could be captured by a screenshot just as easily with more verbiage to explain why the project was successful and what we learned/gained from it. Overall, the archive is a good idea, and it could be better if we added more framing around each entry. Having the HTML and JS is probably not necessary, and a screenshot is much easier to handle. Could even do a lightbox presentation of the different views, which could be better than a simple HTML landing page with broken links. What if we made website-archive.mozilla.org a blog, cut the JS and HTML and instead invested the time in talking about the project (and not in extracting html/js/css)? I'd be less worried about it from a security perspective, anybody could do it, it'd take up less space, and it'd be easier to maintain. Is that plausible?
(In reply to comment #9) > What if we made website-archive.mozilla.org a blog, cut the JS and HTML and > instead invested the time in talking about the project (and not in extracting > html/js/css)? I like this suggestion, particularly because this would give us a viable lifecycle for upcoming projects too. As it stands, we'll be in the same position a year from now, because we have no reasonable process for EOLing projects.
Re comment #9, the screenshot suggestion is definitely worth considering. I think it's worth checking in with Ryan though about how quickly things can be turned into a read-only archive using wget. We might not really be gaining much extra time with the screenshot method. Re comment #10, with new projects starting up now I'd like to move to a model where the concept of shutting things down is built in up front. We're in the position we are in now because there wasn't the concept of EOLing a site before and there's no reason we have to be in this same position a year from now.
The process of archiving a website will definitely take less time than it had previously because I've documented the process. However, this still takes between 1 and 2 days of work for a web developer to completely archive a site. It will absolutely save us time if we take a screenshot, write a blog post, include the screenshot in the blog post and redirect the existing site to that blog post. Also of note is that archiving a website reduces security risks but does not eliminate security risks. In the process of archiving a website, we do remove the code, framework and database used to run that website. But there are still risks associated with the javascript that is saved when archiving a site. So, we eliminate 80% of the potential attack vectors, but do not completely nullify our risks. (The archiving discussion is documented in Bug 599071.) The best option for archiving a website is definitely to create a blog post and redirect people to that blog post. The archiving solution was proposed because people believed that some site content was important to keep around. +1 to include an EOL model for all new websites.
If the blog solution is less work, and it sounds like it is, then that definitely works for me.
We should definitely consider the screenshot model as an option. Note though that this isn't necessarily something that works in all cases -- it makes the content inaccessible and it is also not a trivial amount of work to capture all relevant content and write a blog post capturing the relevant information (unless the suggestion was that we should just take a screenshot of the above-the-fold home page content and say the site is archived and leave it at that). I think the process we have now works -- there is a group of people interested in site archiving who meet as part of the abandoned sites working group and make decisions about what to do with inactive sites. If Mike wants to be a part of that group, that's great. If he does, perhaps we need to meet again to go back over things in light of these new suggestions? Although if Mike's concern is that this process should waste as little time as possible, then revisiting a bunch of decisions that have already been made might not end up saving any time.
Assignee: nobody → ryan
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Great. I will move forward with retiring the site and file the appropriate IT tickets. A stub blog post has been added at: http://blog.mozilla.com/website-archive/2010/12/08/operation-firefox/
Filed Bug 617681 to retire Operation Firefox. The OperationFX blog will remain intact for the time being.
Status: ASSIGNED → RESOLVED
Closed: 15 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
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