675022 - Audit .htaccess file on mozilla.com

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

The .htaccess file for mozilla.com is large has a lot of redirects, some of which may be obsolete, some of which may be able to be consolidated.

http://viewvc.svn.mozilla.org/vc/projects/mozilla.com/trunk/.htaccess?view=co

Comment 1

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

Laura & John, can you take a look at the stats that metrics so helpfully dug up for us on the frequency of use of some of the old URL rewrites: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=675687#c1

I'm inclined to drop at least those URLs that had fewer than 100 hits over the past six months. Anyone still hitting those URLs would still get our 404 page, which is pretty and helpful (and has a download button).

Please advise.

Comment 2

[John Slater]

Thanks Steven. Your plan of 404ing the ones with fewer than 100 hits works for me. If maintaining redirects is a big resource hit on our end, we could safely move any of the ones that have received fewer than 1000 hits in the last 6 months to a 404...that would cut down the list pretty nicely.

Comment 3

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Thanks Steven. Your plan of 404ing the ones with fewer than 100 hits works
> for me. If maintaining redirects is a big resource hit on our end, we could
> safely move any of the ones that have received fewer than 1000 hits in the
> last 6 months to a 404...that would cut down the list pretty nicely.

I've removed any sub-100-hit redirects from trunk in r93208.

The redirects we do not really cause any problems for us, so I don't want to be too aggressive in cleaning these up. Just doing some housekeeping, really.

That said, I wonder if for some of these cases, when pages are shut down, the 404 page might be an appropriate destination.

For some pages, that were just variations of the main Firefox page, it does make sense to silently redirect to the current Firefox page. For others, though, like the /greenfestival/page, if someone was clicking on a link to see something about that festival, being silently redirected to the Firefox page doesn't seem much more helpful than a 404 page - perhaps less so.

Comment 4

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

Also removed a duplicate redirect in r93212.

Comment 5

[mcbmoz]

Steven,

Are there any next steps on this bug?

Best,
CB

Comment 6

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Are there any next steps on this bug?

If James or Pascal want to run through the file and identify any candidates for removal, that'd be great, but it's not a priority.

I've merged my changes to stage in r93336.

Comment 7

[James Long (:jlongster)]

(In reply to Steven Garrity from comment #6)
> (In reply to comment #5)
> > Are there any next steps on this bug?
> 
> If James or Pascal want to run through the file and identify any candidates
> for removal, that'd be great, but it's not a priority.
> 
> I've merged my changes to stage in r93336.

I wouldn't know where to start :) But small steps like this are great, and maybe at the next work week we can look through it together and ween it down slowly.

pushed to production r93572

Comment 8

[raymond [:retornam] (inactive)]

verified fixed