719668 - Go to English doc page if translated page is not available

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Editing, defect)

Description

[Janet Swisher]

As in English, if a user follows a link to a page that does not exist in a given locale, MindTouch helpfully redirects them to the locale home page. However, users expect that if an English version of the page is available, they should get that page instead.


http://mdn.uservoice.com/forums/51389-mdn-website-feedback-http-developer-mozilla-org/suggestions/2516132-fixing-german-language-specific-url-forwarding-on-

http://mdn.uservoice.com/forums/51389-mdn-website-feedback-http-developer-mozilla-org/suggestions/2511579-improve-the-translated-web-pages-of-mdn-bad-li

The problem is that if the localized URL does not exist, there is nothing to associate it with a corresponding English URL (whereas there is a template to make this association on real pages). The path after the language code is often the same across languages, but this is not required; some translators leave it the same but some don't. 

Two approaches I can think of:
1. If a localized URL does not exist, try replacing the language code with "en" and see if that URL exists; if not, redirect as usual.
2. Go through all localized links, especially in Django pages, and verify that they point to existing pages.

Given that we have no fix for the general redirect-for-nonexistant-page problem, #1 seems unlikely to be doable. #2 is doable but extremely tedious.

Comment 1

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

Yeah, #1 is in dekiwiki code so we won't fix that.

#2 is already done programmatically: https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/blob/master/apps/devmo/helpers.py#L75

Though if you know of any links that are pointing to non-existent localized pages reopen this with a list so we can wrap them in the helper function.

Comment 2

[Janet Swisher]

These URLS are linked from the /de front page, and put me into the editor; I assume that for unauthenticated users, they redirect back to /de.

https://developer.mozilla.org/de/HTML/HTML5
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/HTML/Canvas
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Using_audio_and_video_in_Firefox
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Using_gradients
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/CSS/Using_CSS_transforms
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/CSS/CSS_transitions
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/CSS/CSS_animations
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/CSS/Media%20Queries
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/WebSockets
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/DOM/Storage
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Offline_resources_in_Firefox
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/IndexedDB
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Geolocation_verwenden
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/DragDrop/Drag_and_Drop
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Using_web_workers
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Using_files_from_web_applications

Comment 3

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

As said in bug 674702 I've corrected German links to point to /en/. However, my changes don't seem to be committed via verbatim. I've just committed my changes again (hopefully now correctly).

Comment 4

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

I *think* this is already covered in Kuma. If you visit a non-en-US URL for which there is an equivalent path in /en-US, you get a "fallback" page. 

That's en-US content with a banner that says basically "This page has not yet been translated for your locale, want to do it?"

Comment 5

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

Example: https://developer-new.mozilla.org/ca/docs/HTML/HTML5

Comment 6

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Jean-Yves, Florian, Janet: Thoughts on the implementation described in comment 4 and comment 5?

Comment 7

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

This is live on https://developer-dev.allizom.org/de/docs/CSS (note de/CSS doesn't exist there only because we didn't migrate it.)

Comment 8

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Les: In the link you posted in comment 5, the string that appears above the article is:

"Our volunteers haven't translated this article into català yet. Join us and help get the job done!"

Is the message itself in English only because it hasn't been translated to català yet? If that's the case, we might want to be extra sure we have a version of this for every locale.

Comment 9

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

(In reply to John Karahalis [:openjck] from comment #8)

> Is the message itself in English only because it hasn't been translated to
> català yet?

Yes, for example, try this one:
    https://developer-new.mozilla.org/nl/docs/HTML/HTML5

> If that's the case, we might want to be extra sure we have a
> version of this for every locale.

That's up to the localizers - not a whole lot we (the dev team) can do to ensure that, other than ask nicely and offer cake / beer / local delicacies.

Comment 10

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

(In reply to Les Orchard [:lorchard] from comment #9)
> That's up to the localizers - not a whole lot we (the dev team) can do to
> ensure that, other than ask nicely and offer cake / beer / local delicacies.

Totally. I'll be sure it's on our radar.