836529 - Handling of redirects via query strings leads to bad copy and paste.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[Jeff Hammel]

Very often someone will ask for or imply they want the link to a page on MDN and sometimes I know it.  But people move stuff around.  So I start to type, "automat.." which Firefox completes to the old value: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mozilla_automated_testing . However, this page has been moved *AND* there is a bug in firefox (which i'm fairly sure is both filed and really really old) whereby 301 MOVED PERMANANTLY should (IMO) be renamed in awesomebar completion.  

So I navigate to the page, which is now moved to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/QA/Automated_testing . However, MDN adds on some stuff so now I have in my URL bar https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/QA/Automated_testing?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Mozilla_automated_testing .

Instead of copy+pasting the URL bar location, now I have to edit it, nor is the a (sic) "permalink" I can click on to get rid of the garbage.  I also have what has clearly become a minority belief that (exposed) URLs should be semantic.

I would have conveyed this information with a cookie or session.  Is there any reason this can't/shouldn't be done here?

Comment 1

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

Maybe we can use history.rewrite to change the URL after loading so that it looks pretty. We use the URL for this so that the page knows that a redirect occurred and where the originating page was.

Comment 2

[Jeff Hammel]

The text below the page title (where you use this information and link to the old page) is a bit odd too.  Pasting the markup for clarity:

<div class="redirected-from" id="redirected-from">
              <p>Redirected from <a href="/en-US/docs/Mozilla_automated_testing?redirect=no">Mozilla automated testing Redirect 1</a></p>
            </div>

IMHO, kill the "Redirect 1" from the text node of <a>.  This tells me nothing as a user

Comment 4

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

(In reply to Jeff Hammel [:jhammel] from comment #2)

> IMHO, kill the "Redirect 1" from the text node of <a>.  This tells me
> nothing as a user

Yes; agreed, we have another bug on that. See bug 820913.

Comment 5

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

from bug 770969 comment 1:
> Maybe we could get rid of the parameters by using a session message [1] to
> trigger the same "you've just been redirected" warning?
> 
> [1]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/ref/contrib/messages/

Comment 6

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

This is a really, really big problem, and actually probably what I get the most complaints about from users in IRC. Devs get really frustrated about having to edit the URLs they copy and paste from MDN because of this.

Comment 7

[Anthony Ricaud (:rik)]

This is annoying me a lot too. Here's a simple "patch" without touching the backend:

if (history.replaceState) {
  history.replaceState(null, null, location.pathname + location.hash);
}

Comment 9

[[github robot]]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/85398a13f1b0c17a4bcb7b1b2d01c60c35814b76
bug 836529, bug 820913: Switch to django messages framework for redirect notices, remove the redirection parameters from the URL

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/b299956c2918190565064cfee9b6d3c899dc4fa7
Merge pull request #1951 from lmorchard/836529-redirection-urls

bug 836529, bug 820913: Switch to django messages framework for redirect notices, remove the redirection parameters from the URL

Comment 10

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

FWIW, I found https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=971772 after we landed this fix.

Comment 11

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

You guys! This is awesome!

Teoli did notice that the little gray "redirected from" URL includes "?redirect=no" at the end; I think he's filing a bug for it. But other than that little hiccup, wow, this is amazing!