863344 - Restore pages that have gone missing

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

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

Description

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

What did you do?
================
1. Noted that most of the Thunderbird extension howto pages are missing.
2. Did a search: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=thunderbird+copy+selected+message
3. Note that the first result, for example, is: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder

What happened?
==============
Got a 404 clicking that link. Note that the page does have a record in Kuma though: https://developer.mozilla.org/admin/wiki/document/15436/

What should have happened?
==========================
We need to figure out how this happened. The Thunderbird guys are pretty sure these pages used to be there, so where did they go?

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================

Comment 1

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Going to expand this out to be our one-stop-shop for restoring pages that went missing with bug 863692.

List is here:
https://etherpad.mozilla.org/i5iCIiOD3p

Comment 2

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

I don't think that list is up to date: only 1 of the 3 seems to be a 404. Are there other pages not listed that have been reported missing? 

I restored about 170 pages, as mentioned here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=863692#c6

Comment 3

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

(In reply to Les Orchard [:lorchard] from comment #2)
> I restored about 170 pages, as mentioned here:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=863692#c6

Ah, I missed that. Was wondering why those supposedly-missing pages appeared to be loading just fine.

Those are the only pages I know about. We can add to the list as we discover more.

Comment 4

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

The only missing page I know of is the one in the EtherPad:
https://etherpad.mozilla.org/i5iCIiOD3p

Maybe we could quickly bang this one out to close the bug?

Comment 5

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

I don't know what's up with that page; did it ever really exist?

Comment 6

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

It did on Deki, at least.

http://mdn.beonex.com/en/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder

Comment 7

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

OK, we'll need someone to find and restore those pages; I don't know how to do it though. Someone on the dev team will need to do it.

Comment 8

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

(In reply to John Karahalis [:openjck] from comment #4)
> The only missing page I know of is the one in the EtherPad:
> https://etherpad.mozilla.org/i5iCIiOD3p
> 
> Maybe we could quickly bang this one out to close the bug?

What does "banging this out" entail? Does it simply mean copying the content from [0] to [1]? 

Is this still a P1? 

[0] http://mdn.beonex.com/en/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder

Comment 9

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

(In reply to Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] from comment #8)
> (In reply to John Karahalis [:openjck] from comment #4)
> > The only missing page I know of is the one in the EtherPad:
> > https://etherpad.mozilla.org/i5iCIiOD3p
> > 
> > Maybe we could quickly bang this one out to close the bug?
> 
> What does "banging this out" entail? Does it simply mean copying the content
> from [0] to [1]? 
> 
> Is this still a P1? 
> 
> [0]
> http://mdn.beonex.com/en/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/
> Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder
> [1]
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/
> Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder

We can revisit the priority. I went ahead and reset it to the default value.

We could restore the page from database backups, but we would lose history. Sheppy, if the writing team would prefer to get something up now, rather than getting the page and the history up at a later date, I can go ahead and manually copy the content over and close this bug.

Comment 10

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

Let's just get the content back up and be done with it, at this point.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

It seems we're past the point of this ever happening.
Perhaps it should be closed.

Comment 12

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

After 30+ minutes of investigating, I agree on closing this bug.

The linked Etherpad has a single document left:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder

Sheppy mentions Document 15436, which is at:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Open_Folder

This page redirects several times, as it tries to find a valid URL in the current scheme:

https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/en/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/en/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder

The final URL is a 404. My guess is that a page move lost the content. It does not appear to have ever been scraped by archive.org, so it is lost.

Fixing these broken redirects is a big project, partially covered by other bugs such as bug 872593, but there are a lot of redirect bugs [1], and I believe the feature is broken and needs to be redesigned and reimplemented.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=13582714&short_desc=redirect&resolution=---&query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&product=Mozilla%20Developer%20Network