Closed Bug 868872 Opened 11 years ago Closed 4 years ago

All the links under "Common Thunderbird Use Cases" are dead

Categories

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: Mozilla Platform, defect, P5)

Product:
Developer Documentation Graveyard
Component:
Mozilla Platform
Platform:
x86
macOS
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: bersimoes, Unassigned)

References

(
URL
)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0
Build ID: 20130326150557

Steps to reproduce:

I went here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos
 to know how to develop a thunderbrd extension


Actual results:

The links under "Part 1: Common Thunderbird Use Cases" are dead


Expected results:

they should link to content that would let me learn how to develop my own extension
Component: Help Documentation → General
Product: Thunderbird → Mozilla Developer Network
The old contents are still mirrored on Ben's copy of MDN (e.g. http://mdn.beonex.com/en/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/View_Message.html) but it would be a shame to have all this information lost, it's pretty much all we have for Thunderbird...
Have you checked the revision history?
Assignee: nobody → eshepherd
Component: General → Mozilla Platform
Product: Mozilla Developer Network → Developer Documentation
I have been unable to understand why the links are broken, even looking at the revision history. Is there anyone I can CC to take care of this problem? I'm not a MDN expert by any means, but I know this is bad because right now, pretty much all the documentation for Thunderbird is unusable, and I have to redirect people to mdn.beonex.com.
Is there a way to get the revision history of a deleted page like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder ? If it ever existed, but it looks like it did in the past.
(In reply to Frank Wein [:mcsmurf] from comment #4)
> Is there a way to get the revision history of a deleted page like
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/
> Common_Thunderbird_Use_Cases/Open_Folder ? If it ever existed, but it looks
> like it did in the past.

No, there's not; if it's deleted, its history is gone. Sorry!
Eric, this basically means that all the useful documentation for Thunderbird is now dead. There was a significant amount of knowledge in these how-tos, and the static copy on beonex is out-of-date.

1) How could this possibly happen? I've spent an awful lot of time dealing with terrible wiki software to write one third of these how-tos, it is slightly frustrating to see that no one seems to care about this (I had to file a bug and it remained unanswered for several months) and to see that it seems acceptable for all that documentation to be dead.

2) Could someone please look into it seriously and try to find backups or something?

Thanks,

jonathan
Bug 863344 Comment 7 seems to be related here. Back in April developers.mozilla.org seemed to have a problem with a lot of pages disappearing.
See Also: → 863344
Sheeri - how old of backups do we have for the MDN database?
Flags: needinfo?(scabral)
We keep 3 days' worth of backups easily accessible. We do not have any longer-term backups sent offsite/to tape or anything like that.

If the information is truly gone, the Internet Archive at www.archive.org may have the content. (and yes, I've often lamented that deleted wiki pages in most systems are actually deleted from the database, and not retrievable).
Flags: needinfo?(scabral)
None of them pull up for me on archive.org. :(

Sheeri, can we *start* keeping weekly and/or monthly snapshots for longer-term backups?
Flags: needinfo?(scabral)
Sheeri - also, do we have older backups that are *not* easily accessible? ;)
I tried copying and pasting the content from beonex.com. It's a little ugly, but it might be easier than starting from nothing:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/User:groovecoder/Compose_New_Message
Luke - we do not have older backups, easily accessible or not. We have been running an EMC Data Domain disk in the other data center to keep backups longer-term, and now that that has been successful (we've been doing this since July, and in fact can keep backups for months), we are waiting on Systems to get a Data Domain system in scl3, where this database is.

I'll find the bug and put you as a cc on it if you like.
Flags: needinfo?(scabral)
That would be great, thanks :sheeri.
Luke and Sheeri, thanks for looking into this. Jonathan/bernardo, I'm really sorry this content is not recoverable. Jonathan: how badly out of date is the stuff on beonex? If it's worth doing, I'll manually copy it back in the next few weeks.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Flags: needinfo?(jonathan.protzenko)
Even though it took sometime for you guys to get everything up and running, I would like to thank you for taking some time in order to fix this issue.

A couple of months ago I had to make a thunderbird extension for a university project, that would implement a couple of security features. Due to the lack of documentation ended up creating my own app in rails.

With this issue solved, you will make it extremely easier for new comers to start developing Thunderbird extensions.

Best regards
Hi Will,

Importing the content from Beonex will definitely help. I think the main problem with the content on Beonex is that some parts that were written in-between the Beonex snapshot and the data loss have been irrevocably lost, but the rest of the content should be fine.

Much thanks,

jonathan
Flags: needinfo?(jonathan.protzenko)
Assignee: eshepherd → wbamberg
Let's just fix this. I'm tired of having such a hard time pointing people to TB docs.

I can just copy everything other from the Beonex shapshot and fix stuff up, right? As far as I know, it's just a mirror of the old content, so there shouldn't be any copyright issues...
Assignee: wbamberg → squibblyflabbetydoo
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Hi, I was just going to submit a new bug then I found this one.

Would be great is the external docs could be brought back in to MDN.
Adrian: basically it is just the matter of somebody copy /pasting the old content from beonex. Given the internal prioritization of Thunderbird, this task will unlikely be assigned to an employee though.
(In reply to Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli] from comment #21)
> Adrian: basically it is just the matter of somebody copy /pasting the old
> content from beonex. Given the internal prioritization of Thunderbird, this
> task will unlikely be assigned to an employee though.

That's not exactly true. A lot of those docs were bad and probably shouldn't be copied back. I've filled in some of the pages with better docs, but I don't have a lot of time to work on that.
(In reply to Jim Porter (:squib) from comment #22)
> (In reply to Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli] from comment #21)
> > Adrian: basically it is just the matter of somebody copy /pasting the old
> > content from beonex. Given the internal prioritization of Thunderbird, this
> > task will unlikely be assigned to an employee though.
> 
> That's not exactly true. A lot of those docs were bad and probably shouldn't
> be copied back. I've filled in some of the pages with better docs, but I
> don't have a lot of time to work on that.

When (roughly) did you do that?

I had a hard time to find my way into Thunderbird APIs using MDN.

The best resource I found was
http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/
and I got help in the #instantbird channel.

nsIEditor referenced in
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos/Access_Message_in_Compose_Window_Editor
is a dead link.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird/Mail_event_system seems to have very old information.

I was trying to find some old archive links referenced from THunderbird docs but I can't find them now.
Around when I assigned the bug to myself, so January.
This is better now, but not perfect. Anyone else who wants to help on this is welcome to.
Assignee: squibblyflabbetydoo → nobody
Status: ASSIGNED → NEW
(In reply to Jonathan Protzenko [:protz] from comment #3)
> I have been unable to understand why the links are broken, even looking at
> the revision history. Is there anyone I can CC to take care of this problem?
> I'm not a MDN expert by any means, but I know this is bad because right now,
> pretty much all the documentation for Thunderbird is unusable, and I have to
> redirect people to mdn.beonex.com.

Just an FYI, 3 years later: the docs on beonex are TERRIBLE. I did Javascript development off and on for 10 years, and can't make head or tail of how to get done what I need to do from what they're telling me. It doesn't seem to be designed such that people who don't already know it all backwards and forwards will have much luck making sense of it.
Oh, ****- why is this board publishing my email address publicly? Delete! DELETE! DELETE!
Ok. Newbie freaking out here. Get my email address off this page.
Wow. Can't delete my account, can't change my email address, can't delete these comments... somebody please delete all this stuff.
protz, thanks for all the work on this. I'd like to finally get this bug sorted out so...

per https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Thunderbird/HowTos$history there has been many updates to the MDN and the links point to much of the material that was lost. Yet, the "This page is badly broken" warning remains.

Is there a list or non-trivial way to determine what's left to be done?  
And it seems to me that a restore per bug 863344, which seem to have dropped off the floor, is no longer wanted.  Correct?
Flags: needinfo?(jonathan.protzenko)
A restore is still wanted but impossible: the knowledge I had written is 
now gone.

For the record: I had entered a huge amount of docs and then everything 
was gone in a snap. This was circa 2013, when Eric was still handling 
the massive MDN fiasco, with pages just disappearing into a vortex, 
edits taking minutes to save, the awful "rich text" editor, etc. I don't 
have any recollections, except that I put in a tremendous amount of work 
just to see it disappear without any hope of ever recovering it. I don't 
think I wrote documentation after that.

What remains to be done is understand what's left on Beonex, make sure 
all of it is accurately copied onto MDN, and then lament about all the 
great snippets I had written that have now disappeared.
Flags: needinfo?(jonathan.protzenko)
> The links under "Part 1: Common Thunderbird Use Cases" are dead

This is no longer true

The MDN team is no longer actively working on Mozilla Platform docs. Volunteer contributions are welcome.

Priority: -- → P5
MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX

Users are instructed to use this page instead:
https://mdn.beonex.com/en/Extensions/Thunderbird/HowTos.html

However, that page doesn't exist either. This is essentially insult to injury.

Thanks,
Christian Blackburn

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