996608 - Stop redirecting in-product pages and home page for zh-TW to the Mozilla Taiwan website

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

We have redirects in place on redirecting all of our hits for in-product pages for the home page and in-product pages to http://mozilla.com.tw

We shouldn't do that, especially with Australis because:
- The Australis in-product pages have access to Chrome via a whitelisting mechanism built in Firefox. This whitelisting won't work on another domain than www.mozilla.org and the tour will be broken. Adding more domains to the  white list doesn't sound like a great idea security-wise.
- This is demotivating for our localizers that translate pages on mozilla.org and see their work is not used and instead redirected to the local Mozilla Taiwan office were employees retranslate the same content. Our zh-TW has always been extremely reliable on meeting our deadlines on mozilla.org.
- from an l10n-drivers POV, we can't track zh-TW progress reliably

I understand the needs for local information and specific requirements for the Taiwanese site but we should also have a decent experience in zh-TW on mozilla.org for people that want to have access to the global mozilla.org site in their language and not to the regional site.

We have mecanisms in place on mozilla.org to customize content on all of our pages (tags, l10n blocks or even including sub-templates in a page directly in Chinese). I propose that we prominently mention on mozilla.org/zh-TW/ that we also have a regional site that people can visit for more local informations if they want (events, carreers, local marketing campaigns, contact pages...) but that we don't redirect users blindly if they happen to have a traditional Chinese browser.

This way we don't break the link between the global and the regional site, we make them collaborate instead of competing with each other. The l10n-drivers team will be happy to help with customizing the home page and other pages if needed to suit the needs of the Taiwan office. Some pages can of course still be redirected on a case per case basis, but IMO global campaigns should remain global on mozilla.org and we should all work together rather than duplicating work, that's why we merged mozilla-europe.org, mozilla.com, mozilla.org, mozillamessaging.com... into one single site 3 years ago. Let's not split our sites again now that we have just merged them.

We also need to fix *urgently* the redirects for in-product pages if we want to offer the tour of the Australis UI to our zh-TW users because of the domain whitelisting in the product.

We can work progressively on this goal but the home page and the Australis pages seem like good targets.

I digged into bugzilla and found that the redirects were set in bug 764261 when we were transitionning from the old platform to the new one and didn't have a website owner yet. The l10n story in mozilla.org on the new platform is now very good, and we now have a website owner (CCed) so I'd like us to revisit this past decision and see how we can all better collaborate on mozilla.org in zh-TW too :)

CCing to this bug  Linear Li, the Taiwan office employee that asked for the redirects initially, as well as other owners of the project (webdev, l10n, l10n-drivers).

Comment 1

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

Maybe Japanese -> mozilla.jp also?

Comment 2

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

(In reply to Kohei Yoshino [:kohei] from comment #1)
> Maybe Japanese -> mozilla.jp also?

See:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=987059#c6

Mozilla Japan as just agreed on using mozilla.org pages after the Australis launch.

Comment 3

[Chris More [:cmore]]

I would love to undo some of the country-specific redirects that we have on mozilla.org as it is not great for the user experience when people bounce around between websites. 

Do you think we can also revisit the zh-CN redirect in bug bug 755826 or that out of scope here?

Comment 4

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

(In reply to Chris More [:cmore] from comment #3)
> I would love to undo some of the country-specific redirects that we have on
> mozilla.org as it is not great for the user experience when people bounce
> around between websites. 
> 
> Do you think we can also revisit the zh-CN redirect in bug bug 755826 or
> that out of scope here?

I think this is also in the scope yes.

Comment 5

[Yousheng Li [:yli]]

(In reply to Pascal Chevrel:pascalc from comment #4)
> (In reply to Chris More [:cmore] from comment #3)
> > I would love to undo some of the country-specific redirects that we have on
> > mozilla.org as it is not great for the user experience when people bounce
> > around between websites. 
> > 
> > Do you think we can also revisit the zh-CN redirect in bug bug 755826 or
> > that out of scope here?
> 
> I think this is also in the scope yes.

Hi Pascal and Chris,

For the zh-CN, it's different story, we have ICP registration and Great Fire Wall issues in China.
We hope the redirection (bug 755826: www.mozilla.org/zh-CN/ -> firefox.com.cn) will be continuing work.

By the way, the tour and other pages will not be broken on zh-CN, it's only redirect the home page.

Comment 6

[Eric Tsai (no more review request accepted)]

Hi Pascal and Chris,

For the zh-TW, we agree to keep ONLY firstrun and whatsnew for in-product page at mozilla.org. That will make the experience the same with global mozilla.org. Is that OK for Australis launch?

Comment 7

[Eric Tsai (no more review request accepted)]

Update, for 991364, keep tour at mozilla.org. Is there anything missing?

Comment 9

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

Eric, can you have your team provide a patch to mozilla.org to remove the redirect for the tour please? Thanks

Comment 10

[Sammy Fung]

In Hong Kong, operating system locales of some internet users might use zh-tw, therefore some Hong Kong users will be redirected to Taiwan website. The problem is that Taiwan MoCo website will promote/suggest users to download Taiwan MoCo Chinese version Firefox, this version includes some addons friendly to some Taiwan users, but not benefit to Hong Kong users.

So, I think redirection of zh-tw should be revised.

And Firefox 29 will be released very soon, is it possible for MoCo to communicate with Taiwan office to get agreement to disable the redirection first ?

Comment 11

[elin]

Attachment: 0001-bug-996608-stop-redirecting-zh-TW-firefox-firstrun-z.patch

Hi, 

here's the patch to prevent firstrun/whatsnew/tour from being redirected to mozilla.com.tw

Comment 12

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

Please provide a pull request to the master branch and attach the pull request to bugzilla,not a patch. Mozilla.org is on github and we use Github issues for reviews. The reviewer should also be somebody from the Webdev team, not me (although the patch looks good to me) thanks.

Comment 13

[elin]

PR submitted.
https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/1930

Thanks for the help.

Comment 14

[[github robot]]

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

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/7080962f2a98308fce25bd91670dae1225eed1f0
Adjust mozilla.com.tw redirects for bug 996608

Exclude /zh-TW/firefox{/version}/firstrun, tour, and whatsnew

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/354ba9acdbb5bf29bb852aaf07d45b1709431a9f
Merge pull request #1931 from jgmize/tw-redirect-excludes

Adjust mozilla.com.tw redirects for bug 996608

Comment 15

[Peter Pin-Guang Chen [:petercpg] (MozTW.org)]

I only find Firefox equals or newer than version 28 are not redirected. Is this intended?

When user agent is set to 27:
>petercpg@v3 </home/petercpg/workspace> wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0" http://www.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/29.0/whatsnew/
>--2014-04-29 18:48:56--  http://www.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/29.0/whatsnew/
>Resolving www.mozilla.org (www.mozilla.org)... 63.245.215.20, 2620:101:8008:5::2:1
>Connecting to www.mozilla.org (www.mozilla.org)|63.245.215.20|:80... connected.
>HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 MOVED PERMANENTLY
>Location: https://www.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/29.0/whatsnew/ [following]
>--2014-04-29 18:48:57--  https://www.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/29.0/whatsnew/
>Connecting to www.mozilla.org (www.mozilla.org)|63.245.215.20|:443... connected.
>HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 MOVED PERMANENTLY
>Location: https://www.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/new/ [following]
>--2014-04-29 18:48:57--  https://www.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/new/
>Reusing existing connection to www.mozilla.org:443.
>HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
>Location: http://mozilla.com.tw/firefox/new/ [following]
>--2014-04-29 18:48:57--  http://mozilla.com.tw/firefox/new/
>Resolving mozilla.com.tw (mozilla.com.tw)... 106.187.50.102
>Connecting to mozilla.com.tw (mozilla.com.tw)|106.187.50.102|:80... connected.
>HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
>Length: unspecified [text/html]
>Saving to: `index.html.1'
> 
>    [ <=>                                                                                      ] 24,334      --.-K/s   in 0.03s   
> 
>2014-04-29 18:48:58 (693 KB/s) - `index.html.1' saved [24334]

When user agent is set to 30:
>petercpg@v3 </home/petercpg/workspace> wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0" http://www.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/29.0/whatsnew/
>--2014-04-29 18:50:58--  http://www.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/29.0/whatsnew/
>Resolving www.mozilla.org (www.mozilla.org)... 63.245.217.105, 2620:101:8008:5::2:1
>Connecting to www.mozilla.org (www.mozilla.org)|63.245.217.105|:80... connected.
>HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 MOVED PERMANENTLY
>Location: https://www.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/29.0/whatsnew/ [following]
>--2014-04-29 18:50:59--  https://www.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/29.0/whatsnew/
>Connecting to www.mozilla.org (www.mozilla.org)|63.245.217.105|:443... connected.
>HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
>Length: unspecified [text/html]
>Saving to: `index.html.2'
> 
>    [ <=>                                                                                      ] 13,942      --.-K/s   in 0s      
> 
>2014-04-29 18:50:59 (190 MB/s) - `index.html.2' saved [13942]