Still more broken URLs after the redesign

[ExplodingCabbage]

Per #2333 (comment), I think you guys think all the 404s introduced by the migration are fixed now, but this is not the case.

I reran my script from #2332 (comment) (with a tweak to ignore the www.expressjs.com.cn domain) and found the following old URLs (taken from Stack Overflow posts) that are currently 404ing:

• https://expressjs.com/en/changelog/4x.html#4.16.0
• http://expressjs.com/2x/guide.html#req.param%28%29
• http://expressjs.com/en/guide/writing-middleware.html\|Writing
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#configuration
• https://expressjs.com/tr/guide/routing.html
• https://expressjs.com/en/changelog/4x.html
• http://expressjs.com/en/guide
• http://expressjs.com/faq.html
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#executable
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#route-middleware
• https://expressjs.com/ru/guide/routing.html
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#routing
• http://expressjs.com/2x/guide.html
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#res.cookie%28%29
• http://expressjs.com/migrate.html
• http://expressjs.com/applications.html
• http://expressjs.com/faq.html#multiple-statics
• https://expressjs.com/en/resources/template-engines.html
• http://expressjs.com/en/index.html
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#users-online
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#creating-a%20server
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#view-rendering
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html
• http://expressjs.com/ru/starter/static-files.html
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#error-handling
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#passing-route%20control
• http://expressjs.com/tr/api.html#req.method
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#passing-route
• http://expressjs.com/tr/api.html#req.body
• http://expressjs.com/guide.html#proxies

At least some of these (e.g. https://expressjs.com/en/changelog/4x.html, http://expressjs.com/ru/starter/static-files.html) were working URLs shortly before the redesign (confirmed via ad-hoc checking in the Wayback Machine), though some were not (e.g. the FAQ page has, I think, been dead for many years); I leave it to y'all to unpick which are which. But certainly there are at least several URLs in the list above that still deserve a fix.

[krzysdz]

May need fixing

These worked prior to 808751a. I don't know if @jonchurch's CF rule redirects all .html URLs or what exactly happened here. cc @bjohansebas:

• https://expressjs.com/en/changelog/4x.html
• http://expressjs.com/2x/guide.html

I don't know when exactly this broke:

• http://expressjs.com/en/index.html - used to redirect to / on the old website
  

  expressjs.com/index.md

  Line 6 in 2d4df3f

  redirect_from: "/en/index.html"

Won't fix

Bad URLs, should have never worked:

• http://expressjs.com/en/guide/writing-middleware.html|Writing

Removed a long time ago:

• http://expressjs.com/guide.html - removed in November 2014 according to Internet Archive (c2eedaf)
• http://expressjs.com/en/guide - probably same as above, Internet Archive has it indexed only as 404, so it could have never existed
• http://expressjs.com/faq.html - removed in 2014 together with the guide (c2eedaf)
• http://expressjs.com/applications.html - removed in 2014 together with the guide (c2eedaf)
• http://expressjs.com/migrate.html - sometime before August 2012 according to Internet Archive. History of this repo starts on 2012-08-01 - 9e957d4

Removed not that long ago:

• https://expressjs.com/en/resources/template-engines.html - April 2024, Remove ancillary pages and corresponding menu nav items #1484

Removed locales (#1874):

• https://expressjs.com/tr/guide/routing.html
• http://expressjs.com/tr/api.html
• https://expressjs.com/ru/guide/routing.html
• http://expressjs.com/ru/starter/static-files.html

[ExplodingCabbage]

Won't fix

...
Removed locales:

• https://expressjs.com/tr/guide/routing.html
• http://expressjs.com/tr/api.html
• https://expressjs.com/ru/guide/routing.html
• http://expressjs.com/ru/starter/static-files.html

These should surely redirect to English, not just remain 404s.

[bjohansebas]

Okay, I'll bring up the redirects in today's meeting because I don't have access to that. I don't think we should keep maintaining redirects for pages that were removed more than 10 years ago, though there are some others that are still worth keeping.

These should surely redirect to English, not just remain 404s.

Why? If that content was removed, why redirect users to the English page? The content simply no longer exists, and that's okay.

[ExplodingCabbage]

Why? If that content was removed, why redirect users to the English page?

Because that's surely pretty much always the next-best thing that I'd want to see upon hitting a 404? If I've just followed a link in a blog post or Stack Overflow answer or whatever that cites a Turkish or Russian version of an official docs page, and that particular language version doesn't exist any more, the logical next step (as long as I realise an English version of the page exists at all) is to instead look to the version in English (probably - or else another supported language that I know) and read that, having my browser machine-translate it if necessary.

[ExplodingCabbage]

(You could also dynamically redirect to a language chosen based upon the Accept-Language header, of course, if respecting that header is something the website does at all.)

[bjohansebas]

The site is a static page, which is why we're having so many issues using GitHub Pages, since it doesn't support redirects easily. I think in that case we could use redirects to the dynamic part that already exists.