Logstash: [Docs] Make link for LS release notes link consistent with others in stack

Created on 2 Apr 2019 · 5Comments · Source: elastic/logstash

The link for Logstash release notes is https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/logstash/current/releasenotes.html, and is inconsistent with release notes link formatting for other products. (Note the missing dash.)

Examples:

I often get pinged that the LS release notes are 404-ing, especially on release days when somebody is validating links.

Questions:

Should we change the LS release notes link to end in /release-notes.html?
Is 7.0 the right time?
Who will this change affect? Who needs to weigh in and who needs to be notified?
What thoughts do you have that I haven't listed?

discuss docs

Source

karenzone

All 5 comments

I often get pinged that the LS release notes are 404-ing, especially on release days when somebody is validating links.

Is this because we have incorrect URLs listed somewhere or just because people are typing the URL manually and assume it's similar to the others?

Would your plan be to retrofit the name change all the way back through all the versions, or only starting at (for example) 7.0? If the latter, I think you might need to set up redirects so that it doesn't 404 when users switch version numbers in the documentation.

lcawl on 2 Apr 2019

👍1

7.0 seems like a good time to change this. You definitely want to set up redirects, as Lisa mentions, though. Looks like the product page links to the specific version (rather than the container), so you should be fine there.

dedemorton on 2 Apr 2019

👍1

Consistency is valuable, but it does look like there are other inconsistencies in the links. I would like all of them to be called, simply, release-notes, if I ruled the universe. But Lisa makes good points about redirects and other confusion. Is there a bigger issue where all release notes could be found at the same link? After all, customers are using multiple products, and their view is probably that elastic is just one product with multiple aspects, not distinct, the way elastic thinks internally.

kat257 on 2 Apr 2019

👍1

@lcawl My money is on "because people are typing the URL manually and assume it's similar to the others." If we had bad links floating around, we would have tracked them down by now.

WRT

Would your plan be to retrofit the name change all the way back through all the versions, or only starting at (for example) 7.0?

All up for discussion. You and @dedemorton bring up a good point wrt redirects when users are flipping versions. This is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping to have.

karenzone on 2 Apr 2019

I think I'd be inclined to change it from 7.0 onward, and rely on redirects for backward compatibility. This most often crops up because the links from the blog posts/download pages are added manually & folks assume there's a consistent pattern.

I'm pretty neutral on whether or not to prefix the anchor/page name with the product name/abbreviation. It's not strictly necessary & I don't think the abbreviations add much from an SEO perspective. @kat257 probably has the right idea that simply "release-notes.html" is the right way forward (even if we don't jump on changing it for ES/APM/ECE).