Readthedocs.org: support completely removing old versions

[jab]

When I look at my project's inactive versions under https://readthedocs.org/projects/bidict/versions/ I see a bunch of versions I'd like completely removed from readthedocs.org. I've tried cleaning, wiping, and changing privacy level to "private", but no matter what I do, I can't seem to get them removed from https://bidict.readthedocs.org/en/XYZ.

[jab]

You can see there I have an "inactive" version v0.2.1 (for example). I've done everything I can to remove it, but still https://bidict.readthedocs.org/en/v0.2.1 remains.

[gregmuellegger]

Yes, the intend behind this is that we do not want to break existing links into the documentation. That's why there is no way yet to remove the docs for a version.

When setting a version to private, it's taking it out of all the listings in the frontend so that you won't see any new users on the inactive version but only those having the link to it.

[jab]

Sometimes a docs version can get published mistakenly and should just be deleted. No links to it will break because nobody even has any. Would you consider giving admins the ability to actually delete bad versions?

[d0ugal]

Maybe there should be a cooling off period. They could be deleted within a hour (or some other arbitrary period) of creation.

[mboersma]

+1. We would really like to purge some old, mistakenly published versions of docs, and we are not concerned about broken links to these versions.

[wardi]

We've published docs from development branches that were picked up by google and are now extremely stale but remain high in google search results. This has caused us lots of support problems as more often than not new users are looking at the wrong version of the docs.

I understand not wanting to break old links, how about allowing redirects between versions?

[tillig]

We moved our docs from one repo to a different repo. The tags remained the same, but I wanted to make sure everything including the old docs are built from the new repo. Can't remove versions, can't re-point versions to different commits... :(

[ericholscher]

This is a dupe of #1408 -- closing this, and you can watch for a proper solution there. This specific issue has been addressed with #1584 and will be deployed soon.

[ericholscher]

Bah sorry -- thought this was a different issue. This sounds like a bug in our version syncing code -- which should be deleting old versions.

[aperezalbela]

Hi, I need to delete two test docs but I can't find the option in the UI. Could you please remove them completely? Their names are: "ScrapinghubTest" and "ScrapinghubTests". They are really messing with our official docs in search engines.

Thanks in advance.

[gregmuellegger]

@aperezalbela Hi, your request quite different and not related to the bug described in this ticket. Can you please open a new one so we can keep track of your issue separately and address it properly? Thanks!

[aperezalbela]

@gregmuellegger sure! thanks.

[jab]

Anything the user community can do to help with this issue? If you have an idea of where the buggy code might be and can point it out, maybe one of us can take a crack at a PR.

[posita]

Just curious, but does RTD use the Delete event to get notified of branch deletions? If so, projects using manual webhooks need to make sure Delete events are getting sent from GH to RTD.

If my hypothesis is correct, once you've enabled Delete events, if the branch is already deleted on the GH project side, create a new one with the same name and then delete it. That _may_ fix this issue?

[posita]

One more observation: I've found that sometimes, if one deletes a branch via GitHub's Pull Request interface (by clicking the button after merging), sometimes doing a git pull --all && git br -a will show that the branch still exists on GH (and in RTD). In that case, the work-around in my previous comment will likely remove both.

[ericholscher]

Old versions should now be deleted automatically in at least a couple hours after deletion.