Re: lynx-dev Lynx-dev archives on FLORA.

[Klaus Weide]

On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, Russell McOrmond wrote:

>   Silly me - the directory naming scheme I was using only used 2-digit
> years, and of course sorted incorrectly in the new century.  I have fixed
> this.  What it does mean, however, is that old URL's pointing to archives
> won't work correctly as I added in the '19' to the older directory names
> as well.

That's pretty bad; there are *many* such URLs around.  Not just
search engine pages - those should shake themselves out in a few
months... - but manual references by list members to other archived 
messages, for example.  Please, do not break them without need.

You are using Apache - it should be easy (trivial) to let the old
URLs continue to be valid, using Aliases, or using mod_rewrite or
similar (the server already seems to use PHP, so I don't think you'll
be concerned about overhead), or maybe using Redirections.

By the way, the text that is shown when access of one of the now-invalid
pages is attempted looks like

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                      Could not find: /lynx-dev/html/month0597/msg00501.html

   I could not find the file you were looking for.

Did you by chance mean: [1]/lynx-dev/html/month0597/msg00501.html/

   I brought you to the home page as a good place to start looking.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

That is more misleading than helpful, especially the invalid link.  A
straight standard "404 Not Found" would be more useful.

Thank you a lot for providing the archive all the time.  I hope you'll
want to continue to let it work as smoothely as possible for its users. :)


  Klaus