Misc #21367: Remove link to ruby-doc.org from www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/

• Status: Closed
• Assignee: -

[p8 (Petrik de Heus)]

The ruby-doc.org domain no longer seems resolvable.

$ curl -I  http://ruby-doc.org
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: ruby-doc.org

The owner of the domain mentioned he wanted to sell it:
https://ruby.social/@[e-mail]/114375521600278606

This is probably a good time to remove it from https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/.
This could also improve SEO for the official documentation.

[matheusrich (Matheus Richard)]

Agree. On a different note (and I'm not sure this is the right place to ask it), could we buy this domain and redirect to the official docs?

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

It looks there are 95 links 22 unique URIs in www.ruby-lang.org.

http://ruby-doc.org
http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.8.7/String.html
http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ruby-doc-bundle/FAQ/FAQ.html
http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/dl/rdoc/DL.html
http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.1.8/libdoc/dl/rdoc/DL.html
http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.2.4/libdoc/dl/rdoc/DL.html
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/IO.html
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.0/Enumerable.html
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.0/Enumerator.html
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.0/Module.html
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.0/Range.html
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ApprendreProgrammer/Apprendre_%E0_Programmer.pdf
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/rdoc/rdoc/index.html
https://ruby-doc.org/
https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.4.0/Thread.html
https://www.ruby-doc.org/
https://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/

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[baweaver (Brandon Weaver)]

I had tried to purchase it earlier today, but it appears that it has already been bought and I cannot see who owns it as it has domain privacy on. Let us hope the buyer has good intentions.

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

Some URIs in the above list are just in footnotes but unused now.
And the toplevel of the site could be simply removed as there are links to docs.r-l.o already, I think.
But not sure about /core and /stdlib, especially to version older than 2.1.

[st0012 (Stan Lo)]

Checking with web.archive.org, a few links were already 404 many years ago (e.g. 2016), so we can simply remove them IMO.
For those that are still indexed in the last 10 years, I think some of them can be replaced with a link to their web archive pages, with updated texts like "Original text (web archive)". WDYT?

[p8 (Petrik de Heus)]

Thanks Nobu!
I agree with Stan that some of the links to /core and /stdlib could be replaced with a link to the Internet Archive.
For example:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190405070846/http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/dl/rdoc/DL.html

matheusrich (Matheus Richard) wrote in #note-1:

Agree. On a different note (and I'm not sure this is the right place to ask it), could we buy this domain and redirect to the official docs?

I'm not sure buying every third party domain that has better SEO is something we should encourage.
From what I've read ruby-doc.org was an attempt by the community to improve the Ruby documentation, but in the end it did the opposite (outdated documentation, confusion about what the official docs are, and now deadlinks).
Let's hope improvements to the official docs (and the end of ruby-doc.org) will put the official docs at the top of search results again.

[matheusrich (Matheus Richard)]

@p8 I didn't mean buying it because it has good SEO. I meant buying it to keep some level of compatibility (at least it would redirect to the official docs) and to prevent someone with bad intentions to do something with it while using Ruby's name.

[p8 (Petrik de Heus)]

@matheusrich keeping those links working would have been nice. From the Mastodon thread it seems he was asking 10k which is a bit much for something that was a community benefit.

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

• Status changed from Open to Closed

ruby-doc.org is online now.

This is probably a good time to remove it from https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/.

Yes. I removed ruby-doc.org from en/ja pages at https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/pull/3576