Online doc suggestion

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Rob McDonald

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Mar 26, 2025, 3:31:44 PM3/26/25
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Often, when I want to quickly get to the FLTK documentation, I will simply go to Google and search -- something like 'fltk Fl_Group' or whatever...

Unfortunately, this highest results for this kind of search are usually the documentation for FLTK 1.0, 1.1, or (perhaps worst of all) 2.0.  Often, the 1.4/5.X docs don't even appear on the front page.

IMO, Ideally, the 1.4.X docs would be the top hit, with other versions only being found if you explicitly wanted to find those.  However, I don't know if it is possible to manipulate search results in that way.

Short of that, I think some combination of 'noindex' tags and/or robots.txt entries to block crawling and indexing of the deprecated and antiquated documentation would go a long way.

Rob


Rob

Phil Rose

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Mar 26, 2025, 4:33:19 PM3/26/25
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Bookmark the latest documentation, then once you opened it use search facilities within it. It's an arcane art to up the priority on search engines. 

Phil


From: fltkg...@googlegroups.com <fltkg...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Rob McDonald <rob.a.m...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2025 7:31:49 PM
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Subject: [fltk.general] Online doc suggestion
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Rob McDonald

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Mar 26, 2025, 6:10:04 PM3/26/25
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Of course there are workarounds.  Bookmarking isn't great because that still takes you to the top level and you still have to navigate around to find what you want or use the built in search -- which is OK, but not ideal.

The biggest problem with workarounds is that they only work for me.  Google (or search generically) could be argued to be the primary user interface for the internet.  Returning version 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 results as the top hits is IMO a bug of our website.  If I have this problem, so does everyone else who tries to Google FLTK.

I have a bit of a hoarder mentality too -- particularly when it comes to data.  I appreciate the desire to support everything going all the way back -- especially when it seems like it 'doesn't cost anything'.  In this case, the cost of keeping the deprecated html documentation indexed on the website is that straightforward search is broken.

Sometimes it is best to clean up a bit.  At this point in time, we don't actually want anyone using 1.0, 1.1, or 2.0.  If you have a legacy program that can't move forward, then you can probably access the documentation from the source tarball available from the old releases download page.  I think it would be entirely reasonable to delete the deprecated docs from the website -- marking them to not be indexed is a much smaller step that lets us hoard our data while fixing search.

Rob

Phil Rose

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Mar 26, 2025, 7:04:56 PM3/26/25
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Hi Rob,

Google never forgets anything. I've recently spent some time wondering why the previous holder of the secretary of a society I'm currently secretary of came up in searches before I did. These web pages are cached in Google's gigaservers. 
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2025 10:10:08 PM
To: fltk.general <fltkg...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [fltk.general] Online doc suggestion
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