Decommissioning of USFIRST.org archived site

[Lireal]

Originally Posted by bdaroz

Third, right in the middle of build season?!? I'd get it if it got decommissioned after Champs in the off season or something, but seriously. Don't they have better things to do?

It will hopefully help them fix those issues actually, because they do not have to spend anymore effort maintaining the old site.

[bdaroz]

Originally Posted by Lireal

It will hopefully help them fix those issues actually, because they do not have to spend anymore effort maintaining the old site.

I'm sorry... but the amount of effort "maintaining" an older site, i.e. just keeping it running, is utterly dwarfed by the amount of work they need to put into their current problems on the "new" site. It's not like the archive site is getting new content.

Besides, last I checked all the old blogs on the new site that were migrated over still have broken links. The amount of time it would take to fix that alone is larger than the time required to maintain the old site.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by tjf

The most worrying part about this whole decommissioning is that they don't seem to know what parts people actually use...

This seems unlikely on a substantive level, given that I can tell what people actually use, at least to some degree of comparative accuracy. Alexa, SimilarWeb, and a bunch of the smaller checkers I looked at all agree that firstinspires gets about 3 times as much traffic as usfirst. Which is good, but that's still a lot of usfirst traffic.

Moreover, both checkers agree that firstinspires gets most of its traffic from web searches like "first", "first robotics", "fll", "frc", etc. For its part, usfirst traffic mostly comes from "stims" "tims" "vims" kind of stuff. This should give HQ a pretty good idea of who's going where and why--and how to fix it. An speaking of fixing things, the vast majority of users landing on usfirst--after you omit the Googlers--came directly from firstinspires. (firstinspires is also directing to usfirst, though it's to my.usfirst.org, which they may be keeping. SimilarWeb tells me this is the #3 outgoing site for firstinspires after youtube and firstinspires' own blob core.)

I really hope they fix all that before kickoff and decommissioning.

[kmehta]

I've asked FIRST to remove the restrictive robots.txt rules so that archive.org can crawl and preserve the original website.

[runneals]

Originally Posted by bdaroz

I'm sorry... but the amount of effort "maintaining" an older site, i.e. just keeping it running, is utterly dwarfed by the amount of work they need to put into their current problems on the "new" site. It's not like the archive site is getting new content.

Besides, last I checked all the old blogs on the new site that were migrated over still have broken links. The amount of time it would take to fix that alone is larger than the time required to maintain the old site.

Their manuals (volunteers) still reference some stuff that's not up on the new site yet. Like seriously, how hard is it to replicate everything over to a new site?!?!