MathOverflow

5:12 PM

@MartinSleziak I've just answered this but if you have any thoughts, please let me know

1

A: Is it time to replace links to the UCDavis arXiv frontend?

I've reviewed your request and - while I'd generally want to say "yes, we can do this" - in this case, I'm sorry to say that I don't think it will be possible - at least, not without some effort from you all first. I really do think it's important that the links on this site are functional, so I ...

Martin Sleziak

I'll be rather busy IRL but I should at least have a look.

> The tool we have to make this change is a pretty simple find/replace tool that only works for post content, not comments. It only works for URLs and it can't accept RegEx

> Once the difficult URLs are fixed, we will bulk find/replace the remaining using the following method:
> Find `http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/` and replace with `https://arxiv.org/abs/`

So if I understand correctly, the thing which is possible is only to change links in such way that an exact string is replaced by an examples string.

For example http://en.wikipedia.org by https://en.wikipedia.org. Or something similar for the mobile site.

More relevant for this case - if all links starting with http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/10 are correct still after changing them to https://arxiv.org/abs/10, that would be possible.

@Catija Do I understand correctly what are the tools you have for such situations.

Out of curiosity - was such replacement ever done on some site? (If we do not count changes of internal SE links. Such as the http to https move, which is probably finished in most places.)

Catija

5:32 PM

@MartinSleziak Yes. That's correct. The tool was originally created (from what I understand) for that exact case - where we switched URLs from HTTP to HTTPS and where we swapped the order of the "meta" in URLS from meta.sitename to sitename.meta

Martin Sleziak

Was it also used for something else?

Catija

We've used it off and on for situations like these, where a site changes their URL structure and there are many occurences of it on one of the sites, so we do a swap for the site. Making this change for MO wouldn't be the first time we've used it for this purpose.

Martin Sleziak

I see. I have simply missed the past occurrences.

Catija

4

Q: Is it possible to mass-update broken URLs to IndianScriptures.com with HinduScriptures.in?

There are currently about 230 posts (both questions and answers) that cite the website IndianScriptures.com. The site itself is active but it doesn't take the reader directly to the linked chapter/topic/PDF. E.g., clicking on this URL from the very first answer to cite this website just takes you...

Here's an example. :)

Martin Sleziak

Thanks for the example.

in MO editors' lounge, Aug 25 at 11:56, by Martin Sleziak

Since the frontend was maintained by Greg Kuperberg - who is a MO user - maybe he would be willing (an able) to help with the correspondence between the identifiers on arxiv.org and on the front.math.ucdavis.edu.

Catija

5:35 PM

As far as I'm aware, there are no plans to make the tool more powerful.

Martin Sleziak

in MO editors' lounge, Aug 25 at 11:57, by Martin Sleziak

Would the MO moderators be willing to contact him - or at least let him know about the question on meta?

@AsafKaragila I wonder whether you have seen my messages in the other chatroom (the ones I just copied above).

Have you discussed with the other moderators the option of asking Greg Kuperberg for help?

Catija

I would suppose that it may be easier to see if arXiv can add redirects in some of these cases but I'm not certain what that entails.

Martin Sleziak

I suggested that for two reasons: 1. He would be able to say whether he plans to revive the arXiv frontend at some point not too far in the future. 2. At least, he probably would be able to confirm whether the correspondence between the arXiv and front URLs is correct.

In fact, I have edited one of his post - in the hope that he might notice the discussion on meta and respond: mathoverflow.net/posts/6198/revisions

@Catija I am not really sure about that. And I would not know who to ask.

But it would certainly help - if there were redirects, all of this could be done automatically.

Catija

Yeah. :( I don't know the history here but it seems sad that the links would all cease to work. Hopefully it hasn't invalidated the answers that rely on them.

Martin Sleziak

I will add that it would be good to here from the users from the MO community whether bumping of 300 posts would be acceptable. (I do not consider myself to be really a prat of that community.)

Catija

5:42 PM

I know 300 is a lot to have to edit manually - you might talk with Glorfindel, I do think he has a userscript that will automate editing five posts per day for a specific reason and that might be able to be adjusted to run on MO to fix these, so at least someone's not having to do them manually.

Martin Sleziak

And we should way until we hear from Asaf Karagila whether the mods contacted Greg Kuperberg.

@Catija I would not really consider 300 posts that much. I am sure that we went through much more when removing algebra on Mathematics.

The problem is that (as far as I can tell), MO users are much more opposed to bumping old questions than on some other sites - such as MSE.

I am not sure when I will have a bit more time to look into that. But I should at least try to extract the URLs in some more reasonable way than I did so far an check more thoroughly which of them are problematic.

As I have mentioned in the other room, addition of the (status-review) tag also removed the question from hot meta posts. But there is no guarantee that there more users would post some comments there even if it stayed longer in the community bulletin.

Certainly, even if the URLs are supposed to be changed - some of them manually and some of them automatically - then there is a lot of work to do before that.

We'll see whether we get some response from Asaf.

If I may ask a question in slightly other direction: There might be various links which are dead but the replacement would be more straightforward. If I find and collect various such links, I guess asking to update them could be a reasonable feature request.

Basically, it would be similar to the post from [hiduism.meta.se] that you've mentioned above.

But I would certainly have to dig a bit through my old edits to see which URLs like that I have updated in the past. I probably made a note about some of them in MO editors lounge - so maybe I will find some examples there.

Also, thanks a lot for taking the time to look into this and posting the answer on meta!

Catija

Yep. We generally want to see a chunk of posts impacted, similar to the tag removals. Our preference is that y'all do the editing as much as possible but if it's over 100 posts we're OK with doing it on our end. If you have several different requests, you can probably put them all in one meta post and we can look at them as a group. :)

You're welcome :) The system works, no. ;)

Martin Sleziak

Ok, I'll go back to what I was doing. (After all, at the moment there isn't much to add to this specific issue.) Have a nice day!

Catija

Thanks! You too!

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