This is a concern for me too. A suggestion I made in feedback: Don’t break inbound links. Keep the old site, static, under archive.lesswrong.com or something, and redirect classic-format url paths to the archive.
There is a lot of valuable material on the classic site. It might not be useful for current discussion, but let’s not lose it, or let it get buried on archive.org.
(come to think of it, if maintaining an archive is itself unworkable, a redirect to archive.org might be an acceptable next-best alternative)
We tried pretty hard to not break any incoming links, and have been watching the google analytics for the old site to make sure we covered all the inbound links.
I wouldn’t trust a redirect to archive.org, because some of the content might have randomly been missed by the Wayback Machine crawler or the last crawled version might be missing comments that were added later. It also might have systematically missed certain things, such as deeply nested comment chains where you have to click “continue this thread” and posts with a lot of replies where you have to click “load more comments” (which is even less likely to be preserved, as it relies on AJAX).
This is a concern for me too. A suggestion I made in feedback: Don’t break inbound links. Keep the old site, static, under archive.lesswrong.com or something, and redirect classic-format url paths to the archive.
There is a lot of valuable material on the classic site. It might not be useful for current discussion, but let’s not lose it, or let it get buried on archive.org.
(come to think of it, if maintaining an archive is itself unworkable, a redirect to archive.org might be an acceptable next-best alternative)
I think I’ve said this before, but the most important feature of a redesign has always been “don’t break inbound links.”
We tried pretty hard to not break any incoming links, and have been watching the google analytics for the old site to make sure we covered all the inbound links.
Okay, cool. As long as it’s on your radar.
I wouldn’t trust a redirect to archive.org, because some of the content might have randomly been missed by the Wayback Machine crawler or the last crawled version might be missing comments that were added later. It also might have systematically missed certain things, such as deeply nested comment chains where you have to click “continue this thread” and posts with a lot of replies where you have to click “load more comments” (which is even less likely to be preserved, as it relies on AJAX).